Most people assume that the future will look like the present, just more of it. That’s why they get blindsided. Ideas and events that seemed “unthinkable” yesterday often become the norm tomorrow. The end of slavery, universal suffrage, legal equality for women, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the legalization of gay marriage, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the mass adoption of smartphones, and even the outbreak of world wars, none of these were considered likely or even possible by the majority until they were already happening.

Why does this happen? Because what drives large-scale change isn’t today’s opinions or moral sentiments. It’s shifting incentives.

When people change their minds at scale, it’s not because everyone suddenly found a better argument. It’s because the costs and rewards of holding their previous views changed. Incentives shifted. And when incentives shift, behavior follows. Belief is downstream of necessity.

We have been going in a particular direction for over a century now, a direction increasingly out of alignment with Natural Law. Liberalization, moral relativism, and institutional centralization have undermined the evolutionary constraints that sustain functional cooperation. As the distance from a Natural Law equilibrium grows, so do the costs. The pressure to restore reciprocity, sovereignty, and truth builds beneath the surface.

And this buildup doesn’t continue indefinitely. It snaps. When it does, the pendulum swings hard in the other direction. Just as many societal liberalizations once seemed impossible until they occurred, many of the restorations and clawbacks now deemed unthinkable will appear inevitable in hindsight.

This is not a matter of nostalgia or ideology, it’s a matter of survival. Restoration of traditional values aligned with Natural Law will happen, not because it is wanted by all, but because it will become necessary for continued cooperation and survival.

That’s why instead of guessing what the future holds based on what feels right today, we can calculate what is likely based on Natural Law.

Natural Law isn’t a philosophy, it’s a description of the rules that govern cooperation and conflict. It defines the pressures, constraints, and evolutionary incentives that force people to adapt. And it shows how those pressures produce large-scale changes in thought, behavior, and institutions.

That’s the common-language version. But to really understand why this works, and why most predictions fail, we need to move from intuition to computation. We need a scientific grammar of change.

Understanding Natural Law and Its Predictive Power:

Natural Law is a framework developed and refined by Curt Doolittle and a collaborative body of thinkers at the Natural Law Institute. It is not a philosophy or ideology, but a scientific system that explains how incentives shape human cooperation, belief, and institutional stability over time.

This explanation draws on the key principles of Natural Law to clarify why seemingly impossible cultural reversals become inevitable. For more, seek out and follow the Natural Law Institute and Curt Doolittle.

1. First Principle: All human behavior is reducible to acquisition under constraint. Constraints are physical, biological, and institutional.

2. Causal Chain: Beliefs are not causes; they are consequences. What people consider “possible” or “acceptable” is a strategy for surviving current incentive structures. When those structures change, beliefs change.

3. Decidability: Natural Law operationalizes this by providing a decidable, commensurable, and testifiable logic of human cooperation. It identifies invariant incentives and maps them across scales: individual, institutional, and civilizational.

4. Prediction: Prediction is not sentiment or analogy, it is adversarial computation over time. What is inconceivable today becomes obvious tomorrow because people adapt to pressures, not principles.

5. Conclusion: Therefore, we reject moral intuitionism and ideological forecasting. We use Natural Law to trace changes in cooperation and conflict as evolutionary computation. It allows us to model not what people believe, but what they must do to survive within new equilibria of constraint.

Final Thoughts:

Most people attempt to forecast the future using moral intuitions, wishful thinking, ideological narratives, or historical analogies. These methods are little more than guesswork, prophecies dressed up as analysis. They offer comfort, not clarity.

Natural Law offers something different: a method of calculation. A system of first principles, constraints, and causal chains that can be used to project outcomes and identify the likely direction of change. Whether you are a father making long-term decisions for your family, an entrepreneur allocating resources, a CEO steering a corporation, or a statesman crafting policy, Natural Law gives you the tools to understand what pressures are building, what constraints are shifting, and what behaviors will be necessary in the near future.

You don’t need to master every element of Natural Law to benefit from it. That’s what the Natural Law Institute is for. If you have strategic questions, if you are responsible for people, capital, or institutions, reach out. We will help you identify your opportunities, clarify your risks, and calculate the range of outcomes you need to prepare for.

Contact us directly or engage with us online. We exist to make the future decidable.

Noah Revoy Senior Fellow at the Natural Law Institute Natural Law Applied Psychology