Upswing of a “We”

This is a 1603 copy of a famous handbook about hunting and burning witches. The author, Peter of Binsfield, Archbishop of Trier, would later be considered a “moderate” due to his belief that boys had to be at least 14 to be guilty of witchcraft and girls had to be at least 12. He also refused to believe that people could change shape into animals and he doubted the validity of the “diabolical mark.”

As society neared the zenith of the “We” of 1623, zealots were happy to burn chidren as young as two. Because they were witches, of course. “And we’re all working together for the common good, so we need to purge this evil from among us.”

Western society gets
very self-righteous as we
approach the zenith
of a “We.”

GOOD NEWS: Although we have a zenith every 40 years, they alternate between “We” and “Me.”  This means a witch hunt “We” zenith occurs only once every 80 years. 

BAD NEWS: The next “We” zenith will be 2023 and things usually start getting pretty weird during the 10 years prior to the zenith… 

CONSIDER: 1943 was the zenith of the previous “We” when America built internment camps – prisons – to hold Americans with slanted eyes. You didn’t know that? Yes, we locked up 110,000 people of Japanese heritage. And then Senator Joseph McCarthy began seeing communists everywhere he looked. 

READ PENDULUM and you’ll see that we’ve been doing this with the regularity of a metronome for the past 3,000 years. The book will be released October 2, 2012 and will be available in bookstores everywhere.