Strange title: The Infant’s Skull or The End of the World: A Tale of the Millennium. In the work, Eugene Sui  (1804-1857) recounts the panic that enveloped many European Christians at the close of the first millennium C.E. (A.D.). Clergy had reiterated St. John the Divine’s prophecy of the world’s end. They believed they were about to witness the end times 1,000 year after Christ’s birth. The gullible faithful gave away or sold their stuff. Many just stopped farming in anticipation of the Apocalypse.
 
     “In 999, the expectation of the end of the world had put a stop to work; all the fields except those belonging to the ecclesiastical seigneurs, lay fallow. The formidable famine of the year 1000 was then the immediate result, and that was followed by a wide-spread mortality.”*
 
Simpler times? Couldn’t happen today, right?
 
Think Y2K; think year 2000; think Millennium Parties. Think prophecies of 1999. Think Prince’s song 1999. Think an April 26, 1999, report from Reuters:
 
     “QUEBEC CITY - More mass suicides linked to the Order of the Solar Temple doomsday cult, implicated in 74 deaths in Canada and Europe in the past five years, are a real possibility as the millennium nears, police said.
"Yes, there are Solar Temple members remaining in Quebec. There may be about 30 of them left," Officer Pierre Robichaud of the Surete du Quebec provincial police said.”**
 
In 1000 the world did end for those who succumbed to virtually self-induced famine. Then a growing anger against the clergy’s unfounded predictions of the Apocalypse eventually translated into persecution of and mob violence against Jews in Europe. The clergy needed a scapegoat, and they also needed to distract their “faithful” from their mistaken prophecies. When January 1, 1000, came and went without the Second Coming, they explained that the 1,000 years mentioned by St. John the Divine really meant a thousand years after Christ’s death and not after his birth. Look out for the year 1032 or 1033!
 
And, of course, those years have come and gone, the rumors about them now long forgotten. Earth is still here (Look down; you’ll see it).
 
Acting on rumor can be hazardous to one’s health or, as in the case of those Jews who were persecuted between 1000 and 1032 C.E., to others’ health.
 
Unfortunately, rumor draws as the Sirens drew sailors toward hazardous rocks. No one, of course, has the ability to check the veracity of every story, but all of us have the capacity to think before we act. That we live more than a millennium from that first apocalyptic warning did not prevent some, such as those in the Order of the Solar Temple and other cult members, from acting in the same frenzied mode that people exhibited in 999. Are the amygdalae so in control that we can’t work our way to reasoned action? The next time you hear that a passing comet, the Solar System’s syzygy, or an anniversary of some significant event indicates some dire consequence for you personally or humanity in general, remember those who abandoned their farms as they awaited the Apocalypse of the year 1000. And the next time you see the rumor mill in action against an individual, pause before you join the mob to persecute the innocent. 
 
Tend to your farm. 
 
* Eugene Sue, The Infant’s Skull, Or, The End of the World: A Tale for the Millennium, translated by Daniel De Leon. English translation. New York Labor News Company, 1904. Project Gutenberg at http://www.gutenberg.org/files/31759/31759-h/31759-h.htm#CHAPTER_Ia
 
** Patrick White, Reuters online at
https://www.culteducation.com/group/1158-solar-temple/19541-solar-temple-cult-worries-rise-as-millennium-nears.html

You can’t always be sure you’re sure. That’s our plight because being sure about something drives the deep brain to defend ideas and beliefs. Being unsure is particularly disconcerting when such doubt interferes with long-held notions about a person or a people. So, the discovery by Nicolas Naudinot’s team of archaeologists that people in the Azilian Period were artistically inclined and skilled overthrew the notion that that they weren’t.
 
Let’s start with the old belief on the simplest level: What does Merriam-Webster say about Azilian?
 
     "Azilian: of or belonging to an early Mesolithic culture found primarily in France and characterized by stone and bone implements of degenerate Magdalenian type and especially by pebbles painted with lines, dots, and geometric figures"*
 
Let’s follow that with an analogy. Handwriting was once an inseparable part of the American educational system. There were even specific styles. Not so much anymore. Many curricula do not include handwriting instruction. Those who had to practice handwriting under the tutelage of a stern teacher might bemoan that they are among the last to handwrite legibly. They might also warn that in some future generation only a specialist, a handwriting historian expert in the squiggles of the past might be the only person capable of reading a document like The Declaration of Independence. A future generation will become, in at least one sense, devoid of an art form and a skill.
 
