Across millennia, civilizations have surged with the discovery of new sources of energy, widened their influence through innovation, amassed incredible levels of wealth, built powerful institutions, and then found themselves collapsing as a result of the factors that once made them powerful.
The names change. The flags change. The stories change. Yet the underlying patterns do not. In The Cycles Within Civilizations, Michael Reijnierszen follows those patterns, while abstaining from the noise of current events. Drawing on history, politics, economics, and systems thinking, Michael traces how societies accumulate and compound micro-pressures until the system must adapt, break, or transform. There is no intention of being prophetic, only to explore why recurring patterns appear in wildly different eras, and what they can teach us about the present.