Do political excesses of history correct themselves in the long run? Footnotes for North America.
The task to answer this is mindbogglingly complex as in a global open system there will obviously be too many variables to measure and map — and I’m on a hiding to nothing here because some of the variables in this equation are human emotion, tribalism, greed and confidence, which can’t be processed by a function to determine an immutable output (function: a relationship where each input ‘argument’ is mapped to exactly one output value, which is non-variable unless you change the input data it is describing).
In summary, and you can skip this paragraph unless you are a foundations of philosophy nerd, progress at tying this question down will be difficult when some measurements cannot be made to argue for or against the proposition’s existence (see prognostication, religion etc.). Aristotle’s bivalent logic insists that either it is or it is not. It cannot both be and not be. Kiri-kin-the, scholar and follower of Surak’s teachings, concurred with reference to Kiri-kin-tha’s very similar First Law of Metaphysics; “Nothing unreal exists.” — T’Planahath, Matron of Vulcan Philosophy. Apart from two-valued logic pioneered by Aristotle and the script writers on Star Trek, associated topics include the combinatorial basis of truth tables, Boolean Vector Arithmetic (implementation of truth tables through matrices), rules of inference, the deductive reasoning form, also not forgetting Descartes’ most famous argument, the Cogito, of which which the endearing Mr Spock was also very fond. For the rest of you, that’s the nonsense dispensed with.
The point is, certainty cannot be established about future events, unless you can move outside of linear time. However, you can reduce the fog of predicting the future to a probabilistic pattern, such as an observed trend. Did the swarm (not individual) go right or left? = the probability that the individual went or will go right or left. This can be semi-established. I think this means we are talking about trends.
Prime example: Picture an electoral system designed to empower the ‘first past the post’ outcome (non-proportional representation). This naturally focuses on a choice between the representatives of 2 main parties. Why? There are representatives of other parties but public perception is that voting for anyone else than the main 2 amounts to a wasted vote or a protest. The perception for donors is that they are wasting their money if they fund anyone other than the 2 main parties; and do not wish to offend them by doing so.
This system was immortalised in metaphor by Douglas Adams thusly: They come from a planet ruled by lizards. The people are people but the rulers are lizards. The people hate the lizards. It is a democracy because the people vote for the lizards. Why do they vote for the lizards? Well, you have to vote for a lizard, otherwise the wrong lizard might get in.
This 2 party system (i) perpetuates indefinitely and also (ii) alternates between those 2 governing groups*, providing a sense of familiarity and stability. The principle is that the longer any single group is in authority, the greater the number of people upset by them grows until it reaches a majority or another tipping point (unrest). Therefore, assuming no vote-rigging, an extremely low probability can be assigned (based on the historical record) for either party ruling for 4 terms (election cycles) in succession. *I’m thinking of the Tit For Tat progression in Game Theory, in which whatever you choose to do that doesn’t suit everyone else, the reaction by your opponent is to go the other way, almost as if they are conditioning you not to do that and to bring you back to the more cooperative middle ground of policy. Bertrand Russell wrote, in Let the People Think, that a new young voter typically voted left but, after a decade or so, became frustrated and let down by them so would change allegiance and vote right but after a decade or so, became frustrated and let down by them so would change allegiance and vote left. This alternate cycle, he said, repeats until the voter is elderly and finally has the accumulated wisdom to see that neither side properly represents them, that they have been wasting their time and can die; only to be replaced by a fresh-faced new simpleton (tabula rasa) and the cyclicity repeats ad nauseum. Starting a war can also increase popularity for a flagging party, which is stupid but true.
However, even these observations have caveats. Influencing a government back toward the middle ground is not an effective counter-trend if the opposition is very weak (e.g. fails to hold any of the government or legislative chambers and cannot form a coalition), if opposition representatives are detained or if their party lacks sufficient support because a glowing ember of annoyance persists in the population from their own period of governance. Also, as we know, changing the rules of any game will have the knock-on effect of the players changing their strategy. Amending the constitution would be one such donkey knocking over the apple cart (GB Shaw reference).
Another variable is money. Governments have statutory obligations, where the law dictates that they must spend money on a physical provision or service. The total tax income minus the statutory obligation determines the remainder, that government’s discretionary spending. In the case of local councils in the UK, the statutory obligation is so great that almost nothing is left over for a winning party to spend on their own pet ideological projects. Therefore, therefore a lack of discretionary money means there can be no policy choice between the 2 main parties and it makes no practical difference which of them you elect. In a national government with a fiat currency, that financial context of scarcity which prevents either side from going mad falls apart because they can simply print all the new money they need (which eventually breaks the system, long after they have retired to the Bahamas).
History is filled with cycles of excess, where societies or individuals push boundaries, sometimes to destructive levels. Whilst it’s true that many excesses are eventually confronted, some may correct themselves because quantifiable feedback data such as (a) voter enthusiasm, anger or apathy, (b) stock market and currency movements, © being attacked by disgruntled neighbours; and not forgetting the classic by (d) Lysistrata, who called on women to withhold sex from their husbands as a strategy to force men to change policy and end to the Peloponnesian War (Aristophanes, empowering women in politics since 411 BC).
Some excessive policies can leave lasting legacies that shape future developments in unexpected ways. They can also set a benchmark for crossing a boundary which should never be crossed again, i.e. these policies, people and any insignia associated with them become a meme in our culture. This collective memory is a viable force which drags outrageous policy and insensitivity back in the direction of the centre. Drug-fuelled car barons flinging their arms about in that particular way does invite slow days at the dealerships.
