So in Isaac Asimov’s series, Foundation, which has recently been made into a series on Apple TV, the protagonist, a mathematician, invents the mathematics of psychohistory. Asimov reasoned that just like thermodynamics could not predict the movement of individual molecules in a gas, it can predict the overall behavior of the gas, so too could advanced mathematics predict the overall behavior of society. In the series it predicts the fall of the galactic empire.
The mathematics of such would be extremely complicated. Seldon, the mathematician, had a quantum computer to do the calculations. I would think it would have to be a huge series of differential equations of 1,000‘s of variables just to be even close.
But would it be possible?
It is not as straightforward as that, but in principle, it has the beginnings of a useful idea in it.
Think of it a little bit more like economics. We can prove that inflation and interest are linked, so we can make ourselves sound like prophets if we say that the inflation rate will go down if interest rates are raised. However, this is not some sort of economic magic at work: higher interest makes it harder to make new investments, so less money is going into the economy. With less money going into the economy, you thereby blunt the inflation rate. However, this also leads to higher unemployment.
Now, let us divorce ourselves from the idea that such mechanistic principles can only be applied to the economy. If you take away people's leisure time by doing less to protect workers from having to work long hours to survive, you thereby force them to invest more of their social energy in their workplaces. Thereby, you undermine the sense of separation between work and home life by taking away most of people's home life. Inevitably, the increased social organization in places of work leads to a higher rate of unionization. A higher rate of unionization can runaway beyond the initial causes in the growth because of the slowness with which workplace norms tend to change, so it can take a little bit over a generation, probably 35 years or so, before people have had enough leisure time for a long enough time to reestablish a sense of division between work life and home life, thereby leading to a loss of power by labor unions due NOT to the evil machinations of the rich but due to their own success.
Well, labor unions are more obviously economic, so let's say that we look at sexual norms in the same way. When sexual repression is at its worst, everyone suffers as a consequence, and this leads to a sort of sexual revolution. Eventually, though, this increased sexual liberty is abused. In a panic, a government might start imposing laws that limit people's sexual freedom, very much like a government might raise interest rates to deal with inflation. While raising interest rates might make it harder for people to make actual good investments, it can also stop unjustified speculation of the kind that leads to dangerous speculation bubbles, and so it is with anti-sex legislation. Just as it eventually causes stagflation to keep interest rates too high for too long, a long period of sexual repression can lead to a reemergence of sexual bad behavior in spite of continued cramping of people's liberty, such as the ironically high rate of rape in countries that have extremely repressive laws regarding the expression of sexuality.
Now, we could follow the Finnish model for sexual issues. The Finnish do not have a highly sexualized culture, and whenever they are confronted with sexual deviancy, they seem to be more puzzled than angry (less moral judgment and more "Oh, another mental illness we might cure after we've dealt with the more serious ones"). I suspect that this might be related to the fact that Finland's gender equality is among the highest, which is to say the narrowest, in the entire world. Because the sexes are generally more equal, there is less of a power dynamic in people's sexuality. Because there is less of a power dynamic in people's sexuality, there is less objectification of women, and because there is less objectification of women, their culture is generally less prurient by nature. Because their culture is generally less prurient by nature, relatively few sex-related crimes happen at all. Because relatively few sex-related crimes happen at all, they can afford to have more liberal sexual morals.
However, the pursuit of gender equality can be very difficult, and you inevitably get pushback. When you try to address gender inequality, you cannot really absolutely control the actual behavior of the feminists themselves, and you cannot stop them when they approach their goals in ways that result in pushback. There is only so far that you can control how they behave in actual practice. You cannot just order a society to stop being gender-unequal and have them obey you only because it is the right thing to do. Even though feminism is absolutely necessary for us to find the maximum of both sexual freedom and security against sexual abuse, the people that are involved are human beings, and you can't really puppeteer their every move.
There is only but so far that you can rush a feminist movement, but one thing that helps is women's literacy. Women's literacy really does the most to change the overall status of women in a society.
Well, behind every movement toward women's literacy are female authors that actually write compelling literature for women. The Jane Austins of history are some of the most important people that will ever live when it comes to women's equality. Stacey Abrams may have done more than any woman in the past century, not by running for political office but by writing romances that women like her actually wanted to read, which led to those women being more interested generally in literacy.
In order to produce women like Jane Austin and Stacey Abrams, you have to actively promote an interest in writing among women, and you have to create a climate that actually results in them producing damn good written material. If you are a woman, you could start this in your living room. The people that will get young women to take an interest in literacy today are the most important people in the world when it comes to sexual liberty.
It is also true that feminism is deeply connected with people's general attachment to personal liberty. There was a REASON why Mary Wollstonecraft, the first British feminist, was the wife of William Godwin, the first British anarchist.
To bring this back to the subject of psychohistory, the answer is yes, it is possible to predict and control the evolution of society for the same reasons why it is possible to predict and control the evolution of the economy, but as with trying to control the economy, virtually anything you do could either backfire or lead to results you don't expect. Economists have been struggling to figure out a theory for controlling human behavior for years. They still have not figured out how to do it reliably. They still have not figured out a magic formula that gives them perfectly calibrated control over the economy. It has been better than nothing, but it's still not been brought to a science. Social science likewise might eventually lead to us having the ability to control human behavior at a fine detailed level, but that science is years behind economics.
However, I can say this. When a feminist marries an anarchist and raises a science fiction author, it changes the world more than a thousand politicians ever will. For psychohistory to be effective, then it should be capable of mathematically analyzing how and why this sort of thing has such a profound impact on society when very few individual actions ever do.
