07-17-2019, 09:02 PM
(07-17-2019, 02:06 PM)Ghost Wrote: As some of you may know, I made a thread about how the length of a saeculum should be around 72 years last month. That thread ("Breaking the idea that saeculums are ~85 years") did not seem to get good reception based on the replies I saw and the poll I made. One question that I feel should be brought up is the length of a saeculum because I've heard so many different answers on it, with some being as early as 72 years and some going as much as 110.
The Kondratiev cycle and Michael A. Alexander in Investing in a Secular Bear Market say that a saeculum is 72 years.
Various users on here seem to think that saeculums can be anywhere between 80 and 88 years, with many saying, on average, that it's the span of Uranus' orbit (84.3 years).
S&H says that saeculums can be anywhere between 80 and 90 years.
Mike Ebert believes that saeculums are 90 years in length.
The Romans in the reign of Augustus believed that a saeculum was 110 years.
Saecula used to be about 80 years, which about seventy years ago was a freakishly-long lifetime. More people are obviously living to such ages thanks to greater prosperity and activity among the elderly, starting with the GI Generation who exerciused more, smoked less, and kept alert on current events as people of such age rarely did. Maybe 90 is now a better guess on the length of a saeculum.
Meanwhile, kids are making their cultural influence known earlier as markets for music and video. The voting age is down to 18, which may have some influence upon voting patterns. Extinction of childhood memories of a time -- and childho0od memories can be extremely relevant. It could be that eras can stretch to force a certain length of a saeculum. We have yet to see any semblance of a Regeneracy that defines the social purpose of a Crisis Era. America is extremely polarized in its politics - ominously like Spain in the 1930s or Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Maybe Obama was the wrong sort of President (a mature Reactive who better fits the needs of top leadership mostly after a Crisis than during one), and Donald Trump is simply wrong at so many levels that he could never resolve anything.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.