This is Alvin Toffler in 2007, promoting his last book, Revolutionary Wealth. In his 1980 book, The Third Wave, futurist Alvin Toffler wrote of our transition into an "knowledge based society," away from the industrial based society we have been in for 300-400 years. He proposed the idea that we were in transition out of the Industrial Age, into what we now commonly call the Information Age. That was a new idea in 1980. His later books, including Revolutionary Wealth in 2007, expanded on and refined this idea of us being in a major period of change, into a new kind of civilization. Alvin Toffler died in 2016, but much of what he wrote about is still playing out.
Toffler's Third Wave idea is one of the ultra long term trends playing out now, that led me to believe that this decade, the 2020's, will be one of the craziest decades in human history, and the most chaotic decade in modern history. There are several other long term cycles and trends playing out, in economics and socially, which also seem to be reaching major inflection points in the coming years.
I finally figured out that I'm an amateur futurist, and I've been watching some of these trends for as long as 30 years, As we moved through the 2010's, I saw that several long term trends that seemed to be merging, all leading to major changes in the next 10 to 15 years. Being a futurist/economics geek, I believed we were heading for a major recession, quite possible a full great depression, beginning around 2018-2020. But some of these other trends and cycles pointed to other kinds of social change as well.
This post is to list and briefly explain the ultra long term trends and cycles that are playing out, and why I believe there will be an incredible level of overall change in society from 2020 to 2030,in particular. Here we go.
The Business Cycle- On average, the U.S. goes into a recession every 4 to 7 years, this video gives a quick, simple, explanation of business cycles. Heading into 2020, the last recession was The Great Recession of 2007-2009. So we were already past the 7 year mark, which meant we were due for a recession at any time. This is because the Federal Reserve had been creating a lot more new money, and putting it into the economy, in spurts, during the 2010's. That kept us from falling into a typical recession, and extended the business cycle. Using this very mainstream idea alone, we were due for a "typical recession" in 2020. What we got in 2020 was far more intense than a typical recession. That's because there is a lot more going on right now than "business as usual." Some of these other trends and cycles will help explain why.
The Tofflers' Third Wave- First of all, Alvin Toffler, and his wife Heidi, worked as an intellectual team, but he actually wrote the books. The thinking belongs to both of them. I think a huge advantage of their futurist thinking was that they not only looked at new technology and trends emerging, but also asked, "How will average working people respond to, and use this new technology?" There are a lot of nuances to Toffler's Third Wave concept. But the core idea is that we are leaving the industrial-based society, and moving into an information-based society. In our current terminology, we are leaving the Industrial Age, and moving into the Information Age. This is a huge change for everyone, like moving from tribal hunter-gatherer societies into the Agricultural Age, or from the Agricultural Age into the Industrial Age.
The things to remember is that in huge transitions like this, everyday life changes for every single person. In addition, these changes takes decades, maybe even centuries, to fully move form one age to another. Born in 1966, I was born into a world where nearly everyone worked in small local factories. Those factories made nearly all of our physical goods here in the United States. We had one phone line per house, and usually two phones plugged into the wall. There were no personal computers. We had three channels on TV, and most adults read actual newspapers every morning. We went to malls to buy most of our goods, from clothes, to tools, to appliances, at big department stores, like Sears or J.C. Penney's. Simply put, Sears was the way to shop in the Industrial Age, Amazon is how most people shop in the Information Age. That type of change is happening all through society, with some things moving faster than others.
The Big Freakin' Transition- The Big Freakin' Transition is my personal name for the transition we are now in, between the Industrial Age and the Information Age. We are not fully in either age, but in a long transition period in between. This is just my extension of the Tofflers' Third Wave concept, extended into today's world. The Tofflers believed this transition period began about 1956, the first year there were more "white collar" office workers in the U.S. than "blue collar' factory workers. This period of change began super slow. A little change here, a little one there. As time progressed, one change built upon another, and the pace of change got faster and faster. Generation X kids, like me, were the last generation born into the functioning Industrial Age. Since then, we have the Millennials, Gen Z, and post Gen Z little kids now, all born into the late transition period/early Information Age years, and who grew up digital natives. For these people, now roughly babies up to about age 40, digital technology, hyper-connected communications, and continual change in society itself, are normal. They don't know what it's like to live in a slow paced, stable society with very little change.
