Say WHAT?!? And was it reciprocated? I must investigate – for Science.
Don’t bother, it’s really not worth it. Watch some real porn instead.
Here’s a page listing some of the American “cyclic theory” ideas. Only the last one comes at all close to the OP’s 20 year fixation and that’s being generous.
The most famous one is by the Schlesinger’s and it mostly has 12-or-less year cycles but one that lasted 32 years. Note that a few years off from 20 here and there add up to so that a transition point could happen 10 years out of sync with the OP’s idea.
IMHO, much like the “they always come in threes” celebrity death trope, things happen all the time all over the place, but we, as humans, have a need to apply patterns or some organizing principle. Then confirmation bias jumps in and you end up with the Bermuda Triangle, and stuff like this, etc.
The OP is trying really hard to jam events in the right timeframes into the definition. The Challenger explosion was not one of the one hundred most important events in American history and did not have the effect on space exploration the OP claims (decades? Huh?) The assassinating of MLK and the race riots that followed is omitted because it’s too close to JFK to keep the theory going.
This reminds of theories that involve sunspot cycles. Or that between 1840 and 1960 every president elected in a year divisible by 20 died in office.
[hijack] I’ll never forget the first time I actually saw a black swan. 1967, walking down the Limmatquai in Zurich and I couldn’t believe my eyes. Turned out they were common in Australia.[/hijack]
“Completely changes America”?!
– sure, every once in a while (not on any 20 year cycle) we get told that “X changes everything!” Often by people trying to drum up a war.
No. No, it doesn’t. Most things aren’t changed at all. Generally even relevant things that actually are changed by a specific event still continue to have the same underlying issues. Even the Civil War didn’t “completely change America”. If it had, we wouldn’t still be arguing about racial issues today.
Does America change? Sure it does. There’s quite a lot about the place that Martha Washington wouldn’t recognize; and the changes aren’t limited to the size of the buildings, the size of the population, or whether it’s generally considered safe to drink from the creek. But it doesn’t “completely change” in any given moment, or as a result of one specific event.
He mentions the Challenger Explosion but doesn’t mention the first Moon Landing? The Moon Landing was one of the most watched events in human history.
Moderator Note
We are trying to reduce the misogyny around here, and that means that boy’s locker room type posts are no longer welcome. If you want to make a reference to the movie, do so without the oral sex reference.
I’ll go with ~15-year disruptions. Each has a temporal margin i.e. don’t get anal.
1900 - US beat Spain, took empire
1915 - US was in WWI
1930 - US went all Great Depression
1945 - US helped win WWII
1960 - Nixon didn’t shave; JFK won
1975 - Microcomputers incubated
1990 - US won Cold War; brrr…
2005 - US fucked itself in Iraq
2020 - US depopulated by virus
2035 - Pres Kendall Jenner mutated
I’d pick out 10-year incidents but then we get back to more tedious “decades” stuff. Done that. We need new calendars.
Yeah, actually – if you want one specific moment of paradigm shift, I’ve got a candidate. It didn’t “completely change America”, of course; but it arguably shifted our species’ perception of the universe.
http://100photos.time.com/photos/nasa-earthrise-apollo-8
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2018/12/earthrise-apollo-8-photo-at-50-how-it-changed-the-world/
Neil DeGrasse Tyson was on Stephen Colbert’s show a few days ago and made the same point about the Apollo missions, the photos of earth and the establishment of Earth Day, the EPA, the 1972 Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act and so forth.
This really isn’t much different from horoscopes.
I think I first heard the term ‘Black Swan’ in connection with the LTCM financial collapse in 1998. The usual explanation goes something like this
Suppose that an observable x satisfies
. . . . 9 < x < 11 , 68% of the time
. . . . 8 < x < 12 , 95% of the time
Then if we assume that x follows a normal distribution
. . . . 7 < x < 13 , 99.7% of the time
. . . . 6 < x < 14 , 99.994% of the time
. . . . 5 < x < 15 , 99.99994% of the time
. . . . 4 < x < 16 , 99.9999998% of the time
In other words, if we observe the statistics in the first two lines, we might assume that x < 4 or x > 16 are effectively impossible. In fact, they weren’t impossible; it was silly to expect them to be impossible, because it was silly to expect that a simple assumption of normal distribution was iron-clad. But since two of the experts behind LTCM were Nobel-Prize winners, a special term — ‘Black Swan’ — was needed to describe their [del]improbably bad luck[/del] failure to consider model over-simplifications!
I tried Google’s Ngram Viewer to test my recollection that ‘Black Swan’ came into vogue at that time. But apparently black swans aren’t really so rare after all. Although it may be hard to find on Google now, in the 20th century ‘black swan’ usually referred to Cygnus atratus, a swan that is … colored black!
- Which is important, because it meant Germany had already “defeated” the Russians and was coming into a period where it had a temporary boost of energy; the fact this didn’t lead to ultimate success, in part due to America’s presence on the Western Front, was a big part of the Stabbed in the Back Myth which Hitler used to ascend to power.
Plus, by the very nature of “black swan events”, they can’t be on a regular schedule. You can come up with their average rate, and maybe for a suitable threshold of what events count, they’re on average 1 every 20 years. But then you can still sometimes get two of them in the same year (which humans would probably insist on calling “one event”, even if they’re completely unrelated), or fifty years between them (in which case humans would probably find some random event in the middle of that span and inflate it to the point where they can call it another one).
I am replying to my own post because I forgot the launch of Sputnik 1 in 1957 triggered a panic that the Soviet Union was actually technological superior to the United States and launched the Space Race. It was more influential than both events mentioned above.
I get the comments here to my OP and my post was why it was placed in this forum. I’m still a big believer in the “20 year rule” and it was reinforced by the events of the past week which have so far changed my life and my mental outlook on the world more than any other l have lived through, and the only event that took more influence on my life was 9/11…19 years ago.
But I will agree that a lot of this was my own confirmation bias.
And I will agree that the 1979 Teheran crisis was a bigger deal on the American Psyche than Challenger, as much as a horror Challenge was.
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
I have to ask: When people tout the notion that “black swan events happen every 20 years,” or “celebrities die in threes” - what exactly are they getting at?
Are they implying that God is somehow deliberately clustering such events onto a calendar because He likes mathematical patterns?
“Celebrities die in threes” seems to be about something mystical - fate, destiny, God, whatever.
This thing (which I have never heard of prior to this thread) seems to be an attempt to say something profound about historiography.
To the OP - you might be better off claiming that each generation has a single defining event or series of events. Then you have to categorize each generation (a contentious task itself). Then you could go ahead and make a case. It still wouldn’t be very convincing (sorry), but you would be on firmer ground to defend your assertion.
They wouldn’t line up every twenty years, though, and neither has your own list. So your “20 year rule” is more of a “20ish year more or less rule.”