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War, man's most ignoble pursuit, has unmistakable patterns of recurrence. What is it that causes us, at rhythmic intervals, to behave worse than the lowest form of animal life? What forces make us act as we do? How do we receive their commands? Why do we follow such a deadly pattern? And why does this pattern manifest itself in cycles?
When we learn what these forces are, and how they work, we will be able to use them to our advantage. If we know about them, we can, hopefully, circumvent them. If not, we can adapt to them.
Cycles – the mysterious forces that trigger events, by Edward R Dewey, 1971 (chapter 11, 'the patterns of war')
Dewey first became interested in cycles while Chief Economic Analyst of the Department of Commerce in 1930 or 1931 because President Hoover wanted to know the cause of the Great Depression. Dewey reported that each economist to whom he spoke gave him a different answer and he lost faith in the current economic methods. He received and took advice to study how business behaviour occurred rather than why. Therefore, his views are generally regarded as inconsistent with mainstream economics.
Dewey devoted his life to the study of cycles, claiming that "everything that has been studied has been found to have cycles present." He carried out extensive studies of cyclicity in economics, geology, biology, sociology, and other disciplines. In 1940, Edward R. Dewey learned of a 1931 Canadian conference on biological cycles held at Matamek. Under the guidance of Dewey and the conference leader, Copley Amory, the conference’s Permanent Committee was reorganized into the Foundation for the Study of Cycles in 1941, and its scope was enlarged to encompass all disciplines. The foundation was set up with a board that included distinguished scientists and industrialists to act as a central clearing house of cycles studies from diverse areas.
The Wikipedia Bomb – yes, I dropped it. No, I didn't enjoy it.
Dr. Joseph Banks Rhine, formerly of Duke University and now head of the Foundation for Research on the Nature of Man, has spent the greater part of his lifetime seeking a possible sixth sense in human beings, a sense that enables us, with some degree of accuracy, to read other people's minds or to know things it is impossible to know merely through our conventional five senses, such as the order of cards in a shuffled deck.
I have spent the greater part of my lifetime trying to discover a seventh sense, which enables us to detect and respond to certain forces, possibly electromagnetic, in our environment. It is this seventh sense, if it exists, that may lead us to the insane behavior that culminates in wars, stock-market crashes, depressions, civil riots, and moral chaos. Why do we have this seventh sense if it is bad for us? It probably wasn't bad for us in our earlier stages of development, as it probably helped us survive against the elements and prehistoric beasts.
Early man presumably gained by the recurring exhilarations and depressions caused by these energy waves. The time has now come, however, when man must learn about these forces so that he can adapt himself to them before he becomes as extinct as the dinosaur. Our work makes it abundantly clear that, directly or indirectly, man is attuned to something like electric signals or magnetic waves. It is true that for the most part he does not "hear" these signals, but they do affect him and they do cause many of the disturbances to which he is now subjected.
And the greatest of these is war.
Professor Wheeler, a professor of psychology at the University of Kansas...The War Index was used by Professor Wheeler to show a relationship between shifting temperatures in the earth's climate and man's proclivity for war. Warm periods, he noted, were the time of dictators and international wars, while cold periods produced civil unrest and democracy.
His compilations were made without any preconceived notions of cycles, but he did note that there were recurrences of drought and civil war at approximately 170-year intervals..
Romans 8:20-23
Against its will, all creation was subjected to God’s curse. But with eager hope, the creation looks forward to the day when it will join God’s children in glorious freedom from death and decay. For we know that all creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time.
The Behavior of Wars
There is one aspect in the cycles of war that I find particularly fascinating. International battles clearly have their counterparts in both biological and economic cycles. By a "biological" cycle I mean one that expresses itself predominantly in biological phenomena, such as animal abundance. By an "economic" cycle I mean one that expresses itself predominantly in economic phenomena, such as prices and production.
It is rare indeed for a phenomenon to evidence both kinds of cycles, but war does. For example, the 9.6-year cycle in war can also be found in forty-two different biological phenomena. On the other hand, the 17.7-year cycle in war is primarily an economic cycle. As international war is sensitive to cyclic forces that are normally responded to only by animals and also to cyclic forces that are normally responded to only by men in their economic capacity, we may think of it as both an economic and a biological phenomenon. This is most interesting and unusual. If we knew the particular aspect of animals, or of men, that responds to cyclic forces and the aspect of man as a producer and investor that responds to different cyclic forces, we might have an additional clue as to the causes and nature of war cycles in general.
How should we interpret these war cycles?
