The Fourth Turning: What the Cycles of History Tell Us About America's Next Rendezvous with Destiny

by William Strauss

We are presently in the Third Turning of the Millennial Saeculum, the seventh cycle of the modern era.

The elder Artist is replacing the elder Hero.

Using a political metaphor, Alcmaeon of Croton taught that health was preserved by the balance (isonomia) of the quatemities, whereas disease was caused by the rule of just one (monarchia). According to myth, each temperament was associated with one of the four deities commissioned by Zeus to make man more like the gods (Prometheus, Dionysus, Apollo, and Epimetheus).

In Jung's view, certain symbols, aspirations, and behavioral modes (archetypes) are biologically hard wired into mankind. In all eras and cultures, he said, these archetypes have become so deeply embedded in mankind's “collective unconscious” that no degree of progress, real or imagined, could weaken their grip. Identifying these archetypes by probing dreams and myths, Jung fashioned his theory after the ancient quaternities, best represented visually by the quadrisected Hindu mandala. His four archetypal functions draw energy from the dynamic antagonism between two sets of opposites: thinking versus feeling, sensing versus intuiting. When one function dominates the psyche, its opposite is necessarily suppressed as the psyche's “shadow.” Past midlife, people become conscious of the limits of their dominant archetype and draw energy (constructively or destructively) from its shadow. Jung called this quest for life-cycle self-correction “individuation.”

headman, clown, shaman, hunter.

In any era, mythical archetypes assist people's understanding of who they are and what they should live up to.

They speak to the insight (not valor) of youth and the blindness (not wisdom) of elders.

Compared to the Hero and Prophet Myths, their tales speak more to human relations than to the rise and fall of dynasties and religions. Yet they too embody shadow life cycles that mirror each other in reverse. Nomads are abandoned and alienated children who later, as adults, strive to slow down, simplify, and brace their social environment. Artists are sheltered and sensitive children who later, as adults, strive to speed up, complicate, and adorn their social environment. Nomads are raised to manage alone and are burdened with low expectations. Artists are raised to cooperate with others and are burdened with high expectations.

How else could young prophets emerge, if not in response to the spiritual complacency of hubristic elder heroes? This in turn requires that each generation exert a dominant formative influence on people who are two phases of life younger, that is, on the second younger generation.

This critical cross-cycle relationship is just what we see in most societies. It arises because a new child generation gathers its first impressions about the world just as a new midlife generation gains control of the institutions that surround a child.

In American history, for instance, a generation's dominance in national leadership posts typically peaks around the time its first cohorts reach age sixty-five—just as footsoldiers are on average about forty-two years (or two phases of life) younger. The G.I.s fought in (Missionary-declared) World War II, the Silent in the (Lost-declared) Korean War, Boomers in the (G.I.-declared) Vietnam War, and 13ers in (Silent-declared) Desert Storm.

According to Ferrari, a revolutionary generation launches a new idea, a reactionary generation battles against that idea, a harmonizing generation uses that idea to establish community and build political institutions, and a preparatory generation subtly undermines that harmony, after which the cycle repeats.

Mount Rushmore's granite is a monument to four great American leaders. Born over a span of 126 years, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln represent four different generations (Liberty, Republican, Progressive, and Transcendental). But the mountain depicts more than that: Looking from left to right, the visitor sees permanent testimony to the best-regarded president of each archetype chiseled not in chronological order, but in saecular order: Nomad, Hero, Artist, and Prophet. In the vision of Rushmore sculptor Gutzon Borglum, the power of the archetypal myths asserted itself once again.

From the Arthurian Generation through today's Millennial Generation children, there have been twenty-four generations in the Anglo-American lineage. The first six were purely English. The next four were colonial, yet still heavily influenced by English society and politics. The eleventh (Awaken-ers, born 1701-1723) became the first distinctively American generation—the first whose name, birth years, and persona diverge significantly from peers in the United Kingdom. The Awakeners were also the first generation to be made up mostly of native-born Americans and, late in life, the first to know the U.S. nation and flag. So although today's Millennial children are the twenty-fourth in our full lineage of postmedieval generations, they are fourteenth in the American line.

