Cycles Will Be Cycles

Keeping in mind the previous post's main theme: fictional attempt to change history, in particular to prevent a corporate oligarchy from permanently establishing itself in the world, for generations to come. If a reliable time travel device were available today, to what point in American or UK/European history would seem to be the most useful stop-off point in the past? Which individual(s) would be the key to prevention of a headlong gallop into global corporate governance?

I don't know enough US political history to be able to answer that in respect of the USA. A simple, obvious but not complete, answer would be to travel back to 2009/2010 when the Citizens United case was being decided in the Supreme Court. Could time travellers influence a change that would reverse SCOTUS eventual decision?

In the UK I'd head for 1975 to try to stop Margaret Thatcher's rise in Conservative politics. With regard to Europe - I have no clue. Europe has always been a complex bag of tricks.

Alright...(fantasising): say SCOTUS decision on Citizens United had been reversed, due to time-travel related intervention. That would have moved us onto a new timeline. But, cycles must cycle on, nature decrees so, astrology records it. Life, whether individual, communal or global, moves in cycles - or spirals. Something else would take the place of the Citizens United decision, a few steps further ahead. Events themselves might be vulnerable to change by time travellers, but nature is highly unlikely to be vulnerable in the same way.

Imagine a stream or river flowing towards the sea. Something prevents it from following its established course; it doesn't suddenly begin flowing backwards, or simply stop in its tracks and become a stagnant lake, it carves out a different route for itself, to reach the same sea.

Fascinating, entertaining and distracting as time travel themes are in novels and films, tempting as it is to imagine there'd be a way to change things, in reality I doubt there would be. Most novelists and screenwriters hint at this. Detail might be changed, course would remain the same.

We, as a species and as a civilisation, warts an' all are probably at exactly the stage we're supposed to be right now, in our place on the developing spiral. The best we can hope for is a smooth and relatively painless transition from one stage of the spiral to the next, when it becomes time for that to happen. A reasonable aim for which to struggle now, I guess, would be to develop circumstances most likely to lead to smoother transition into natural changes.