Mark Twain once opined, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.” A previous AT article noted that Scottish professor Alexander Tytler developed a similar observation specific to republics: throughout human history, they all follow a particular life cycle. According to his defined cycle, and barring a dramatic change in our nation’s conduct, America is soon destined for collapse. Best-selling author Jonathan Cahn, who wrote “The Harbinger” and a follow-on series of related biblical pattern-repeating books, has highlighted stunning parallels between specific periods in the history of Israel and the current state of the United States. These parallels are both precise in their details and alarming in their implications. Cahn also warns that without a significant change in our collective beliefs and behavior, our nation will soon fall.

Before addressing the validity of these foreboding forecasts of gloom and doom, let’s explore this interesting phenomenon of what appears to be fractal behavior. Fractals, a term coined by IBM mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot, are complex geometric shapes that display self-similarity, meaning a subset or smaller part is a copy of the whole. They are found throughout nature in the branching of trees, the patterns of leaves, the outlines of mountains and coastlines, the shapes of snowflakes, and the spiral patterns of hurricanes and galaxies. These are physical patterns of self-similarity, but what Twain, Tytler, Cahn, and others imply is the existence of repeating human behavioral patterns. These “mythofractals” demonstrate that throughout human civilization, subsets of human behavior repeat themselves. Unlike the Kübler-Ross model of the five stages of grief of denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance, which can be experienced in different intensities and orders (much like the scattergram of emotions Democrats are now experiencing after last Thursday’s presidential debate), these behavioral patterns are more rigid in their sequence and thus more reliably predictive of their outcomes. Can discerning these mythofractals and analyzing their critical components be useful........

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