The Creative Contrarian

Wise Fool Strategy # 14Revisit a Discarded Idea

“Everything old is new again.”

— Peter Allen, Australian Singer-songwriter

Wise Fools are big believers in eliminating obsolete ideas and beliefs. But interestingly enough, they also believe that sometimes there is a place for applying once-abandoned ideas to current situations. In other words, the right idea can become the wrong idea, but occasionally — and under certain circumstances — it can become the right idea once again. I've named this the “Thuban Phenomenon” after Thuban, the former and future “North Star.” Here's the background.

Our current North Star is Polaris — the star around which all the other stars appear to rotate. But Polaris's role as the night sky's center isn't permanent. This is because as the earth rotates on its axis, it also wobbles like a spinning top. Over a 26,000-year cycle, the earth's axis draws a ring through the northern sky, and any star along that ring gets a turn as the “North Star.”

One of Polaris's predecessors as a “North Star” was Thuban, a star in the constellation Draco. From roughly 4000 BC until 1800 BC, Thuban was the “guiding light” the ancients used to find true north. And what a “stellar” run Thuban had! The Egyptians used Thuban to align the great Pyramids of Giza; neolithic British tribes used it to lay out Stonehenge; and early Babylonian astronomers used records from a Thuban-centered ...