Cycles in American History - 5
The double headed snake of republican and democratic movement.
Organization of Levels
The last section of this paper is a general proof of how Fourier Transforms also use the Laplace transforms in the area of the social sciences. But it only shows that a general proof that Fourier transforms need to have Laplace transforms. It does not show either the specific nature of the interaction between Fourier and Laplace nor does it have pointers. Since the Generation Models has pointers and a location that means the need to go from the general to the specific. That is China, Russia, Europe, the United States, and every other country has a Fourier and Laplace Transform, they all have movements from these cycles, but we are interested in a cycle of the United States and the specific cyclic is the turning of the Government consensus. This means that there shall be more proof, be forewarned.
But before there can be more rigor, there will have to be more research. The empirical must come before the theoretical in science, even if the Social Sciences are not yet fully formed as such. The first step is to connect the Social Sciences with the Physical Sciences. For the Social Sciences, this means a connection with Biology. The first proof did not have mathematical symbols in it, though it could, but the further proof while be more mathematical. This is because in the Generations model the is no need for Laplace Transforms because in the mode of generations “ideas” are already set in stone. Consider that on pages 99, 100, and 106 the list of “ideas” is spelled out among other places. But there is no Laplace Transform to explain them. On page 107:
We resist calibrating our conclusions to the exact year, cycle does reveal a four century record of strikingly consistent timing. In figure 6 – three we show that every movement has begun shortly after the first year of a recessive generation - that is, shortly before the beginning of the matching (awakening or crisis) constellation era. We also show that every social movement ended near the first birth year of a dominant generation.
Then they show each multi-generation as an aspect of rigid social forms that play out in time.
This is more than slightly misaligned even from a Fourier Translation perspective: the generations work in very different periods because the period of reproductive success of a given group changes over time. When a group of parents decides to be reproductively active depends on natural forces and the pharmaceutical and medical advances. In the baby boom generation, the years of reproduction went down considerably and also caught up several people who would have been part of the reproductive cycle but there was too little money to do so, which is why we call it “the baby boom”: a larger swath of the population became involved. The reason that straight lines can determine behavior is that looking backwards they can cherry-pick certain aspects and ignore others.
There is also the problem of when a generation dies: not because the oldest members died early, there have been outliers who live to over 100 years in most generations of the “long modern age” but how many people of that generation survived until the end expands as health care gets better for a larger number of the population. Some few of any given generation will survive but the size of that generation grows over time. This is obvious when one looks at the endpoint in political terms: Ronald Reagan was the oldest president but now Trump and Biden are older still because the G.I. generation lived a great deal less time than the BB generation. This is not anywhere reflected in their Laplace Transforms or even in their Fourier Transforms. The length of time that each generation survives is crucial to the population pyramid and indeed shows up in some of the analysis that surrounds the population pyramid discussion.
While before I praised the generations model for the rigor that its used population pyramid I now must point out that there are deep and irreducible flaws in the way that it both handles Fourier transforms and the cavalier approach. Instead, they simply take a Procrustean layout and fit the numbers to their theory. But in certain places, it shows a backward bias, take for example on page 200 the novel Moby Dick by Herman Melville is listed as one of the great American pieces of literature, but if one looks back at the reception at the time Moby Dick was a failure compared with his earlier novels. What this shows is that looking back Moby Dick is indeed a towering achievement of the American literary form but it is only recognized in the 20th century. We can go through many lists that they present and find that the past and the present have very different views on what their finest achievements are. For example, Lincoln is called a transcendentalist but when looking at his papers one finds a different individual struggling with the enormous problems of the constitutional order as it is and only finally decides that some aspects of the Constitution needed to be reformed. This makes him different from William Lloyd Garrison who thought that the Constitution should be abolished.
It is not that there are no cycles and ideas do not match the genetic basis that they come from because the ideas are top-down. It is not that a group of people who are born at a particular time see things in a particular way. This does not mean that there are particular psychological, sociological, and economic underpinnings to the acceptance of ideas, but it is far more fluid than the tables that Strauss and Howe present. Instead of a line denoting a generation, there is a wavefront that will induce members of that cohort in a particular generation to act as they do. However, differing endowments to each member of society will make it so that on a family-by-family basis there will be a different leaning. This is particularly true at the boundaries between generations: for example, in 1962-1970 there were both the tail end of the baby boom group generation and the first members of generation X. There are instantaneous differences because while one generation is ending their reproductive hero and has a different set of ideas the other is entering the reproductive era and has two learn again the same lessons. Therefore the G.I. generation and the baby boom generation learn differently. For the G.I. generation, the learning cycle was much earlier, and the last baby is more like their older siblings while for the baby boom generation, this was their first or their second, and therefore, they needed to learn now what had to be done in a simple parental laundry list.
This means that the Laplace transform needs to be described in greater detail than by simple charts with straight lines.
Fourier Transforms versus Laplace Transforms Redux
We now must form an exact notion of what Fourier Transform and Laplace Transforms are:
The Fourier Transform is:
Where: 𝜉∈ℝ, that is 𝜉 is a member of the Reals.
Note that the exponent has an i component. This means that while 𝜉 is a member of the Reals it is produced by a Complex number or ℂ.
The Laplace Transform is:
Where s= 𝜎 + 𝜔i, that is s is a member of the Complex Plane.
The first difference is the Laplace Transform is defined in terms of time and t is a Real number.