Like the four seasons of nature, the four turnings of history are equally necessary and equally important. Awakenings and Crises are the saecular solstices, summer and winter, each a solution to a challenge posed by the other. Highs and Unravelings are the saecular equinoxes, spring and autumn, each coursing a path directionally opposed to the other. When a society moves into an Awakening or Crisis, the new mood announces itself as a sudden turn in social direction. An Awakening begins when events trigger a revolution in the culture, a Crisis when events trigger an upheaval in public life. A High or Unraveling announces itself as a sudden consolidation of the new direction. A High begins when society perceives that the basic issues of the prior Crisis have been resolved, leaving a new civic regime firmly in place. An Unraveling begins with the perception that the Awakening has been resolved, leaving a new cultural mindset in place.

The gateway to a new turning can be obvious and dramatic (like the 1929 Stock Market Crash) or subtle and gradual (like 1984's Morning in America). It usually occurs two to five years after a new generation of children starts being born. The tight link between turning gateways and generational boundaries enables each archetype to fill an entire phase-of-life just as the mood of an old turning grows stale and feels ripe for replacement with something new.

The four turnings comprise a quaternal social cycle of growth, maturation, entropy, and death (and rebirth). In a springlike High, a society fortifies and builds and converges in an era of promise. In a summerlike Awakening, it dreams and plays and exults in an era of euphoria. In an autumnal Unraveling, it harvests and consumes and diverges in an era of anxiety. In a hibernal Crisis, it focuses and struggles and sacrifices in an era of survival. When the saeculum is in...

In 1930, Stalin arrested the economist Nikolai Kondratieff and shipped him off to Siberia. His crime: daring to defy that most linear of ideologies—Marxism—by suggesting that the long-term performance of market economies is cyclical. Soon after his death in the gulag, Kondratieff became a cult figure to historical economists around the world. Today, his name is attached to a popular family of two-stroke economic “K-Cycles,” some traceable back to the fifteenth century and all having a periodicity of forty to fifty-five years.

Total stability is beyond the reach of any human system.

A war-torn society that suffered enormous trauma restored the equilibrating sequence of saecular turnings.

Even at the height of the Crisis, civic authority laid seeds that would later blossom into vast endowments: transcontinental railroads, family-farm homesteads, and land-grant colleges. It also laid a fresh foundation for nationhood: Before Appomattox, United States had been a plural noun; afterward, it became singular. And there would be another High. Postwar generations never gave up their belief in progress, repaired the damage, and invested heavily in the future. Their hard labor, wise investment choices, and foreborne consumption were substantially responsible for the twentieth-century American economic miracle.

Americans turned cynical, viewing every social arrangement as unworthy of long-term loyalty, deserving only of short-term exploitation.

The collapse of health care reform confirmed that America no longer had faith that big institutional solutions could solve public problems.

Polls show that a majority of Americans, young adults especially, believe that the nation's best years have passed.

Nomads come of age in a society strong in choices and judgments but weak in structure, guidance, or any sense of collective mission for young people. Lacking a generational core, they are defined by their very social and cultural divergence. Aware that elder leaders don't expect much from them as a group, they feel little collective mission or power. Yet their accelerated contact with the real world gives them strong survival skills and expectations of personal success. Acting as individuals, they take entrepreneurial risks and begin sorting themselves into winners and losers. Their culture develops a frenetic, hardened quality, provoking next-elder Prophets to accuse them of lacking a principled inner life. Young Nomads shake off these criticisms and do what they must to get by.

David Osborne describes as a neo-progressive “synthesis”: “If the thesis was government as solution and the antithesis was government as problem, the synthesis is government as partner.” Regardless of ideology, the Silent generally agree that policy decisions are best left to experts. In defense of his peers, Tom Foley fought Boomer-led term limit initiatives by hiring expert lawyers to keep expert incumbents in office.

Many of them will download vast data about care options and special benefits, advise doctors about their preferred medications, and request the most complex treatments available. When their health fails, the Silent will be more loath than G.I.s to enter group living arrangements, spurring a surge in individualized home care. All this will add substantially to federal spending on elder health.

