Eardley Factor Articles: Home: A Strategy Markedly
Improving the Probability of TV Marketing Success
The Eardley
Factor and You
Marketing
Success
Do Your Ads
Match The Eardley Factor Standard of Excellence?
EardleyFactor
Confidently Predicts Bush Victory
Teresa Heinz-Kerry's
Democratic Disconnect
Why John
Kerry Lost
Fox
News 100 Ads Eardley Factor Evaluation
Sublime,
Subliminal, Secrets and Shambles
CNN 100 Ads Eardley
Factor Evaluation
MSNBC 100 Ads
Eardley Factor Evaluation
ABC 100 Ads Eardley
Factor Evaluation
Fox News
37 Ads Eardley Factor Evaluation
Hillary
Rodham Clinton, Our Next President
Eardley
Factor Gives Mrs. Snowball the "Cold Shoulder"
Predicting
Election 2008 Through the Lens of Eardley Factor Analysis
The
Race to the White House
Obama
on the Slide
`Walking
the Plank' or `Jumping Ship?'
McCain
Back from the Brink
Neuromarketing
the Next Big Idea?
Market
Research the Poor Relation
'Head
On' Proves the Point
Dollar
Woes Spell Doom
Smell:
The Sense We Neglect
Bits and
Pieces
Primary
Dyspepsia
Don't
be afraid of the 'Holy Grail'
Mother's
Milk Can Turn Women On!
For Love
or Money
When Life was Brutish and Short
Is
Bob Prechter Right?
Torture?
What Torture!
Dollar
Weakness Now Critical
Telling
it like it is
When Life was Brutish and Short
All will be revealed in due course. For now, bear with me whilst some aspects of my personal journey are made known.
When I was sixteen I went abroad for the first time. It was just a short hop over to France, hitch-hiking with two school friends, but even now, many years later, I have goose bumps remembering the war graves. A French truck driver pointed them out on the horizon. There they were. Thousands of white crosses in neat rows extending over what seemed miles.
''Les Anglais'', he had whispered almost reverently
I felt a lump in my throat. So many dead boys and all arranged so carefully in a geometric pattern. At least it was dignified, not those same bodies strewn in heaps as when they were recovered.
It had been my first encounter with the product of war and it's stayed with me all these years. It was St. Quentin. I do remember that.
Since then, I have experienced a strange fascination with World War 1 I have taught and loved the poetry of that terrible war. Ypres is one of my favorite places. Now reconstructed in every detail, that Belgian town has become part of British Military Mythology. Rather like Bastogne for the Americans--the town that would not surrender.
For those unfamiliar with Europe, every town and village has a war memorial with the names of the fallen inscribed on the stone cross. These memorials serve as a constant reminder that not so long ago young boys died for King and Country in a cause not against evil but rather to perpetuate economic 'realpolitik'. Let's leave it at that!
Terrible as the Second World War was, for those who fought in both, certainly
in Britain, they simply do not compare. The so called 'Great War' was
so much more terrible simply because it seemed so pointless and the slaughter
so much more
sustained and the leadership so incompetent that it beggars belief that
we could repeat the experience today. To me, at any rate that conflict
was the final time that life seemed short and brutish.
People in the West today have no concept of what life was like prior to World War II. Large families were common and necessary. Few families reared all their children. Pneumonia, diphtheria, appendicitis, and Scarlet Fever all took their toll. War, mining disasters flood and famine joined the fray along with still birth, birth made certain that a seemingly never ending stream of new humans were required to populate the planet.
My mother in law was one of thirteen children. In one week five were lost to I forget which disease. If that were to happen today it would be headline news. Then, only 75 years ago, it failed to make a story in the local paper!
The point I'm making is that the past fifty years has seen a transformation in life expectancy and life style the like of which would have seemed impossible to our recent ancestors. People then seemed old at fifty. Now it is normal to see Americans in their eighties jumping around on the dance floor, hair dyed, faces heavily made up or reconstructed by the surgeons knife, happily contemplating marriage number four or more. It's a whole new world.
Instead of six or seven children, the norm is now 2.4. Parents expect to rear all of their children, not just some of them. Indeed in Italy, once the home of the archetypal large family, they are now struggling to average even one child per couple.
Which leads me to my point. Is mankind designed for lifelong marriage?
Probably not is Eardleyfactor response. Marriage is in crisis. For all
the reasons mentioned, War, Pestilence and Famine would normally have
taken at least one of the partners long before the 'boredom factor' took
hold. Now, with female job opportunities, smaller families and much longer
life expectancy humans have t
o solve the boredom factor by Divorce and Remarriage or living in what
used to be called 'sin'.
Clinging to the old morality of one partner for life was causing great stress, guilt and unhappiness. When I started to teach in the 1960s only one pupil had divorced parents. By the time I retired in the early 90s more than half were in that situation.
Once child bearing and rearing is complete, in many cases the couple wake up one day only to find they are married to a stranger. The cement that bound them together has crumbled and they seek a new structure. In evolutionary terms we were not supposed to live so long so quickly. The evolutionary change has happened so rapidly that our minds cannot cope with sudden longevity. Hence the massive breakdown in the old structure of lifelong marriage.
In just two generations we have moved from a life expectancy of 'forty something' to one of 'seventy something'. That's an increase of around seventy per cent. Sad though the poignancy of St. Quentin's war graves were, and the devastation of my poor mother -in -laws loss of five brothers and sisters in one week, that was how Nature had established some kind of equilibrium, until the recent improvements in health management and then the Balance of Terror and of 'Mutual Destruction' of Nuclear War became established that a whole new scenario has evolved in super record time.
Eardleyfactor expects even more rapid change to occur in societal terms before a new equilibrium takes shape. In future articles we can make intelligent speculation as to the general direction of those changes. Some of them may be too horrendous to contemplate.
Robert Francis Eardley, Cert. Ed., B.A.
3366 Commodore Drive
Lexington, Kentucky 40502-3602
(859) 229-7714
For those interested e-mail
inquiry@eardleyfactor.com
or
robertfrancis@eardley.org