In high school and college, cycles are not usually taught about. The idea is not respectable in social studies. History is taught in great detail, and in academic and professional circles sociology and economics aspire to be sciences, however "dismal" they may actually be. Only empirical facts are presented and valued. What is not verified by experimental testing in a laboratory, or at least in careful field studies, is not accepted. Theories about cycles are considered non-academic speculation.

I admit, I prefer empirical, verified facts to made-up substitutes for them. I look to actual measurements to prove that climate change caused by humans is not a hoax, for example. I watched a documentary recently on the JFK assassination narrated by KGO San Francisco investigative reporter Dan Noyes. It claims that researcher Josiah Thompson proved that it was an organized hit job. Thompson said that a blurry image behind the fence on the grassy knoll was a man that a policeman saw, and that the man flashed a secret service badge although the bureau said there was none in the area. There were footprints there, and mud on a car that later disappeared. I guess Thompson’s theory is that the culprit was able to put the gun and bullet cartridges in the trunk of the car quickly before the policeman arrived and still saw him, but no-one ever saw such a gun or any cartridges. Debris from a supposed shot to the front of JFK’s head was scattered to the left and hit motorcycle riders on the left of the car, but not on the right. He said Kennedy’s head apparently moved forward at first, but only because Zapruder jiggled the camera.

But that jiggle would only have moved the entire scene forward, not the head within the scene. And the famous film showed no 4th shot, as Thompson claimed. And it has already been proven by tests that the bullet found on Gov. Connally’s stretcher and the bullet fragments found in JFK’s car and in JFK’s skull could only have come from Oswald’s gun, which was left with its cartridges and with his fingerprints on it in the building he worked in, a building from which he was the only one missing after the shooting. And so on. So the story that a phony secret service agent behind the fence shot JFK in the front of his head seems to me nothing but a made-up theory to fit Thompson’s preconceived belief in a professional hit job. Even films show that the debris didn’t hit the motorcycle riders on the right side of JFK’s car because these riders stopped, while those on the left who got hit with debris did not. And how could Oswald be part of a conspiracy hatched in 2 days, since nobody knew JFK’s motorcade route before then?

So it is interesting to debunk such conspiracy theories. But do you need an empirical study or accurate measurements to prove that you breathe in and out in a cycle? Do you need facts to prove that the sun rises and sets every day, or that we experience the seasons each year? Can science deny that time is measured with these cycles, and that even our clocks are circular? Or that wheels on our cars have to rotate in cycles in order for them to take us anywhere, even straight forward? Can young women deny that they experience menstrual cycles that roughly correspond to the Moon’s monthly phases, or that tides rise and fall according to this cycle? Don’t radio signals move in cycles, and isn’t the table of elements called periodical? Even our brains move in waves. Waves are cycles too, and waves move in the ocean. Even what we call matter is often said by scientists to be waves. Our recent ice ages moved in cycles too.

We hear pundits say that our politics move in cycles, as the pendulum swings from left to right. Looking at history, this is hard to deny. Economic forecasters use cycles, and theorists like Turchin and Kondratieff offer cycles to explain trends and events in history. Strauss and Howe presented a generation cycle that seems to work, since the new generation of civic-minded, collegial, tech-savvy, well-behaved networkers turned out just as they had predicted, and the "fourth turning" 21-year crisis they foresaw in their cycle for our times seems to have arrived on schedule.

Yet these kind of cycle theories are not seen as respectable, regardless of how many facts are discovered to demonstrate them. They don’t apply in every detail, or to everyone; they are not physical laws that can be disproven by one exception. But without cyclic theories we have no idea where we are or where we are going in our lives or in society.

That’s why I wrote my book: Horoscope for the New Millennium. Most people today are cynical and think that the USA, the "empire", Western Civilization, or civilization itself, is going to collapse soon or fall into a new dark age. But I experienced a great awakening in myself and in society simultaneously in 1966. Soon afterward I read about the meanings of the planets in astrology, and then I predicted exactly where they would be in my chart. I considered the meaning of the slow outer 3 planets and saw that a rare conjunction between them happened on the exact date I expected to correspond to this great awakening. I approached this subject very empirically. I looked at other such conjunctions too and was able to lay out a landscape of time designated by these planetary cycles that has also been seen by non-astrologers.

The three greatest turning points map out our history. The Axis Age of the sixth century BC is well known as the start of many religions and of our western civilization and science. The Fall of Rome ushered in the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance began our modern age of humanism and world exploration. In between these are other turning points. The same planetary cycle designates one of these in the 1890s. It was the start of a new cycle of civilization.

Seeing this turning point in this great cycle, I discovered how much of our society today stems from this rapid new beginning in circa 1892-- in modern arts, in new existential philosophy, in new physics and psychology, and in enormous technological and political changes. If we are still so close to the beginning of this 500-year cycle, then we can’t be near the start of a Dark Age. And looking around, despite the great challenges we face, our society does not seem ready to collapse from exhaustion, as Rome or the Middle Ages did. We seem pretty lively, and there’s still a lot of energy. Cars still go briskly along the street I live on carrying people to work every day. Our media is still full of life, and young people are bright and charismatic. Maybe the cycle is correct. Maybe it disproves the cynics. Maybe endless details of facts without any perspective are not sufficient for our understanding, despite what stuffy academics say.

Horoscope for the New Millennium by E Alan Meece

The Fourth Turning by Neil Howe and William Strauss

JFK Unsolved: The Real Conspiracies by Dan Noyes

The Reason for Conspiracies by E Alan Meece

Who Was Lee Harvey Oswald by Frontline