I personally think the 2020's will be the most chaotic decade of The Big Freakin' Transition, because we were due for a major economic downturn heading into them. Sure enough, the 2020 downturn happened, with Covid-19 sending us into lockdown, dramtically amplifying all kinds of change in daily life that was already happening. The actual economic crisis began with the Repo Market Crisis in the banking system in September of 2019. The Federal Reserve had to start pumping what was then considered huge amounts of new money ($20 billion every 2 to 4 days, at first) into the economy. This "liquidity" helped keep the banking system in the U.S. functioning. But it also led to rises in asset prices, particularly in the stock market, at first. Six months later, As the Covid-19 pandemic reached crisis mode in the U.S., the CDC pushed for lockdowns to slow the virus spread, and that was a crippling blow to an already shaky economy. This led to a level of new money creation unseen in U.S. history, which definitely helped on many levels, but ultimately warped the financial markets, natural check and balances in markets, and led to the high inflation we are experiencing now (June 2022).
I think this decade, which I dubbed the "Tumultuous 2020's" in early 2020, will be a time of change on top of change on top of change, at nearly every level, I don't see these as the "End Times," which get predicted every few years. I see it more like hitting a long section of really rough rapids while rafting down a river. There are a lot of bad things that could happen, but it we hang on, and deal with crises reasonably intelligently, we should come out the other side OK. But it will be a much different society when we do.
We already have a lot of the actual technology of the Information Age, such as the internet, smart phones/devices, and levels of human to human communication, and ginormous databases, never seen in human history. But our businesses, organizations, and society as a whole, need to catch up with all the changes these new technologies have created, and new opportunities, lifestyles, businesses, industries, and social norms, they make possible. Because there is so much change that needs to happen to many businesses, industries, organizations, and governments, during the Big Freakin' Transition, I knew that the 2020 downturn would have to be much more intense, and much longer, than a typical 6-18 month recession.
Change. And then even more change. The Tumultuous 2020's, are the decade of continuous change, pretty much everywhere you look. Hang on!
The 30/60 year economic depression cycle- This is a largely discredited idea by mainstream business and economic people. You know, the people losing their asses in the stock market today. As I write this (June 10, 2022), the Dow is down 880 points, and the Nasdaq is down 414 points, and the S&P 500 is down 117 points. The "experts" didn't see this coming, and they're taking soem big losses at the moment. Days like this are when some of these long term trends suddenly make more sense to a lot of people. Most traders and speculators think short term, seconds, minutes, hours, days. Old, experienced investors like Warren Buffet and Charlie Munger think long term. Those two were both alive in The Great Depression, and were old enough to remember how people lived coming out of it. They do lots of research, find companies they believe in, and look for great bargains on days like today.
Anyhow, there are a small number of people who believe that there are 30 year and 60 year cycles in the economy (here's economis Ravi Batra's 1985 book * about these cycles). I first heard of this idea in The Great Depression of 1990*, by economist Ravi Batra. In that book he made the case that we have a depression every 30 or 60 years, and if it skips the 30 year mark, we're much more likely to have a great depression at the 60 year mark. We had The Great Depression in the 1930's, following the 1929 stock market crash, as we all know. There was no depression in 1960, and Batra expected a great depression in 1990. We didn't have that depression, but we did have a long double dip recession, and six stagnant years economically. Most of what he predicted, which I read in late December of 1989, did actually happen. It just didn't happen to the degree and depth Batra expected it to. Here is another reference to the 30 year cycles, focusing on interest rates. I saw one YouTube video on this idea, claiming this trend extended back to the 1600's here in the U.S..
