How a Book I read 27 Years Ago Predicted Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump

This video is a Power Point presentation of P.R. Sarkar's Law of Social Cycles.  This is the most incredible theory on human society I have ever seen, and this video only has 373 views.  If you are interested in how society changes over time, and have 43 minutes, check out this video.

In the late 80's, I was living in Southern California and working in the BMX bike and skateboard industries.  My dad, a design engineer, got a job in North Carolina.  For Christmas in 1989, I flew to my parents' house in Greensboro, NC for a week.  I didn't take my BMX freestyle bike, which I usually rode two or three hours every day.  I was bored out of my skull, and picked up a book to read while in NC.  That book was The Great Depression of 1990 by economist Ravi Batra.  Yeah, I know, it's a pretty boring sounding book to most people.  But I wanted to start my own business then, and was taking an interest in business, economics, and the future.  For me, it was a fascinating book.  Many of you may be thinking, "Wait, there was no Great Depression in 1990."  Technically, that's true.  What we did have was a "double-dip recession" that lasted from mid 1990 to about 1996.  That's about as close as you can get to a depression without actually having one.  One many levels, Batra was right, the economic downturn just wasn't quite a deep as he predicted.

That brings us to the next question.  How did he predict that economic quagmire?  Ravi Batra was from Indian descent (India Indians, not the Native American ones) and he was familiar with The Law of Social Cycles, thought up by P.R. Sarkar.  It's an amazing and deep theory.  But here's the gist of it.  Sarkar believed that there were four basic mentalities in any society.  These are the Acquisitors (business focused people), the Laborers (those who work for the others), the Warriors (people who earn a living with courage and physical abilities), and the Intellectuals (those who earn their living with their brains).  At any given time, one of these mentalities is dominate in society.  That dominant mindset shapes all of society.

Here's where it gets really crazy.  One of these mindsets can dominate a society for hundreds of years.  There's no set duration.  But the four mentalities dominate in a certain order, the order I listed them above.  By Batra's estimation, the U.S. has been in the Acquisitor Age since it first formed as a colony.  In 1989, he said we were getting to the point where the business world was ripe with corruption, and the average people were getting tired of being screwed over.  That corruption would lead to the collapse of the Acquisitor (businesspeople) Age, and the Laborers would rise up en mass and fight back to even things out.  Basically, since I read that book in 1989, I've been waiting for a big populist movement in this country as a reaction to the massive corruption and wealth inequality.  

Some of the first evidence of this societal change was the Occupy Wall Street movement.  It started with a small group of activists, and seemed to catch fire across the country in a matter of weeks.  Simply put, it was an idea whose time had come.  People across the country (and much of the world) were sick and tired of working harder, longer hours, all for a decreasing standard of living.  People of the Baby Boomer and Generation X have watched thousands of factories close up, the jobs taken by robots or workers overseas.  There seem to be fewer high paying jobs and more low wage service jobs.  In addition, younger people struggled through college only to end up with a mountain of debt and few good job prospects.  Then came the real estate market collapse and The Great Recession.  That horrific economic downturn morphed into a really anemic economy.  Politicians kept trying to tell us that the economy was back.  But us everyday people knew better. 

Then, as the 2016 presidential campaign got going, a couple of unexpected candidates jumped in the race.  On the Republican side, New York City real estate mogul, billionaire, and reality TV star Donald Trump started making fun of nearly everyone.  His crazy, racist, sexist, inflammatory comments sparked a lot of media attention... and supporters.  At first his fellow Republicans saw him as a joke.  No one took him seriously.  But his hatred, anger, and salty comments have now turned to votes.  He tapped into a huge number of people in the U.S. who are pissed off about something.  A lot of these people are racist.  Some are religious fanatics.  Some are sick of no longer having high paying factory jobs like those that existed 20 or 30 years ago.  As a group, Trump supporters are afraid.  They're afraid of an uncertain future in a slew of different ways.  Now we've come to the point where much of the Republican establishment is actually trying to wipe out their top presidential candidate because he doesn't represent the Republican party they worked so hard to build.  In a sense, it's a surprise political revolution.

On the Democrat side, Vermont senator Bernie Sanders came out of nowhere and started attracting crowds of 20,000 to 30,000 people to his events.  He's a die hard progressive, and a self-proclaimed democratic socialist.  The Democratic Party thought Hilary Clinton was a shoe-in for the nomination.  She is leading at this point by a fair margin, but Bernie Sanders has tapped into a populist sentiment in the U.S. that the Democratic leadership didn't realized existed.  On both sides of the political aisle, candidates no one expected to do well are showing just how much American citizens are sick of politics as normal in Washington D.C.  Bernie Sanders actually campaigns on the platform that this country needs a political and economic revolution.  The highly educated, highly motivated political operatives of both major parties have no idea how to deal with Sanders and Trump.  These unexpectedly strong presidential campaigns seemed to surprise nearly everyone.  Except perhaps economist Ravi Batra.  Using the Law of Social Cycles, he saw a huge populist movement coming nearly 30 years ago.