Current Changes in America in Historical Context

	    			by Jeffrey Race

     Presented to the Harvard Class of 1965 60th Reunion

We Americans have been either blessed or cursed by our 
unusual history.

Our beliefs and institutions grew from historical 
anomalies, so our country and our culture are exceptional.

We were the last people standing after World War Two,
with unique economic and military power.  

So we are unable to comprehend the realities of the world
and live in a fantasy.  

Two constants and three variables tell us what lies ahead.

FIRST CONSTANT

Values revert toward their means

SECOND 
homo sapiens is a competitive species.

FIRST VARIABLE
Reversion to historical patterns of interpersonal and 
interstate relations. 

Human history--large scale and small--has been one
of violent struggle, theft, murder, genocide and war.   

Special factors mitigated this after the Second World War,
creating the baseline our generation mis-understands as 
reality.

We are reverting to the historical pattern Kipling explained 
to us:

   "thou canst kill everything that thou art strong enough 
   to kill. . . 

   That is the law of the jungle."

SECOND 
Historically man lived on what he could produce, seize or steal.
  
The Industrial Revolution multiplied our productivity,
while Post-World War Two historical factors temporarily 
mitigated interstate conflict.

But with the arrival of the credit card, from the 60s we 
began to live on personal credit as a way of life

and from 1971 with the severing of the dollar's link to gold,
America as a nation began to live on credit.

In 1945 we were the world's greatest creditor nation. 
Now we are its greatest debtor. 

At the same time the whole world has been living on capital: 
running down natural reserves of energy, water and land
accumulated over millions of years.

That's over.
 
A great financial crisis impends.

THIRD 

Climate change is accelerating, not slowing.

We have passed several tipping points.  It's too late.

Life is over as we knew it in the golden era of our youth.

As resources become scarcer, civil strife and wars will increase.

"And the rain descended, 
 
 and the floods came, 

 and the winds blew, 

 and beat upon that house; 
 
 and it fell: 
 
 and great was the fall of it."

That's all you need to know.   

Everything else is detail.

Remember you heard it here first.

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