So, for a long time archaeologists believed the people of the Magdelanian Period in France and Spain who made the Lascaux Cave drawings failed to pass on their skill and art to succeeding generations. Then the University of Nice’s Naudinot made his discovery: Engraved stone tablets with—surprise of archaeological surprises—drawings of animal heads not too dissimilar from those of the Magdelanian cave paintings.**
 
Chance discoveries and treasures purposefully sought often overturn previous notions. The same thing seems to happen in our relationships with others. The deep brain likes stability, but the frontal cortex always has to deal with changes. When we chance upon some information that overthrows previous character assessments, we often struggle for a rational explanation. When a discovery’s new reality seems irrefutable, the deep brain lags behind in acceptance. Maybe what we should do is follow the lead of Naudinot and his team: Go looking for more information.
 
We might find art, skill, and knowledge we had never known, long overlooked, or even dismissed because of set perceptions locked in the deep brain. Seems that the Azilian people had not forgotten how “to write.” Now archaeologists see the reality that a formerly unsuspected level of sophistication had traveled through time and that the Azilian people were just as capable of symbolic language as their predecessors. All that was needed for this revelation was the discovery of some stone tablets.
 
Do a little digging. First, look into your deep brain. It is a cave whose recesses hold some notions that conflict with external realities. The paintings on the walls there aren’t the only such artworks. Second, look to find the art, skill, and knowledge you overlooked in the lives of others.
 
*Merriam-Webster online https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/Azilian
 
** Powell, Eric A., Archaeology, July/August, 2017, Late Paleolithic Masterpieces, p. 20. 

Okay, fella, take a deep breath; it’s not about some starlet on the red carpet. So, eyes up. Well, maybe not fully up, but on her necklace and its gems, instead. Cleavage is a term mineralogists and gemologists use to describe a breaking plane in a crystal, and gems, as most solids are, are crystalline substances.
 
Cleavage? Think pages in a book. You can separate the pages parallel to their surfaces, but not perpendicularly without ripping them (that’s covered by another mineralogical term: fracture). Many minerals exhibit characteristic separation planes like book pages. Even diamond.
 
Gemologists take advantage of the cleavage planes to “cut” diamonds, the hardest of naturally occurring substances. They “read” the planes and strike the diamonds at just the right angle to effect the separation, just as you might insert a fingernail to separate pages. Walla! With just the right angles of strike, pieces of diamond break off, and we get a beautiful gem ready for setting in a starlet’s necklace.
 
Light reflecting off diamond’s facets (or faces) gives it a glassy luster.* The starlet and her idolizers gathered near the red carpet might be ignorant of the science behind the gem’s flashing. Photons not only pass through it along paths determined by its ordered carbon atoms, but also bounce off its angled faces, giving it the luster for which starlets pay big bucks. The dancing light, like the flashes from cameras held by paparazzi elbowing for a picture, catches the attention of all the eyes not focused on that other kind of cleavage.
 
You know the old saying about testing a diamond. “See whether or not it will scratch glass.” Trust me; it will. When Lucy excitedly runs into a house eager to show her engagement ring to assembled family, including her spinster distrustful aunt, she might be met with “Will it scratch glass?”
 
Lucy, if she understands mineralogy, might respond, “Aunt Maple, this will scratch the engine block on your 1985 Chevy.”**
 
In fact, diamond will scratch not only steel, but also corundum, the mineral group from which we get rubies. Hardness is the term for scratchability. In diamond, nature has given us a hard substance that is easy to cleave but incredibly difficult to scratch.  Strength, beauty, and weakness characterize this mineral that plays tricks with light and serves as a good analog for humans.
 
Even the strongest and most brilliant have weaknesses. Supposed strength and brilliance is what draws paparazzi and gawkers to “red carpets” of any kind. They see the glitter. They assume strength of some kind, even strength of character the adoring public transfers and projects from fictional character to actress. Of course, some paparazzo or other also wants to capture cleavage of not just of physical but rather and especially of psychological nature. There’s nothing like exposing a plane of weakness for selling photos.
 