In my own mind I picture the space in which we live as filled with forces that alternately stimulate and depress all human beings - make them more or less optimistic, or make them more or less fearful. These forces do not control us, they merely influence us. They create a climate that is sometimes more favorable to war and sometimes less favorable. War will come without the stimulus of these forces and wars will be avoided in spite of these stimuli, but, on the average, the probabilities for war are greater when the "climate" is right. The evidence suggests that one of the major causes of war, if not the major cause, may be mass hysteria or combativeness, which occurs at reasonably regular rhythmic intervals.
What mysterious forces cause these war cycles, how they operate, and how we can control them - or their effects - may, in this nuclear age, be the most important discovery ever made by man.
Is there in some way a means by which the local & wider solar environment is able to have an influence on us at a subconscious level? Are our psychic energies both individually and collectively being swayed by the tidal forces of the planets, are our destinies guided by sidereal powers in the heavens above?
link
Psychohistory is a fictional science in Isaac Asimov's Foundation universe which combines history, sociology, and mathematical statistics to make general predictions about the future behavior of very large groups of people, such as the Galactic Empire. It was first introduced in the four short stories (1942–1944) which would later be collected as the 1951 novel Foundation.
Body "Clocks" - Fact or Illusion?
The scientific and medical debate as to whether all living organisms, including man, contain biological "clocks" that regulate body functions is not resolved. One group maintains that these "clocks" (still not located, if they do exist) are strictly internal devices uninfluenced from the outside. Another group of biologists has performed experiments that do more than hint that nature's timetables, including man's, are affected by outside forces. Prominent in this area is the research being performed by Frank A. Brown, Jr., Morrison Professor of the Biological Sciences at Northwestern University.
One of Professor Brown's early experiments, in 1957, strengthened the "outside force" hypothesis.
He collected a number of oysters from the seashore at New Haven, Connecticut, and transported them nearly a thousand miles to his laboratory in Evans-ton, Illinois.
If those who maintained that all living organisms have internal "clocks" were correct, then the oysters - living in darkness in covered containers of Atlantic Ocean salt water, under constant conditions of temperature - should have opened their valves in Evanston at the same time as they always had at New Haven, in synchrony with the tides on their old seashore habitat.
They did just that - for a few days. But within two weeks they were opening and closing their valves at a different time, in synchrony with the positions of the moon in Evanston! The positions of the moon always coincide with the ebb and flow of atmospheric tides everywhere in the world, but there is no ocean tide in Evanston, Illinois. Yet the oysters, still covered, were synchronizing their movements with a nonexistent ocean tide that "something" (certainly not any internal "clock") was telling them existed in their new neighborhood.
Professor Brown and his associates went further in their brilliant research. They began to experiment with a biological process common to every living thing - metabolism. Metabolism, in simplified, nonscientific terminology, is the measurement of chemical change in a living organism between the time it has been "fed" and the time it discharges the food as waste. Your physician might give you a "basal metabolism test" to discover whether or not your body is making proper use of the food it receives.
The subjects selected by Professor Brown were small pieces of potatoes with sprouting eyes.
These young specimens were hermetically sealed, in constant darkness and under constant conditions of pressure, with proper recording apparatus to measure the rate at which the young sprouts consumed oxygen. Brown and his associates discovered that the potato had a twenty-four-hour cycle of oxygen consumption, even under these controlled conditions, which, evidence indicated, was somehow related to a similar twenty-four-hour cycle in barometric pressure outside its sealed container.
Most surprising was the potato's ability to predict the outside barometric pressure two days in advance. The height of its afternoon peak in metabolic rate appeared to be related to the barometric pressure of the area two days later!
As Dr. Brown sums it up:
"Every living thing studied in our laboratory, from carrots to seaweeds, and from crabs to oysters to rats... has shown this capacity to predict very safely, beyond chance, the barometric pressure changes usually two days in advance. It is interesting to contemplate the problem of a meteorologist sealed, incommunicado, for weeks or months in constant conditions, and asked to give two-day weather predictions... or for that matter, even to tell you the weather today."
Just as radio waves penetrate the walls of your home to bring you the six o'clock news, "something out there" penetrated hermetically sealed containers and triggered the strange and cyclic actions of Professor Brown's potatoes.
You and I, of course, are not protected within sealed containers, nor do we go about our daily lives under constant conditions of temperature, humidity, and pressure.
Yet we all would like to think that we are at least as sensitive as a potato.
Do we then dare conclude that the same unknown forces that act on the oyster and the potato might also affect us? Could whatever force that "triggers" them also "trigger" some sensitive mechanism within us, causing our moods to fluctuate with all the characteristics of a barometer?