PREDICTIONS – 10 Years Later - Santa Fe Institute

9. REACHING THE CEILING EVERYWHERE
relationships is getting shorter; the average duration of relationships, including
marriages, has been reported to be less than 2.5 years in the United
States.) Social living in general, seen from all angles, is getting ever
more competitive and demanding. Succeeding or even simply surviving
in today’s society is becoming harder all the time. Naturally enough, the
question on everyone’s mind is, “Just how long will these conditions
last?” To answer that question we can look to natural-growth curves and
the periodic economic cycle to which they are related.
Not long ago I was showing my observations of cyclical human behavior
with Michael Royston, a friend who had taught environmental
sciences in the International Management Institute of Geneva in the
1980s. Royston became excited and quickly produced an unpublished
paper of his own, written in 1982, in which he talked about the same
fifty-six-year cycle but from another angle. 6
Royston’s thesis was that life progresses in spirals and that long-term
growth follows a spiral that passes successively through four phases:
discharge, relaxation, charge, and tension, after which it returns to the
starting point, but enriched with new knowledge, experience, and
strength. The period of discharge is characterized by economic prosperity
or a boom; relaxation is characterized by recession; charge is a
period of new order and new technology; and tension is a time of
growth leading once again to discharge and boom. The entire cycle is
completed and repeated in fifty-six-year intervals. In the most recently
completed cycle, reproduced in Figure 9.3, Royston considers the years
1912 and 1968 as high points of affluence, followed by periods when
the world tumbled into war and economic turmoil. In the spiral that begins
with 1968, there would appear to be an ominous echo of 1940 in 1996.
Royston made an attempt to connect his fifty-six-year cycle with
environmental issues, as well as with human behavior:
Humans spend the first twenty-eight years of their lives acquiring or
“charging,” first an affective, then a physical, then an intellectual,
and finally a spiritual capability, each building successively on a
seven-year spiral. The second twenty-eight years see the human in a
state of “tension” as parent, contributor to society, thinker. The final
twenty-eight years the person becomes “discharged” affectively
and spiritually reaching the full age of three times twenty-eight to
relax in eternity.
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