The Long Term Debt Cycle- Here's acclaimed investor, Ray Dalio, briefly explaining The Debt Cycle, really well, in 12 minutes. This is not one of the trends I've been watching for years. But it dovetails well with the 30/60 year trends that Ravi Batra wrote about, which I have been watching since 1990. I first heard of Ray Dalio and the debt cycle in the last couple of years. It's another long term look at economics, which most "experts" don't believe in. That's why the experts get paid to talk on TV, and not paid to actually invest money. Thinking like this is partly why Dalio is an actual legendary, successful investor.
Sarkar's Law of Social Cycle- P.R. Sarkar- This is another concept Ravi Batra shared in his 1989 book, The Great Depression of 1990. P. R. Sarkar was a serious, but weird, thinker and character in India, in the mid-20th century. His concept of the Law of Social Cycle is almost completely unknown to American intellectuals, and was published in his book Human Society Vol. 2. I've never been able to get ahold of that book, so I know it only from Batra's writings.
The basic idea is that there are four basic mentalities in any society, The Intellectuals, The Acquisitors, The Laborers, and the Warriors. Every person belongs to one of these groups, depending on how they earn a living. A person can move from one group to another, by changing their lifestyle, by living a different type of life.
In this theory, each mentality dominates a particular society for a period of time, shaping all aspects of that society. Most parents want their kids to grow up to belong to the dominate mentality, even though they don't realize it. These eras, with one dominate mentality, can last for decades, or hundreds of years. When there is change from one mentality to another, is a chaotic, crazy period of time. Revolutions and wars, and other chaos can mark these transitions. The crazy thing is that these mentalities dominate society in a certain order: Intellectuals, Acquisitors, Laborers, and Warriors.
Ravi Batra, being of Indian descent (India the country, not what is now called Native American), researched this idea, looking at several societies in history, and decided it made sense to him. Then he looked at the United States, and concluded we have been in the Acquisitor Age (buisnesspeople's age) since colonial times. As that age nears the end, corruption in business and government becomes increasingly pervasive and widespread, and the living standard for average working people declines.
Eventually this leads to worker revolts, a populist movement among the Laborers, the largest group by population. The workers rise up, and eventually toss out the corrupt business people. At this point, either the society collapses (or is invaded by a neighbor), or the Warrior mentality (soldiers, police, fire fighters, professional athletes, activist leaders, etc.), the people who make their living with courage and physical abilities, rise to power. The Laborers have the numbers, but people who actually lead, generally fall into one of the other mentalities, so the Laborers don't get a full age of their own. The transition out of the Acquisitor Age is called the Acquisitor cum Laborer Age, as the worker revolts occur. Guess where we are in this timeline? Yep, we are in the Acquisitor cum Laborer Age, 11 years into it, by my reckoning.
Watching much of Batra's other thinking play out in the early and mid-1990's, I began to put more faith in the Law of Social Cycles. On one hand, as a longtime BMX freestyler, and BMX/skateboard industry guy for a while, I came to believe this theory helps explain the rise of action sports. It explains why sports like surfing, snowboarding, skateboarding, BMX, wakeboarding, and others were born and/or grew exponentially in recent decades. These, I believe, are a new aspect of the Warrior mentality growing in society, over the last several decades. I think it also explains the rise of MMA (Mixed Martial Arts) fighting, as well. I came to those conclusions in the mid to late 1990's. I did a lot of research during that period on what the word "warrior" meant in many traditions. I believe there are many different types of people who use great courage, not just the people Sarkar included, listed above.
Since Sarkar's Law of Social Cycle seemed to actually be playing out, slowly, I looked to what that said about our future. Around 1997 or 1998, I realized that it meant the U.S. would have some major populist uprising, the Laborer part of the Acquisitor cum Labor Age, somewhere in the future. I went on with my life, and kept an eye out for something that looked like a legitimate populist uprising. It took over a decade, but in 2011 the Occupy Wall Street protest came along. Within two or three weeks, it spread like wildfire nationwide and worldwide, with several hundred small encampments in major cities.
