Historians get really nervous about patterns. That’s changing a bit now. And the truth of it is there’s not much way to avoid the 500-year cycle. You almost have to work too hard to unsay it, it’s so obviously there in every way. And if you say every 500 years we go through one, then you immediately say we’re in the 21st century and baby are we going through one.
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If you look at human history all the way through, we organize ourselves in different ways. Tribes, religions, guilds, states, more recently companies and networks. And what these institutions do is they sort of codify values and beliefs, and they they transport them across the generations. So we see this phenomenon that when you codify values in institutions, you give those values longevity.