In most cases, extreme behaviours or ideologies do eventually provoke corrective reactions. For example, the provocation from eras of excessive inequality or oppression later created the Civil Rights Movement, the suffragettes and the fall of the Berlin Wall. There will always be an element of the human population who are a bit contrarian, like me, and can’t help themselves pushing for more equality, justice and reformation where it is required. Okay, I don’t join marches but I do puzzle over how legacy systems that were only fit for purpose in a previous age could be replaced with something that looks ahead and works better for a larger fraction of the population. Of course, you can always expect massive push-back from the legacy governance systems as they protect a lot of overpaid people who enjoy their comfy job, expect a knighthood and don’t want that to change any of that to placate scum like me, thank you.
I’m not socialist by nature as I believe people should keep what they have earned (incentive) but unjustifiable facts do exist in our world, such as more than fifty percent of the wealth in whole population of the USA (340,000,000 people) is owned by 3 men. The President wishes to float a new policy to reduce these 3 men’s tax burden. Yes, you heard that policy correctly, but it is accepted because every ordinary working person knows that, despite the improbability, they or their children might make it to the top if they make about 14,000 correct decisions in a row. I can manage about 3. Hoping for a conclusion of the Ukraine War, the leader of that country’s policy is to depart from morality, establish a strategic partnership with Russia to exploit the world together, accept genocide as no longer being a crime (the database of evidence for the 45,000 child abductions by Russia, collected by Yale, has now been permanently deleted on the orders of the US government — presumably carried out by DOGE), then bully and sanction the confused victim. The global population as a whole might not take positive action to counter such obviously anti-communal policy but additional evidence to compound a trend of expansion (potentially any action to harm or capture Greenland, Canada, Panama, the Gulf of Mexico, Moldova, Belarus, Georgia, Estonia, Hungary, Slovakia, Poland, Sudan or assisting the deletion of Taiwan) moves the collective international psyche increasingly toward the point at which, no matter at what cost, pariah governments will need to be isolated. The correction there is about knowing the difference between right and wrong and then being needled enough to actually do something to reestablish the lines of good versus evil.
The calculation for the perpetrator of extreme policy is therefore to estimate how far they can push it before the point at which the cost outbalances any potential gain for themselves or their population. In many cases, internal protest movements or a change of government will correct extreme policies before external intervention ever happens.
Excesses, especially in terms of empire-building or economic expansion, can sometimes lead to collapse, which may be the ultimate correction for the excess — but collapse is brutal and affects the whole population of a society rather than just the policy-making group who went too far. The damage from the excesses of history may linger for generations. The fall of Greece (disunity) and Rome (corruption and decadence — see Sir John Glubb’s Fate of Empires for the 250-year cycle) were shocks but lacked perpetual stigma. The resentment to many countries following colonialism and even feuds between groups of mere hundreds in the Scottish clan system, one of which between the Comyns and the Grahams still continues to this day 700 years later (caused by a murder in a church on 10 February 1306), similarly the Arabians’ tribal inability to forgive, have left long-lasting scars that have failed to correct in the way we might expect. The question in the modern era is to understand whether the polarised political groupings of today are reverting to being non-rational tribes. If so, self-reinforcing excesses of policy are more probable and the chance of any side self-correcting becomes less likely. They have to crash the structure they are supposed to be curating before they will notice they went too far.
Sometimes, societies overstep in terms of cultural or intellectual movements. This happened in the extremes of the Renaissance, the Spanish Inquisition and in the artistic excesses of the Baroque period. In some cases, these extremes contribute to longer-term shifts in thought and culture, such as the Enlightenment or Romanticism but they don’t always ‘correct’ in a way that entirely erases the past excesses. Sometimes art is a factor preventing correction in an excessive society, where the justification is that all is well because our society can make beautiful and enlightened things like this.
On a philosophical level, some argue that history is a series of mistakes and lessons learned, suggesting that excesses tend to correct themselves over time as people adapt and evolve. Others argue that history is cyclical, we forget the lessons of the past and some excesses are repeated in different forms. When our social and structural decisions are made by artificial intelligence systems, all of these mistakes of the past will be taken into account, so a tech-enthusiast may point to artificial delegation as a solution to extremes. Although, it might never explain to us what it considers to be a mistake and what examples it took into account (thinking more moves ahead than we are capable of following).
Long-term perspectives matter, as they help us see the wood from the trees. Different countries formulate policy for different timescales, e.g. The long-term strategies of party-controlled China as opposed to the short-term policies of any nation with a 3- or 4-year election cycle (US, UK etc.).
In some cases, what seems like an excess at one point in history may become normal or accepted over time, especially if the consequences are not immediately visible. For example, the rapid industrialisation of the 19th century created environmental and social excesses that are now being reconsidered, such as populations abandoning most of the land area of a country and moving to a congested city, but the pace of change can sometimes mask or delay the correction (e.g. using technology to work from somewhere less expensive, more pleasant and where you have a chance to go out with someone who isn’t covered in soot).
Should I wrap this up? Okay, so some historical and policy excesses do get corrected over time, but not everything. The outcome often depends on the nature of the excess, the capacity for societies to learn from past mistakes and the ways in which power structures or dominant ideologies evolve. Some imbalances persist and can have lasting effects, while others prompt significant social or cultural transformations.
I would contend that the most effective transformative factor for the US right now would be to invest in the power of literacy. If you discount non-fiction books and manuals which people read for work, the average US citizen reads fewer than 1 novel per year for pleasure. This has to change. I recommend building a book depository overlooking the main thoroughfare of every American city and then inviting the leader to come and cut the ribbons. The mayor could include everyone in a wonderful celebration of the President’s visit by giving the police a day off.