That movement gave us the terms "The 1%" and "The 99%," now part of our popular lexicon. It wasn't the movement itself, so much as the speed with which it caught on, that told me that was the beginning of the true populist uprising. It was quickly quashed by the powers at be, in a few weeks. But all those emboldened people went back to their lives, as activists.
Then, in 2015, came the 2016 U.S. presidential election campaign cycle. It began, though it's hard to remember now, with Hillary Clinton vs. Jeb Bush. Two political empire families, three former U.S. presidents among them, and Jeb with $100 million political "war chest" at the beginning. Few Americans were really excited about either candidate. Then came Bernie Sanders on the Left, and Donald Trump on the Right, both populist candidates, and both pulling millions away from the traditional, candidates. I saw that as another rising wave of the populist movement. Everyday working Americans were sick of the status quo. Later still, the Blue Wave in the 2018 election was another populist wave, a reaction to Trump's far right push. In my opinion, the populist movement in the U.S. is still rising, and we have have several more years of strong populist sentiment, until life actually gets better for the majority of everyday, working Americans.
And now we have economic hardship with inflation, after surviving an actual economic depression in 2020 (Yes, a Depression, by official definition, 10% or greater GDP drop), and a 100 year pandemic. Now inflation is hitting Americans, another big blow. There's more to come.
The Globalist Agenda (aka The New World Order)- What was originally considered conspiracy talk in the early 1990's, the "New World Order," is now out in the open as The Globalists, and the globalist agenda. What do this network of world financial, political, and business elites want? All we have to do to find out now is watch their YouTube videos, like this one, The Great Reset. This video is straight from the World Economic Forum itself, the elites who meet in Davos, Switzerland every year. They want what all so-called "elites" throughout history have wanted, total control.
Not surprisingly, this Orwellian propaganda video didn't go over well. As people looked into what The Great Reset actually meant, it sparked more flames in the worldwide populist movements. What are the actual billions of people in the world, the populists, rising up against? This, The Globalist Agenda. These "elites" have been changing laws and consolidating power for at least 75-80 years. They are the ones who HAVE BEEN running the world for decades. They control the central banks (like The Fed here in the U.S.), that created our current high inflation. The multitude of crises they refer to in that second video all happened while they were in control. Their actions led to the lower standards of living for most of the people on the planet. That led to the populist movements here in the U.S., and most other developed nations. Here's the good news. The Globalist Agenda is an Industrial Age plan. We are moving into the Information Age. It's already falling apart and failing. This agenda will continue to collapse... in the 2020's.
Global warming/Climate change- Fires here in California, floods in other areas, regular earthquakes due to fracking in Oklahoma, drought, melting glaciers and ice caps, rising sea levels for island nations, more powerful hurricanes and typhoons. Yeah, the climate is changing. We need to take a variety of actions to continue living as "civilized" humans here on planet Earth. But first we need to survive the economic chaos of the next few years. There are volumes of opinions on climate change, so I won't go into depth on it here. But it's another huge issue reaching crisis points in many areas already, and many more in coming years and decades.
These trends and cycles, some of which I have been watching for over 30 years now, led me to believe that we are in for an economic downturn that will at least feel like a great depression, to most people (by 2027 or so). And, this economic downturn will speed up the already fast rate of change, from the remaining Industrial Age institutions and industries, into Information Age replacements, or entirely new institutions and industries. Like I have been saying for 3-4 years now. The 2020's are the greatest period of MASSIVE CHANGE in modern history. That's why I refer to this decade as The Tumultuous 2020's. It's not the "End Times," but it's an end of many things, and a beginning of many others. We're humans, we have trouble with change. But we're getting better at it.
