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August 14 - December 12, 2024
The risk of catastrophe will be very high. The nation could erupt into insurrection or civil violence, crack up geographically, or succumb to authoritarian rule.
The rhythms of history do not reveal the outcome of the coming Crisis; all they suggest is the timing and dimension.
Triumphal linearism has shaped the very style of Western and (especially) American
the ancient Greek word kyklos meant both “cycle” and “circle.”
“The warrior does not wish to fight against himself and prejudices his son against war,” he observed, “but the grandsons are taught to think of war as romantic.”
The rhythm of human life, often expressed in terms of generations, was regarded as a sacred link between ancestors and posterity and as a normative standard for wise stewardship.
The next Crisis era will most likely extend roughly from the middle Oh-Ohs to the middle 2020s. Its climax is not likely to occur before 2005 or later than 2025, given that thirty-two and fifty-two years are the shortest and longest time spans between any two climax moments in Anglo-American history.
Because the seasons of history shape the seasons of life differently, the result is different generations.
Gone were the sheltered “goody two-shoes”; in their place were latchkey kids growing up hard.
This Euro-American experience confirms that the faster a society progresses, the more persistently generational issues seem to keep springing up.
So has it always been. Roughly once every twenty years, America discovers a new generation—a happenstance triggered by some striking event in which young people appear to behave in ways manifestly different than the youth who came just before.
This elder possesses little worldly power but supernatural gifts of magic and access to the gods.
When a myth shows the Nomad archetype in midlife, the story tells of an aging adventurer, savvy but going it alone.
How can we make society better?
the Reformation redefined it as spiritual progress toward salvation.
Likewise, the worst nativist reactions have reflected a recurring parental urge to protect the childhood of a fledgling Hero archetype.
Here again, the only exception arose during the Civil War Saeculum, which produced no Hero archetype.
Eventually, civic life seems fully under control but distressingly spirit dead. People worry that, as a society, they can do everything but no longer feel anything.
Entering the 1760s, the colonies felt rejuvenated in spirit but reeled from violence, mobs, insurrections, and paranoia over the corruption of official authority.
There would be no apogee, no leveling, no correction. Eventually, America would veer totally out of control along some bizarre centrifugal path.
Like Schlesinger, most theorists point to generational change—even if they can’t say exactly how it works.
Authoritarian government isn’t dead; it’s just hibernating, poised to return in the Fourth Turning, rested and refreshed.
The linearist view of technology fails to appreciate the dangers a new turning can bring. Microsoft founder Bill Gates is now predicting that everyone will soon tune in to a world of unlimited options via high-tech portable devices. What he nowhere mentions is that by merely reversing a few circuits the same technology could empower a central authority to monitor what every individual is doing.
Does the rhythm of the saeculum make a major war unavoidable? No one knows.
every Fourth Turning since the fifteenth century has culminated in total war.
This suggests that, had the Japanese not attacked Pearl Harbor, the United States would have found some other provocation to declare total war against the Axis powers.
The saeculum does not guarantee good or bad outcomes.
The rise of fascism had much to do with the saeculum’s grip on European history.
Yes, the Union was preserved, the slaves emancipated, and the Industrial Revolution fully unleashed—but at enormous cost.
vilified the old as never before or since in our history.
history is not predetermined—that the actions people take (and political choices they make) can fundamentally alter the course of history.
Eloquently indecisive
“His hour is one of darkness, and adversity, and peril. But should domestic tyranny oppress us, or the invaders’ step pollute our soil, still may the Gray Champion come.”
Americans have always been blind to the next turning until after it fully arrives.
This time, the history lesson will be your own life story.
“unhappy fate…to be young in an era when age was respected, and old in a time when youth took the palm.” In their last years, they became self-effacing pessimists who (like John Adams) knew for certain that “mausoleums, statues, monuments will never be erected to me.”
the “rising generation” of “mental rickets and curvature of the soul.”
their “candle will not last the night.”
Adlai Stevenson shared Ike’s innate cultural conservatism; he unapologetically wore old shoes, and his close advisers pointedly denied that they ever watched TV.
“We must not become dependent spiritually, socially, physically or financially upon relatives, friends, or government.”
As the G.I. media bleached out African-American rhythms and dressed black stars in white shirts and ties, G.I. business came to realize that integration was more economically efficient than segregation.
“It seemed logical to us that fascism and communism…could not really succeed except in countries where children were raised by very authoritarian homes.”
In The Dream and the Nightmare, Myron Magnet observed that an Awakening that began as an experimental euphoria among secure elites ended with pandemic family and community dysfunction whose most debilitating symptoms were observed among the poor.
Americans were now fully absorbed into what Christopher Lasch called the “Culture of Narcissism,” feeling that the best way to approach life was not (as in the High) to start with the community and move in, but to start with the self and move out.
Between 1964 and 1984, America’s inner yearnings surged and its outer discipline decayed.
Reflecting on his own childhood, Thomas Wolfe wondered “what has happened to the spontaneous gaiety of youth” among a Lost generation raised “without innocence, born old and stale and dull and empty,…suckled on darkness, and weaned on violence and noise.”
“the vision thing.”
“Jennifer Fever,”
“I have made no plans because I have found no plans worth making,” a
A popular poll about recent decades showed that the best-liked ones were the furthest away—and the 1990s was least-liked of all. In
