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Paul Downey's avatar

Some thoughts from my world, of maths and physics. In the late 1960s I attempted to put together an economic model for the UK. No matter how hard I tried, no matter what I did, it always pointed to the collapse of the UK economy, and the economy of much of the rest of the world by 2010. That was just one of my hobbies. It's the sort of thing nerds do in the evenings.

My day job was long range planning for HMG so I had access to a vast amount of data and thought my model was fairly robust so I showed it to my boss. He too, it turned out, thought, as he put it, that Humpty Dumpty would fall off the wall around 2010. So, in my book,you can be absolutely certain that the people running the show have known for over 60years that a mechanism, such as a "pandemic" would have to be put in place to manage world wide collapse.

So much for my world.

Now for the much more interesting, and far more demanding, world of history. As history is always written by the winners how on earth is it ever possible to study it?

A great starting point for me was the realisation that I knew nothing at all outside of my own tiny little world. But how on earth could 5 billion, back then, 8 billion now, not clearly see that world-wide collapse was self- evident. And the most astonishing answer, to my rhetorical question, was that we are all tribal and that our sense of self for the vast majority of people is derived from our place in the tribe, and to rely on the Laws of Physics ie. science to live by would cast you out of the tribe, where you would have to live entirely alone, as no other tribe would ever take you in.

And History? Well it is, when all is said and done, nothing but the various stories each tribe tells about themselves and the other tribes and a good historian must have discovered some extraordinary place, outside of his tribe and any other tribe, to stand, in order to clearly see the world from.

A place such as Jung's collective unconscious comes to mind.

Anyway just my 2 cents.

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Jake Beale's avatar

Congratulations Matt, you've brought the crazies out.

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