The Storm Before the Calm: America's Discord, the Coming Crisis of the 2020s, and the Triumph Beyond

by George Friedman

There is a rootlessness in America that is part of its strength. People move about freely without the constraint of family and tradition.

The rootlessness of America is simultaneously liberating and frightening, containing the fear of an unknown evil lurking in the darkness.

Morality starts as a simple concept and becomes complicated. The relationship between a man and a woman starts as a simple concept. It becomes enormously complex.

High Noon was filmed in 1952, seven years after World War II ended. World War II called for men to be like Kane, more afraid of cowardice than of death.

There is an ancient dynamic in war, and many stereotypes associated with it. In the minds of men, women will forgive anything but weakness.

War is the ultimate test of strength, and soldiers offer it to women as proof of strength. Women comfort men when they come home from war temporarily weakened and make them strong again.

Women also won World War II in a radically new way. It was an industrial war. U.S. success had to do with production.

The core of all cultures is the relationship between men and women. For most of human history, the relationship was defined and constrained by biological and demographic reality.

Marriage was about social and personal necessity. Women were essential, and yet the key role they played in human reproduction put them at severe risk. The evolution of modern medicine and sanitation changed all this.

In 1963, Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique, which many regard as the beginning of contemporary feminism. By the end of the century, the role of women had transformed in the United States.

We have gone from an inescapable and desperate struggle to reproduce…to marriage as the result of romantic affinity and free choice…to the virtual collapse of the courtship ritual.

There are many startling things about American life, but none more startling than the unprecedented speed with which the role of women changed and the speed at which sexual relationships shifted.

However courageous Kane’s wife is in High Noon, after it is all over, she will go home with Kane and have his children.

Grace Kelly as Amy in High Noon and Rosie the Riveter unintentionally revealed that the role of women as traditionally performed and viewed as a moral necessity suddenly became one of many options available as part of the pursuit of happiness.

The world had been filled with other inventors, such as Nikola Tesla, who had done a great deal of work in the area of electricity but had never created a truly successful business. What Edison did was to combine the art of invention with an understanding of business.

The subtlety was in understanding what society needed and what the customer would buy. It was not enough to be a scientist or an engineer. It was also necessary to be a sociologist.

Thomas Edison became the template for Henry Ford, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and all of the rest who understood that the inventor had to have a user and that business was the bridge between the two.

There is a saying attributed to him that helps explain his thinking: “Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.” Another is, “Genius is one part inspiration and ninety-nine parts perspiration.” What he said was simple. Yet the insight is far from obvious.

Edison’s most important contribution was a structure for inventing things. He created the first industrial research laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey, by designing a method for invention that used teams.

He turned inventiveness into a multi-team effort, managed by him and driven by market opportunities, and he built the marketing effort around his personality.

And these men shared the profound idea that a movie camera, an automobile, and a computer would do both.

Business existed as the counterbalance to the state. The founders mistrusted the state, but it was the repository of military power. The corporate world, itself fragmented, was the repository of wealth. Each blocked the other’s ability to rule absolutely, and both cooperated in pursuing mutual interests.

In the creation of the Great Seal, an unspoken deal was struck, which has been there since the founding: the deal between political and economic power.

From the beginning, the United States was the confrontation and cooperation of money and politics, and of the application of both to war.

America is a warrior culture. That would seem to be contrary to the discussion of Thomas Edison, not because he was a pacifist, but because he was a technologist and a businessman.

As I have said, the United States was born in battle, eight brutal years of unrelenting warfare in which twenty-five thousand American soldiers died.

Thirty years after the revolution, the United States fought the War of 1812. About thirty-four years later, there was the war with Mexico, and then about thirteen years after that the Civil War broke out.

As we will see, there are geopolitical reasons for the increasing frequency of war. But the cultural question is more puzzling.

But there is a deeper synergy. I’ve been talking about progress, technology, and business. We need to take this process apart a bit to understand how it all fits together and understand the cultural alignment and tension that arise.

The battle of High Noon was fought in New Mexico, which was also the home of the greatest scientific battle, the development of the atomic bomb.

Ever since the Manhattan Project built the bomb in New Mexico, the military has been obsessed with basic science and with the scientist.

The atomic bomb posed a moral dilemma. As with Grace Kelly’s character in High Noon, the Americans chose victory and survival over the moral absolute.

More money can be saved by drawing a line between teaching faculty and research faculty.

The loss of fantastically expensive facilities and the creation of a division of labor among faculty appear to be extremely radical changes.

The university struggle will be an ideological struggle that will define the politics of the sixth socioeconomic cycle.

The university’s ideology ultimately rests on its pride of place, the status it occupies, and need rarely justify itself. What are called elite universities frequently can’t define the way in which the knowledge they provide is in any way superior to “lesser” schools.

Focusing on the university as the battleground of this cycle’s crisis may seem odd. Yet the university is increasingly controversial simply in its internal values and emphasis on ethnic, but not necessarily intellectual, diversity.

Paralleling the emergence of the fourth institutional cycle in the 2030s will be the emergence of the sixth socioeconomic cycle.

Each socioeconomic cycle is, when it reaches maturity, a golden age, with a diamond at its center.

Consider the fifth cycle and the 1990s,

Consider the 1950s in the fourth cycle,

We can see back to the 1890s of the third cycle,

the 1840s of the second cycle,

After the transition into the new cycle, a golden age emerged, with a small but startling diamond that glittered at its heart.

A golden age doesn’t mean a time of universal harmony or a time of unlimited joy or an absence of tragedy. We are humans, and tragedy, suffering, and rage are inescapable. A golden age is an age that in spite of all the pains that are normal and possible nevertheless creates something extraordinary. We think of Athens or the Renaissance as a golden age. Each was suffused with the human condition, from slavery to poverty to war, intrigue, and murder. But these things are common to all times. What we remember about the golden ages in history is not what was common to all times but what was unique to them.

The diamond moment that defines the golden age seems to come two or three decades after the new cycle begins.

The financial problem that will frame the sixth cycle is a surplus of money in the economic system and its distribution.

The surplus arose from the success of the fifth cycle and the maturation of the microchip economy. As I’ve mentioned several times, the big issue is lots of available money and not enough opportunities to invest in things that create wealth. The money is unevenly distributed, clustered in the upper half of society and increasing its concentration the higher you go. Given low interest rates on money, it makes little sense to hold that money in banks or in bonds that pay low interest. Rather than holding money, investors decide to buy things, such as real estate. Therefore, home prices, commercial real estate, and rental properties are surging in price.

The culture wars that define politics in the fifth cycle will continue but will no longer be linked to economic demands and will instead diffuse over various factions.

There is no reason to believe this trend line will shift, and every reason it will continue. This in spite of the manic-depressive nature of the American soul.