The "crazy" stuff: Prophecies and the weird predictions of the early 21st century by several other traditions
The Age of Aquarius- If you're a late Baby Boomer or old Gen Xer, like me, you remember this song, from the musical Hair. Recorded by The Fifth Dimension in 1969, it was a hippie anthem and got a ton of airplay in subsequent years. Whatever you think of hippies, the 1960's counter culture/drug filled revolution, and musicals, the Age of Aquarius is a real thing. As you may remember from science class, the Earth wobbles on its axis, and the full cycle of this wobble takes a little under 26,000 years. This is called precession. Because of this wobble, the stars appear in different places during this super long cycle, also called a Great Year. During this cycle, we go through each of the Zodiac signs, each era lasting about 2,150 years. We are somewhere near the transition point from Pisces into Aquarius. This video goes into the technical aspects of this, with some of the lore and beliefs about each age, as well.
Remember the Mayan calendar, year 2012 "apocalypse" hype? That, too, was the end of a baktun, a Mayan "long year" based on the precession. Their tradition 500 or more years ago, saw our time as a big transition point in society. Very simply, an imaginary line in space crossed another imaginary line in space, marking the end of the Mayan's way of calculating the "Great Year" of the precession. That's what happened in 2012.
The Zodiac goes back to the earliest days of civilization, like ancient Sumer, maybe longer. Those who are into astrology in a serious way, believe that civilization goes through different stages as we move through the long cycle of the precession. This short video gives an intelligent look at how that may be affecting movies and literature today, why we have vampire, witches, wizards, zombies, and the like in so many books and movies. If you want to get really into depth on the Age of Aquarius, this video is a talk based on the readings of Edgar Cayce, the most documented psychic in history. He lived in the late 19th and early 20th century, and went into trances to give readings on health and many other subjects. His readings say we entered the Aquarian Age in the 1940's or 1950's. Many of Cayce's 14,000 documented readings made references to big changes, and a major transition point in society in the coming years, which would be the late 20th century and beyond.
No matter what you think of astrology or New Age ideas, my point here is that this tradition, which goes back at least 7,000 years, believes we are in a big transition period right now. At its core is the precession, a known, scientifically proven phenomenon. This tradition has nothing directly to do with economic cycles, debt cycles, interest rates, politics and things like that. So completely outside the economic world, there are other traditions and belief systems, based on the stars and other things, that also have predicted a major transition period for human society.
St. Malachy and the 112 pope prophecy- The story goes, the Irish Catholic bishop Malachy, later cannonized as a saint, had a vision in the year 1139. He wrote down a list of 112 pope of the Catholic church. These were written down in short, cryptic, Latin phrases. This video goes into the prophecy was first published in 1595, and some people think it was written in that era. Who knows. In any case, the current pope, Pope Francis, is the 112th pope since the list was reportedly written. So Pope Francis is the last pope as seen in the vision by St. Malachy. What happens after Pope Francis? Nobody knows. I'm not Catholic, I grew up Lutheran. But this is another ancient prophecy that looks to this era in time as another transition, in some way. Will something major happen to the Vatican and the Catholic church in our time? Will there be a big transition in Catholicism? Or will things just go on as usual? Only time will tell.
The Great Pyramid of Giza- If you really want to go way "out there," here's a really weird story. There's a tradition that the Great Pyramid of Giza has, encoded in its design, a physical representation of the stages of human evolution here on Earth. Yeah, that sounds crazy, I know. But the fact that is exists, and was built 4,500 years ago is also crazy. This lecture by John van Auken, Edgar Cayce expert, goes into, and explains this idea. I don't care if you think this is garbage or not. It's waaaaay out there, even by today's crazy standards, I realize that. But, this tradition says that we are now in a major transition period in human society, and we will reach a major inflection point in 2038. My point, for this blog post, is that here is yet another tradition that sees us as being in a major transition phase for human society itself. It it based on Edgar Cayce's readings, which were in the early 20th century, 80 to 100 years ago.
This post was written by a homeless man.
* Not a paid link.
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