The Redemption of Prediction

Dr. George Friedman

by Dr. George Friedman: Foreseeing what will happen is not difficult. It requires only that we face the fact that life always repeats itself if not perfectly, then roughly. As Mark Twain famously put it, “History does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme.” We are born of a woman, are nurtured and grow, live our lives as best we can, and die, and within a generation or three, our names and lives will be forgotten, along with what little we have done. There are variations within the rhyming tune, but on the whole this is what we are. We cannot predict everything about life, but we can grasp the pattern that grips us and within which we struggle to live.

It is conceited to claim that the pattern that grips the individual does not also grip humanity and all of its parts. It is more difficult to grasp the song that is being sung than to grasp its rhyme. An individual is born to his life. Where he was born and to whom tells an observer a great deal about what his life will be. The place you were born and the people to whom you were born is both a comforting cradle and a painful prison. If place, people and time will tell us what is possible and impossible in our life, then the possible and impossible is held in common by all those whose origins we share, and with subtlety and gentleness, we can tell the story of cities and nations before they occur. It demands only that we see the obvious and be honest with ourselves as to what we have seen.

There are those who wish that they would be different. There are others who wish that their city or nation would be different. And there are those who wish people would be different. As we learn playing poker, it is important never to lie to yourself about the cards you were dealt, or comfort yourself by imagining that the other player’s cards were different. If you accept that your own life is an inevitable cycle, and you accept the cards that you have been dealt, then altering the pattern ever so slightly is possible. If you demand that it be vastly different, life will crush you, as history crushes nations that try to escape what they are.

It is not difficult to predict, to some degree, what path your children will take, and the path that nations will take. But as with children and your own nation, it is impossible not to lie and wish for them what is not in their nature. Both are loved, but both are ultimately untamed, subject to their own nature and moving predictably toward an end you will not see.

I am living through my second transition. I know what these transitions look like, but even knowing what is to come, I forget how painful it is. I saw Harlem burn after Martin Luther King was murdered. I thought that in the second and last cycle of my life, it would be different. More precisely, I didn’t think. I separated my knowledge of the cycles and sanitized them into an abstraction. I lied to myself in not remembering that the cycle comes with rage over past and present injustices, with lives shattered unexpectedly by poverty, and the fundamental truths of who we are, dismissed in favor of strange and alien beliefs. The 2020s, a decade of change, have opened as I expected, but the sense of being a stranger in a strange land was not what I expected. Or more precisely, I welcomed the first cycle with my youth; the second is made unwelcome by my age.

This is how my country grows. It explodes in rage, and mutual loathing and self-righteousness become universal. We grow this way because we have little time. Americans live their lives with urgency, knowing that as individuals they are born and die, knowing that they will be forgotten as all others are, yet they are unwilling to believe their cards. The American phrase is the epicurean “Dum vivimus, vivamus,” meaning, “While we live, let us live,” with a joyous assertiveness in the last phrase. And implicit in that phrase is a will to be remembered through the ages, like Benjamin Franklin, who enjoyed the finest wines and women to be found in Paris. That is not the card we were dealt, but it is the hunger we have. And the problem is that the urge to play a busted flush leads if not to disaster, then to discomfort and disappointment.

Americans are a lucky people, partly because the country was invented to deal us, to continue the card analogy, full houses, and also because when we lose, the country will stake us to another hand. And so I know that, as in the past, the pain of the 2020s will pass. Who imagined electricity or microchips? We are a nation built to reinvent itself.

COVID-19 was mindless nothingness as viruses are. But the events of the past few weeks, the demonstrations and riots and preposterous claims that each will assume belong to the other side, raise Shakespeare’s vision: “Life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Implicit in my work is that there is something uniquely nobler about my country. I know this was forgotten when Detroit burned, when children starved and froze in the Great Depression of 1929, when the dead were buried after the Civil War and a vile corruption seized the nation.

I know that the nation redeemed itself after each of these events. I know that few thought at the time that it could, and that they passed into the light confident of their redemption. I know that this will likely happen again. But in a decade whose beginning has been announced with authority, sending the country into wrenching pain, I am caught up with the thought that predicting these things is a chump’s game, and that this time we won’t pull the “case ace.” But I know we will because Mark Twain taught me the secret. It all rhymes. I know this is necessary, but I wish the nation would not put itself through this again, and perhaps be less ambitious. But that is not our nature, and in our lives we live the struggle to be more than we might be, and as a people to be a “light unto the nations.”

It is ugly, painful work at times, and we are in those times.
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Dr. George Friedman is an internationally recognized geopolitical forecaster and strategist on international affairs and the founder and chairman of Geopolitical Futures (@GPFutures).

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