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

by George Friedman

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.

There will also be an ideological realignment of a retreating Reagan-era free-market group, a resurgent class who are focused on outcome, and the outcome they will want is a redistribution of income and even of already earned wealth. 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.

The core problem of the next sociopolitical cycle will be demographic. I pointed this out in The Next 100 Years when I wrote that one of the central problems was the decline in birth rates and the extension of life expectancy. In 2018, the birth rate in the United States was the lowest ever. It has declined in all native-born ethnic groups.

Second, a health-care system must be created that does not follow the current federal model of ultra-centralization and ultra-complexity but that can marshal the resources without paralyzing with fragmentation and micromanagement.

At all levels, there will be a loosening of bonds. The tight and stifling bonds of the federal government will be broken. The bond that tied the microchip to the vision of high tech will be broken. The alliance system that bound the United States to nations it had little interest in will be broken.

The burden of living a life without any external expectation is liberating, but liberation also can leave someone at a loss for what to do next.

Therefore, the expectation is that the sixth cycle will have a new communication technology at its center. It won’t. It won’t, because communication technology has reached its reductio ad absurdum. It has become so thin in its efficiency that it cannot sustain the emotional needs of a human life.

What will actually happen is the transcendence of the microchip culture and an aggressive reassertion of community, not perhaps with the old rituals, but with a culture that has at its center the avoidance of loneliness.

The hunger for AI represents the end point, because it proposes, at its most extreme, a replacement for human beings. Having the ability to think, it can replace human judgment in driving cars. But the claim is far-fetched. In order to create an artificial analogue of something real—such as intelligence—it is necessary to understand how we think.

No one really understands how our minds work. The sterile logic of computers and their programs don’t begin to grasp how we think.

An analogue of intelligence is impossible until we come to understand thinking. In the meantime, we can have more powerful programs doing important things, but we will not have emotions, and without emotions there is no intelligence.

Technological enthusiasts always extrapolate too far.

The children of what are called millennials will be the ones who revolt against the previous generations’ rootlessness. They will be the ones who find computers and the Internet old-fashioned and creating powerful family ties modern.

The foundation of any empire is not guns, something that Hitler and Stalin never grasped. It is money, and the envy that brings.

All lasting empires are empires of the mind and soul, empires that cause others to crave to emulate them.

As for the institutional cycle, the solution that will emerge in the federal government is one in which its internal functioning will shift, with the rigidity of regulation giving way to the use of increasing judgment among decision makers, from the public on up.

All nations contain some elements of wildness. None have institutionalized the chaos as has the United States.

The current storm is nothing more than what is normal for this time in America’s history and our lives.