We live in an Age of Cleavage, a time when would-be photogemologists and rumormineralogists look for planes of weakness in the lives of others. Many spend their lives lining red carpets, rather than trying to walk on them.
 
Just remember that if you tend to idolize someone, the gem you see has weaknesses that are not unlike your own. Luster of the most glassy gems derives from some sort of cleaving. We can take this at least two ways: All raw materials need some refinement; all refined materials had a different appearance before being shaped into what we desire, admire, or envy. Something of the original had to be separated, broken off. Something of the original lost.
 
And what of your own luster? What cleavage did you undergo to reveal facets? Where are your hidden planes of weakness?   
  
* Luster is a property that reflected light gives to the surface of a mineral: “glassy,” “metallic,” or “earthy,” for example.
** The setting, however, might be made of gold, a soft metal, so keep the hood closed and avoid the test.

I can’t imagine doing the job: Lying on one’s back or crouched in a stoop, day after day in imperfect lighting, trying to do something precise and lasting, something of color and grace of form, and above all, something not only inspiring, but truly uplifting. I could never have painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Unless.
 
Unless stick figures and painting outside the lines were in vogue. No. Making a beautiful work of art, a detailed painting on a ceiling high above the floor, is beyond my capacity. Just think of the discomfort in doing the project. Just think of the stillness. Can’t get any exercise save climbing the scaffolding.
 
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not against the work. I’ve painted ceilings, all solid white of course with no distinguishable details save spatter on uncovered sections of the floor. Typically, I use a roller rather than a brush to do most of the job. I’m going to guess here, but I don’t think Michelangelo Buonarroti used a roller on the ceiling (though he could certainly have saved himself some considerable time and effort and definitely avoided discomfort because that ceiling has an area of 6,000 square feet).
 
Four years on one painting project! The work took its toll on his prone and stooping body, or so he writes in verse to Giovanni Da Pistoja. In the poem entitled “On the Painting of the Sistine Chapel,” he complains, “foul I fare.”  Here are some of its lines:
 
            “I’ve gown a goiter by dwelling in this den…
            Which drives the belly close beneath the chin:
            My beard turns up to heaven; my nape falls in,
            Fixed on my spine: my breast-bone visibly
            Grows like a harp: a rich embroidery
            Bedews my face from brush-drops thick and thin.
            My loins into my paunch like levers grind:
            My buttock like a crupper bears my weight…
            In front my skin grows loose and long; behind,
            By bending it becomes more taut and straight….”*
 
Before and above him 300 figures, none of them sticklike, stick on the ceiling, defying gravity. And prime in theme floats one supreme Creator in the clouds with an outstretched finger ready to impart life to a species just as Michelangelo’s atrophied muscles reached upward to create his art. In a line I excluded from the above verses the artist declares the painting to be “the fruit of squinting brain and eye.”
 
So, between 1508 and 1512 the artist worked to paint a ceiling and sacrificed his body. For centuries after, millions, if not billions, of people have looked with wonder at a work whose detail is too great to see in a single glance. Only our own squinting focuses our brains on the detail. Michelangelo asks in his poem, as he asks all of us by extension, “Come then, Giovanni, try/ To succor my dead pictures and my fame/Since foul I fare and painting is my shame.”
 
Shame? Faring foul? Isn’t it interesting to see the Sistine Chapel through Michelangelo’s squinting eyes? We see the beautiful art; he saw the labor and sacrifice. Should we apply such a perspective to everyone’s work, even the most mundane, but nevertheless still detailed creation? I would ordinarily leave you with this as a point of departure for your own thinking, but I’ll give an example. Just about every workplace, every building that houses employees, is a chapel painted by someone’s efforts, risks, and sacrifice. We usually can’t see the details unless we squint.
 
* http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/10314/pg10314-images.html   

In 1867 an explosion of nitro-glycerin killed some workers in Bergen, N.J. After testing the compound to determine a cause of the explosion, Professor Doremus concluded that under certain conditions the substance was rather harmless, but that under others, it was quite explosive. While it was in an open container, he subjected the liquid to a piece of red-hot copper: No explosion. He subjected it to extreme heat: No explosion. The nitro-glycerin fully exposed to air did not explode.
 
