There are immutable laws in this universe. The speed of light is constant and unchanging, gravity is ever affecting everything in the physical universe, energy can neither be created, nor destroyed, and then there's the law of undulation.
What we know as the "Law of Undulation" is a concept created by Christian philosopher and author C.S. Lewis (most know him from "The Chronicles of Narnia"), who wrote this idea of a law into his other famous work, "The Screwtape Letters." This story revolves around a senior tempter demon named Screwtape writing to his nephew, a junior tempter named Wormwood, who is currently assigned to a British man during World War 2.
In one of the letters, Screwtape is describing humanity's "amphibian" state of existence, having one foot in the spiritual realm, and the other in the material. Lewis uses this to explain how humanity experiences a dual nature that simultaneously roots it in the eternal while constantly experiencing temporal change, and it's here that Lewis introduces the Law of Undulation:
"Has no one ever told you about the law of Undulation?
Humans are amphibians—half spirit and half animal. …As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time. This means that while their spirit can be directed to an eternal object, their bodies, passions, and imaginations are in continual change, for to be in time means to change. Their nearest approach to constancy, therefore, is undulation—the repeated return to a level from which they repeatedly fall back, a series of troughs and peaks. If you had watched your [human] patient carefully you would have seen this undulation in every department of his life—his interest in his work, his affection for his friends, his physical appetites, all go up and down. As long as he lives on earth periods of emotional and bodily richness and liveliness will alternate with periods of numbness and poverty. The dryness and dullness through which your patient is now going are not, as you fondly suppose, your workmanship; they are merely a natural phenomenon which will do us no good unless you make a good use of it."
When we say there are "immutable" laws of the universe, what we're saying is that we know these are constants... so far. Something might come along that completely wrecks our understanding of physics, thermodynamics, or quantum principles. However, the Law of Undulation is stone. We cannot change this about ourselves as material beings with evolving needs and situations. Change is inevitable, personally and thus societally.
Why am I talking about this?
Because we are entering into a new age, and one that is unfolding as I write this in ways that make it hard to predict how much will be affected. For instance, we know that Donald Trump's election was a mandate from the people to leave behind the radical leftism our society has been infected by, clean out our government as much as possible, give power back to the people, and fix our economic situation.
This has, in turn, had an interesting effect on our society as corporations have also begun bending themselves to be more in line with this new age. As I wrote earlier on Tuesday, McDonald's, Meta, and other corporations have begun ditching DEI goals and ESG requirements in order to rid itself of what the people have signaled they've moved on from socially and politically.
(READ: Is the Age of Wokeness Dead?)
How this affects countries overseas is yet to be seen, but it seems that there is a movement to bring various countries into this new age as the issues they're plagued by reach a boiling point.
For all intents and purposes, this new age is a welcome one, but it was always inevitable. The infection of leftist radicalism across the Western hemisphere was always going to cause a swift pendulum swing. This is manifesting in various ways. The election of Trump, of course, but also the deconstruction of ESG policies, cultural companies realigning their products to be less politically charged, and the change-up of social media companies. You can also see this in the burgeoning embrace of libertarian economics all over the globe. It's taken root in a big way with Argentina's Javier Milei, and his success is being noticed by others.
This was a big pendulum swing, and it's easy to see why. The powers that be had attempted to artificially move the world in a direction it didn't want to go. Of course, the backlash was going to be big.
But the law of undulation is absolute.
At some point, this age will also come to an end. It's unclear how or why, but what we fought so hard to escape will call itself by a different name, and it will have fresh new causes that take advantage of the people's needs and desires of the time. Those leading that movement will cause the people to turn away from the lessons they learned previously, as the new age will seemingly render them obsolete, and the pendulum will swing back.
We are currently moving toward a peak. We will reach it. Then we will descend.
You cannot stop this, but what you can do is make sure that when the descent starts, that it's not one that will plunge as deeply as this previous age did. The key is to destroy government control over society to the greatest extent possible, put laws in place that will severely restrict it going forward, localize politics as much as possible, and then continue to be prosperous until the age ends.
We will hit a new valley, but in our diligence, we won't have as deep of one as last time.
We have a great opportunity to do this now. We shouldn't waste it, because bad times are coming, but if we're prepared enough, and the framework is in place to help, those bad times could be less of an issue than before. While the law of undulation is absolute, like any universal law, it can be used to your advantage.
