[nicomeemes]

I recently finished Peter Turchin's "End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration": https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/62926960-end-times. I thought his insight (that societies often fall into so-called secular cycles, rather profound and illuminating).

[science4sail]

I think that historical cycles have been a popular topic ever since at least the days of Socrates and his philosophical peers.

That said, have any of these predictions ever managed to stop the cycle? As far as I know, both Turchin and Ibn Khaldun (who Turchin calls out a lot in his books) felt that such cycles were inevitable. The more common response to these predictions seems to be some variant of "this is cherry-picked data, our society is different!"

Or are such predictions instead intended to speed the advent of the next cycle? Perhaps we should be like King Wen Zhou in pre-imperial China, watching the skies for a sign from heaven to bring about the new age.