Then he tested it in a sealed container: Boom! He concluded, “My opinion is that nitro-glycerin should be used in the most careful hands; [I] do not think I would put it in the hands of a common laborer for blasting purposes.”*
 
I wonder what Professor Doremus would say if he were asked to examine today’s explosives called social media and email. Operating sometimes under the concealment provided by the anonymity of pseudonyms, some write explosive comments designed to blast the reputations of others or otherwise malign them. Would Doremus say, “My opinion is that social media and email should be put in the most careful hands”?
 
Full exposure to the air prevents nitro-glycerin from exploding. Would the same work for malicious verbal attacks?
 
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/8951/8951-h/8951-h.htm#24

What if you were told that to continue along any journey, you first had to visit Hades to seek the wisdom and guidance of Tiresias, the mythical blind prophet, the Seer. Do you think your navigation system would help? Think you would ask Siri?
 
Probably not. Visits to the Land of the Dead aren’t on most people’s itinerary as part of some side trip, an excursion to see something talked about like the three-headed dog. Boat rides on Charon’s ferry are also not popular. No, we like to visit lands that, if not currently mapped, at least are mappable. Maps enable us to return; they are strings laid in a labyrinth. One goes in and follows the string back out.
 
We’re used to navigational aids: Maps, signposts, friendly-guy-on-the-sidewalk-eager-to-point-out-a-location (“Just go down this street two blocks and turn left”), and, of course, Siri and the GPS system that mysteriously combine to point you toward your goal. But going to Hades?
 
After a year in the palace of Circe, Odysseus and his men wanted to resume their voyage toward home, and Circe was ready to release them but only on the condition of a visit to the Underworld. Concerned about going where no mortal goes unless it’s on a one-way trip and befuddled by the mystery of the location, Odysseus naturally asks, “But who will be my pilot?”
 
Whereas it is true that we are all sailing on a one-way voyage, most of us make many side trips, all on two-way passage tickets, before we reach that ultimate destination. For all of those side trips, all of us might ask as Odysseus asks, “Who is my pilot?”
 
What people, ideas, or even emotions have been pilots in your life? For which of the completed trips would you choose, in retrospect, a different pilot had you only known the nature of your destination and the path on which the pilot guided you?
 
Have any side trips to places, events, or ideas planned at this time? Who will be your pilot?

The U.S. Patent Office had a problem shortly after the Civil War. Injuries like war wounds had catapulted the need for doctors and effective treatments. Medicine was becoming more scientific; but even though the country had a medical college as early as the eighteenth century, it had no thorough way of determining the efficacy of medical practices save by anecdote. When the Civil War brought to the public mind not only injury by weapons but also by disease as the causes of military losses, numerous people, including charlatans, plied various techniques and compounds to the injured and sick. Sometimes what they did worked, but they did not know exactly why. With disease, doctors faced a problem that extended beyond the battlefield in both time and space. Organic chemistry was in its infancy, and devices for analysis were crude at best. So, the Patent Office had a problem.
 
What if something worked as a cure, but no one knew exactly why it worked? Should the Office issue a patent? In 1867 S. H. Hodges, writing for the Board of Examiners, addressed the problem with respect to medicine to prevent and cure Swine Cholera. He wrote, “The applicant’s specific is composed of a number of medical articles [think chemical constituents], the nature of which is not important upon the present occasion, and it is unnecessary to enumerate them.”* In short, the question at hand was whether or not the inventor had to address the nature of each constituent’s contribution to a medicine’s effectiveness.
 
Hodges argued against needing justifications of the ingredients. Don’t fault him as you see from the perspective of “all things labeled.” All that mattered to Hodges was that the stuff worked. As he also said, “…there are remedies employed with success the effect of which the most intelligent are unable to account for.” Think whole, not part. If it worked, who cared how it worked?
 
