There ' s the highly apocryphal story that after Neil left the stage , he said to Bob Dylan You ' re really gonna have to go some to follow me , man , I was so great . And Bob replied , What do you want me to do , go on stage and fall asleep ? <| sep |> Yeah I forgot about them just like everybody does . <| sep |> This is a nice step back , but you need to step back further . The cycle of cultures and governments is the closest thing to a rule in political science . Perhaps the narrowness of your studies made this less clear , but there is no such thing as cultural progress . Of course this generally happens over centuries , not decades so I can see why you ' d have missed it . Specialization doesn ' t mean limiting myself to a narrow focus , just what the final year or so and deepest research was devoted to after years of broader and varied historical periods and regions . The idea of cultural progress is a touchy one considering how it was used by euro centric scholars and various people to justify actions against perceived lesser peoples England being one of the biggest offenders here . But you cannot deny the existence of larger trends of cultural change that have an immense amount of momentum behind them . Outright slavery of the human being is one good example . Could chattel slavery return to the side of morale in the view of the majority of cultures and historians ? Possible , but only through some catastrophic change that flies in the face of our current social momentum . Wage slavery domestically or the far worse international version that we support is only tolerated because it ' s not exactly visible to the biggest group of Americans , despite such a notion being antithetical to our national mythology . I ' d argue that there is such a thing as social progress defined within the current world view of a large percentage of the human race . Could this change ? Could the ideas of individualism , liberty , and human rights fall out of favor ? It ' s possible , but again it would take catastrophic events to create that situation . The 17 th and 18 th century represented a Pandora ' s Box in terms of the philosophy of the individual and those that held feudal power knew the unstoppable threat that loomed . Combine this contagion with every sweeping , world changing advance in information distribution and the isolated cyclical moralities become less likely and more an exception rather than a trend . Maybe the historians of the 28 th century will look back on this period of one revealing the dangers of the mob and free thought , but within the current context of study , even people within countries where the governments believe these regressive ideas Turkey balk at the notion that this is morale or the new direction of their culture . Relevancy fuck typing this on my phone Trump , the Tea party , the altright are reactionary groups born from the rapid social change progress over the last half a century and longer . This type of movement is very predictable , even if the amount of damage that will be done by them against social momentum isn ' t quite as predictable . Barring some rejection of the mythology of the US by its citizens over the next century , the Trump administration will be viewed as such .