In this paper, the term “imaginary” will be used as little as possible and instead the term “possibility” or “potentiality” will be used instead. The Laplace Transform does not deal with imaginary ideas or imaginary time but potential. This does not mean that such objects do not exist or that the idea of such objects cannot be contained within the Laplace transform because the idea is a real value in time. That is, we can think of things whether or not we know or not their existence. Look at any history discussion on the internet and you will find sections on imaginary histories. You can see them in literature and film such as “The Man in the High Castle” or the animated Justice League. An idea moves in Real-time even if its idea does not.
The second point is a follow-up: time is started at 0 or -𝜺.
The third is that, for the moment, a one-sided Laplace Transformation will be used but the two-sided Laplace Transformation is waiting in the wings.
This means that ideas do not propagate in straight lines in the real but in terms of potentialities in the plane. This trashes the orthogonal grids as an overall concept but that does not mean they are of no value. This is because there certain conditions where the mainstream idea is the dominant one.
After all, the population pyramid shows that there are waves of births and one can group them by a signed pattern which one can then fix the peaking of the wave and the collapse of it by labeling its parts in retrospect. For example, a group of people who are trying to maintain “the union” are much more willing to compromise to preserve the union of states as a country. Whereas only a few years later a growing number of people wished to dissolve the Union or reform the Union to get rid of chattel slavery, while still allowing other forms such as debt slavery. All of these ideas cannot be adequately informed by a Fourier transform but they can more adequately be described by Laplace transform because ideas move in radical ways using written and electronic communication.
This means that William Lloyd Garrison founded the Liberator in 1831, long before there was any notion of civil war, in the group because William Lloyd Garrison used The Liberator as a focal point for organizing the disparate forces of abolition into a cohesive force. It was not “rightoues” (page 203 of Generations) because in the Liberator was no end of violence or insurrection but a directed leave that the governmental systems needed to be reformed.
A long time before there was the disruption the people who would make it happen were already hard at work in creating the paradox that “All men are created equal” cannot be squared with chattel slavery. While there were still options, a large number of people would take those options, but in the compromise of 1850, a “grand compromise” was created to square that particular circle the five laws that were part of the 1850 compromise were amending the fugitive slave act, making the slave trade in Washington DC illegal, the admission of California as a free state, the establishment of Utah, and the fixture of Texas are boundaries. However, once the compromise was in full force, the motion for chattel slavery as a permanent feature with a future in reproduction became clear that there was no stasis because time would progress with the number of slaves increasing year by year. The primary leads were Henry Clay and Stephen Douglas. While they introduced the parcel of pills it was Douglas which passed a different set of bills and it seemed to avert a civil war. But underneath the passage of the compromise of 1850 was a trick of compromise, namely voting on each bill separately and then collectively together to form the compromise. Each one had just enough support from different people to pass. But no one would vote for the entire bill because each division of society objected to some provision so deeply that the only way to get it passed was to vote on it separately and never as a whole.
It did not work because the fugitive slave act required local and state law enforcement to participate in the recapture of slaves and the Supreme Court, decided in Dred Scott that black people were in all but name, sub-human. This did not go over well, and it said to both the proslavery and abolitionist forces that the time to resolve things by consensus had ended. The pro-slavery forces wanted an assurance that the slave trade would be legal and have an outlet in the United States. This meant to the praise of slavery forces that Kansas needed to be a pro-slave state while the Northerners wanted it to be a “Free Soil” state and thus again the conflict over Kansas. An idea continues to grow even after it is accepted because there are consequences to its acceptance that need to be unwound.
What this means is that time does not stay fixed in any given point and the results of the Laplace Transform will continue to take effect in a way that the Fourier transform is incapable of simulating correctly. But ideas that are common and fit within the Fourier transform can be decidedly effective. For example, when men come home from fighting a war as they did in 1945, to an economy that still has room to grow, the result is an explosion in population. This is a mainstream idea that has mainstream consequences and forms a linear result. But the tailing off of that idea is a curve that only vaguely can be a grid. There is no line on page 231 of Generations that would show why be baby boom dried up. The idea that the secular crisis would and before World War II is also extremely unlikely. A better fit would end the crisis in 1953 with the end of the Korean War when the few men who were eligible to be drafted were called up to fight the Korean War.
The problem is that a Fourier transform does not create a bottom-up solution nor does the plot’s transform create a top-down solution. This means that they are an interface between top-up and bottom-down, which we will represent as middle outwards. The middle of words solution is because the top-down and bottom-up paradigms need to have a mechanism to establish what they feel they have won. A good example is the establishment of administrative law as a way of policing departments in court. It is neither civil nor criminal in its standpoint. Once established it goes on creating new administrative law and takes on the newer departments that are established afterwards. Administrative law now forms a legal part of the structure in addition to civil and criminal. This was again in the early part of the 20th century but was given a major boost by the New Deal in regulating the administrative functions of government. This was because Congress left it to the executive as to how to administer the broad consensus. Thus, administrative law was born. But as the old saying goes, just because the problem goes away does not mean that the people do as well. The depression may have ended but administrative law continued onwards under its weight.
This means that the Fourier transform cannot encompass ideas because ideas do not travel in real space but in the possibility space represented by complex numbers. It means that the line while it is useful is also deeply flawed It also means that the two must intermixed by a third form which we call the middle out. The next part of this paper is to discuss the ad and flow of generations in light of the Laplace transform and the middle outwards. It will show that there are two parts to the discussion, a republican era and a democratic era. Again the small letters denote not the political parties but the thrust of the direction.