Today, we have the ability to analyze the individual components of almost anything. That makes duplication and repetition easy. As a result, we’re used to seeing labels on supplements that claim “proprietary” proportions, indicating that some “scientific researcher in some lab somewhere figured out the most effective combinations of atoms and molecules to prevent, cure, or enhance whatever. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration demands identification and testing of each medicine’s chemical composition before it stamps “Approved.”
 
But do individual components matter in other aspects of life? Take teams (of any kind) for example. After a losing season, the general manager searches for that one player who can make a difference in the ensuing season. Just that key guy. And sometimes the strategy works. But then, sometimes it doesn’t. We could look for specific examples, such as the Cleveland Cavaliers of the National Basketball Association, tracing both their failure, success, and failure largely based on their reacquisition of LeBron James, a truly great individual player. There are numerous other examples, of course, and if you follow some sports team, you probably have anecdotes about placing too much emphasis on a single constituent player. And just as Hodges knew that if a medicine worked, he could take its working as a sign that it was patentable, so we know that if a team wins, we can take the championship as an outcome of all the constituent players working somehow—probably inexplicably—in unison.
 
Sometimes we overanalyze when we should just accept that something works just because it works. No, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to make improvements, but changes to things that work don’t always engender things that work better. We will, of course, continue to overanalyze, but that’s our general nature.
 
So, if  you are in a relationship that’s working, don’t make an unnecessary acquisition for a special player. Change one component and you change the whole, sometimes for worse, sometimes with no effect, and sometimes, yes, for the better. But if you've already won a championship with constituents that work well together, Hodges, were he alive today, would probably grant your team a patent.  
 
*Scientific American, Vol. 17, No. 26, December 28, 1867 online at
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/8951/8951-h/8951-h.htm#24

Have you seen many arguments on an elevator? Of course, the short trip doesn’t make much time for any kind of extended relationship. Maybe you have noticed what I have noticed. People do move in the cramped space to allow others room. Sometimes, people exchange pleasantries. Sometimes, people help others move suitcases or baggage gurneys. Given the conditions, it all seems rather civilized. People share the journey at the worst in stoic resolve and at the best in friendly chatter, even though their destinations might be different.
 
     “There has just died upon her little farm at Clarens, Switzerland, ‘La demoiselle Juliette Dodu of Pithiviers,’ forty-four years ago a telegraphist who outwitted the German invaders, was taken prisoner, threatened with death, treated chivalrously by the ‘Red Prince’ Friedrich Karl, released on the proclamation of peace, decorated with the Cross of the Legion of Honour, and retired to the little farm, where she ended her days. The spirit of this romance of the Franco-German War of 1870-71 lives in [a] picture by E.J. Delahaye. Chivalry was not then dead…”
 
Delahaye’s picture shows the Red Prince reaching to shake the hand of Juliette, a woman who had done her best to hinder the German advance on Paris. He greeted her by saying it was an honor “to meet so brave a woman.”*
 
If you read Malory’s Morte D’Arthur, you come across a number of passages that describe chivalrous actions, kindnesses, by knights of opposing allegiances. In “real life” meetings between enemies like that between the Red Prince and Juliette Dodu are probably not very common. The adversarial relationship of the Prince and Dodu was born of war, and their meeting was in the context of her capture.
 
Strangely, war does provide opportunities for chivalry, such as the “Christmas Peace” of 1914, when World War I adversaries stopped to share peace for a day. At the surrender of the Confederate Army at Appomattox Court House at the end of America’s Civil War, General Grant silenced a band that was playing in celebration by saying that the rebel soldiers were once again the Northerners’ countrymen, and he granted the Confederate soldiers the right to keep their personal possessions, including their horses so that they could use them for spring plowing.
 
But what has happened in the intervening time between Grant, the Red Prince, and our current rude generation? Are there still acts of chivalry once displayed by reconciled enemies, or even proffers of kindness to those with different allegiances?
 
Fortunately, personal acts of chivalry continue. We do get stories of kindness and mercy rather frequently, especially in times of trouble. Except. Except on the pages of social media, where cruelty seems to prevail between ideological adversaries. In war and catastrophe people are packed into an elevator even though they might desire different destinations. Proximity breeds familiarity. Familiarity has the potential to breed compassion, though it doesn’t always do so.
 