Old Unraveling-era strategies (flexibility, stealth, elite expertise, stand-off weaponry, and surgical goals) will all be replaced by new Crisis-era strategies (mass, intimidation, universal conscription, frontal assault, and total victory) more suitable to a fight for civic survival. By then, people will look back on the Unraveling as the time when America evolved from a postwar to a prewar era.

The economic role of government will shift toward far more spending on survival and future promises (defense, public works) and far less on amenities and past promises (elder care, debt service). The organization of both business and government will be simpler and more centralized, with fewer administrative layers, fewer job titles, and fewer types of goods and services transacted.

Social distress, with violence fueled by class, race, nativism, or religion and abetted by armed gangs, underground militias, and mercenaries hired by walled communities

a decency backlash in favor of state censorship

People will leave niches to join interlocking teams, each team dependent on (and trusting of) work done by other teams. People will share similar hopes and sacrifices—and a new sense of social equality. The splinterings, complexities, and cynicisms of the Unraveling will be but distant memories. The first glimpses of a new golden age will appear beyond: if only this one big problem can be fixed.

after

The bulk of today's gerontologists and demographers do not yet grasp what's coming. Ken Dychtwald's Age Wave and Cheryl Russell's Master Trend create the impression that Boomers will be much like today's busy senior citizens—except better-educated, more selfish, and (an easy prediction) much more numerous. This kind of forecast leads to the conclusion that early next century, younger generations will be overwhelmed by extravagantly doctored, expansively lobbying, age-denying old people. To support their consumptive Sharper Image lifestyles through old age, Boomers would have to impose confiscatory taxes on younger people. This would be an enormous dead weight, if it ever happens. It won't.

Old travelers will seek self-discovery and wisdom, preferring monastic retreats over cheery cruises, tai chi over shuffleboard. Elder enclaves will resemble Se-dona more than Sun City, rural hamlets more than condo minicities. The gray elite will cluster in areas long associated with this generation: Northern California, the Pacific Northwest, New Mexico, New England.

The Great Devaluation is likely to hit Boomers just as their first cohorts are reaching the official ages of retirement, long before Social Security is now projected to go into official bankruptcy.

The typical Boomer will live on bits and pieces of SEP-IRAs, Keoghs, 401Ks, federal benefits, and assorted corporate pension scraps that will vary enormously from person to person. For many, this will add up to a lot; for many others, nearly nothing.

All the old Unraveling-era promises about Social Security will now be known to be false, just as most Boomers had always presumed. This will create a moral rubric for breaking those promises. A debate will begin about which (if any) of the old promises should still be honored, and what new ones made, in a Next New Deal among the generations. Where Unraveling-era Congresses debated over one or two percentage point differences in rates of increase, Crisis-era Congresses will debate massive cuts. To maintain G.I.-style elder dependence on the young, Boomers would have to wage political war on their coming-of-age Millennial children. It is a war they will not wage—and would not win if they did.

Next New Deal will find all Boomers, rich and poor, paying a price. Many who spent a lifetime paying steep Social Security and Medicare taxes will be substantially excluded from benefits by an affluence test. Those who still qualify for public aid will receive a much worse deal than their G.I. parents did. The debate will rip apart whatever remains of the old senior citizen lobby built by G.I.s back in the Awakening. The AARP will survive only by reinventing itself as a council of elders committed to advancing the needs of posterity. Modern Maturity magazine will shift its style from Silent hip to Boomer classic and change its title to refer to aging in more traditional and less euphemistic terms.

Where their youthful ethos hinged on self-indulgence, their elder ethos will hinge on self-denial.

Funeral homes will help predecedents prepare posthumous books and CD-ROMs to communicate with heirs in perpetuity.

They will never have known a time when America felt good about itself, when its civic and cultural life didn't seem to be decaying. From childhood into midlife, they will have always sensed that the nation's core institutions mainly served the interests of people other than themselves. Not many of their classmates and friends will have built public-sector careers, apart from teaching and police work. Most 13ers will have oriented their lives around self-help networks of friends and other ersatz institutions that have nothing to do with government.

13er voters will disregard motive and ideology, and will simply ask if public programs get results that are worth the money.