Maybe all acts of chivalry are born of close proximity: When we interact in person, even an adversary takes on a form similar to our own. On social media, we are disembodied, anonymous, stereotyped, and removed from personal contact. Unfortunately, those who live on social media rarely come into personal contact with their adversaries. Off in some cyber-distance, adversaries are “not like us.”
 
Can there be a shift of sensibilities from crude rudeness to merciful chivalry on social media? Yes. But it will require those who currently lack a sense of chivalry to imagine being in close proximity of their adversaries, somehow seeing them on a similar journey though to a differing destination. Standing in a packed elevator, we have little choice but to be civil during the ride.
 
* You can see the picture at  https://ia800202.us.archive.org/21/items/theillustratedwa18334gut/18334-h/18334-h.htm

The sun doesn’t really “stand still,” as the word solstice implies. But during the summer and winter solstices (the first days respectively of summer and winter), the position of the noon sun seems stationary to the casual observer.
 
The sun’s position in the sky is dependent upon latitude, so it varies for each degree north or south of the Equator. The sun’s apparent position changes because of Earth’s axial tilt (23.5 degrees to the plane of its orbit and toward Polaris) and its revolution about the sun; the sun’s rays strike the round surface at different angles, again dependent upon latitude. Only those who reside between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn can on certain days see the noon
sun directly overhead. Those who live beyond the tropics never see an overhead noon sun. Noon, if you recall from some elementary school lesson, just marks the midway point in the sun’s journey across the sky, and that midway point can lie, once again dependent upon latitude, from directly overhead to the horizon.
 
On the first day of summer for the Northern Hemisphere (first of winter for the Southern Hemisphere) someone on the Equator would see the noon sun at 23.5 degrees from overhead. People along the Tropic of Cancer would see it overhead, and those at the Tropic of Capricorn in the Southern Hemisphere would view the noon sun at 47 degrees from overhead (23.5 + 23.5). The view is reversed on the first day of the Northern Hemisphere’s winter. And those at the Equator get an overhead noon sun only on the first days of spring and fall.
 
Ignore the math if you can’t visualize this, and don’t stare at the sun. But consider the main point: The sun’s apparent standing still is merely that. Think if you want of riding a swing. At the highest point, the limit of the arc you make, you seem to pause as you reverse direction. For a brief time, both going forward and backward, you appear to be in the same position. Hope the analogy works.
 
In your movement you, like the sun, temporarily appear to “stand still,” it’s a “swingstice, a youstice.” But it’s just a brief appearance. Similarly, the sun seems to be in the same position in the sky for about two weeks, even though its position is, like the swing and its rider, changing.
 
Note the history of social and political movements. Pendulum swings, positional swings, idea swings occur. Positions seem to “stand still,” but subtle movements in the opposite direction occur. What seems to be a steady position is moving. The brightly shining ideas of one decade or generation yield to the “tilt” that underlies all positions. We go round and round, swinging between self-control and other-control, between individualism and groupthink. Just when position appears to be steady at some apex, the trend is already in the opposite direction. The natural tilt and revolution can’t be undone by a temporary position.
 
And the process seems to apply in daily living as during the peak of fashion or fad a new fashion or fad takes gradual precedence. Where, for example, are your leisure suit and super-wide bellbottoms? But I hope you haven’t thrown them out. They were popular twice in the last century, and they will probably swing back into fashion in some form.
 
Whether it’s idea and fashion or perception about natural phenomena the same truth about appearance seems to apply. If you ask someone who lives north of the Tropic of Cancer where he or she will see the sun at noon, the person will almost invariably say, “Overhead,” even though such a solar position cannot be seen from latitudes north of 23.5 degrees latitude. If you ask someone convinced of idea or fashion where either stands in value, you will hear something similar, maybe, “It’s at top; it’s significant; it’s the only way to think or dress.” So, two misconceptions seem to rule. First, many people have misconceptions about positions, ideas they obtained without thorough examination, just as some have never taken a protractor or theodolite to measure the sun’s angle. Second, those same people have misconceptions about the durability of their positions.
 
Look back on your own positions. How have they changed? Can you recognize the moment when you began to alter your position? Can you see any underlying reasons that caused the positional change, some undeniable tilt and movement beyond your personal control? What do you now possibly misconstrue as a true and unshakeable position that might only be apparent? What objective measurements can you make to see the reality of your positions?
 
Should we wonder that there’s always a tension among positions? Most, if not all, of us hold onto unmeasured, un-quantified ideas and see apparent positions as standing still. At times each of us marks an ideastice; and each places it in an overhead position regardless of its true location and thinks it will last while by its very nature it is already in a state of change.   

Forethought is a key to a successful and peaceful future. But no amount of fore-thinking can account perfectly for what has yet to be or account for the effects of external and internal forces born in the recesses of any system that evolves into the rule of the many by the few.
 
Take Bolshevism as an example. Assume well-meaning originators wanted to overthrow a former corrupt system. Now, long after they have come and gone, look at the product: Over the twentieth century tens of millions died under the system the Bolsheviks instituted, and billions throughout the world governed by Communists suffered by losing to the state their prospect for personal economic growth. The originators of socialistic and communistic governments might have had the best of intentions—might even have thought that they were doing something highly ethical—but the product of their efforts couldn’t have been seen in full until they were applied. (Look, for example, at the plight of Venezuelans in the second decade of the twenty-first century after the institution of socialism by Chavez***)
 
This isn’t an original thought. In a 1919 edition of Punch, the satirical British weekly, the editors included this statement: “The —— Society has a large selection of literature tracing the origin and development of Bolshevism, and exposing its miseries and horrors, of which samples will be forwarded on application.--Times. We are not applying; it is bad enough to read about them.”*
 
Is there any lasting Utopia? Think the Gulag under Stalin.
 
In a newsletter designed for instructing children in current events called The Great Round World and What Is Going On in It, the editors report on the practice of sending people to Siberia.
 
               “On page 134 of Vol. I. we spoke about the unfortunate Russians who are exiled to Siberia, and of the thousands of miles they are forced to march across the continent before they reach their place of punishment.  It has just been reported that the Czar has issued a decree that persons who are exiled to Siberia shall, from this time forth, be carried by train to the convict settlements.  In the days when the poor unfortunates had to make the journey on foot it took ninety days of steady marching to reach the journey's end, and women and children as well as men took their places in the long, sad procession that wound its way across the dreary steppes of Russia.  This decree must have caused much rejoicing among the Russian people, and if the Czar continues to rule his people so mercifully and kindly, we may all live to see the day when there will be no more Nihilism or hatred between the ruler and the ruled in Russia, and when it will no longer be necessary to send anybody to Siberia.”**
 
The editors wrote that in May, 1897. Let’s see if I understand. People would still be exiled to Siberia, but they wouldn’t have to walk there. Yes, I can see that as something worth rejoicing. Not.
 
Obviously, a segment of Russian society also didn’t feel like rejoicing over train rides to Siberian exile. The overthrow of the Tzar seems to confirm their lack of rejoicing. But what did they get in exchange for the overthrow?
 
“Perfect social systems” eventually become imperfect by application. That’s life on a scale of many people, and there’s little the average person can do to mitigate the coming effects of proposed and enacted rules that encompass a country. Those who lived past the time of the Tzar’s overthrow and who opposed the leadership of Stalin were sent to Siberia. “Welcome to the Gulag, a place of forced labor, few rewards, and severe climate.” I don’t think they rejoiced because they made the trip by train.
 
By application Bolshevism forwarded the same practice of exile.  
 
What do you value more than your freedom and individuality? Are you willing, for example, to exchange a system like capitalism that ensures no successes but that allows you to achieve them for a system that guarantees some tenuous security but negates personal growth and that eventually, upon being forwarded by application, decreases the quality of life for individuals who are not in control?
 
Train ride? No thanks. I think I’ll walk somewhere I want to go.
 
* Punch, Vol. 156, April 9, 1919.
** https://ia800301.us.archive.org/18/items/thegreatroundwor15518gut/15518-8.txt 
*** Rich Venezuelans Eat Sushi, Guzzle Cocktails Amid Chaos
https://www.yahoo.com/news/rich-venezuelans-eat-sushi-guzzle-cocktails-amid-chaos-142524940.html