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April 5 - April 14, 2023
Around World War II, we were proud as a people but modest as individuals. Fewer than two people in ten said yes when asked, Are you a very important person? Today, more than six in ten say yes. Where we once thought ourselves collectively strong, we now regard ourselves as individually entitled.
During each of these periods, an aggressive moralism darkened the debate about the country’s future. Culture wars raged, the language of political discourse coarsened, nativist (and sectional) feelings hardened, immigration and substance abuse came under attack, and attitudes toward children grew more protective.
Over the next two decades or so, society convulsed. Emergencies required massive sacrifices from a citizenry that responded by putting community ahead of self. Leaders led, and people trusted them.
The next Fourth Turning is due to begin shortly after the new millennium, midway through the Oh-Oh decade. Around the year 2005, a sudden spark will catalyze a Crisis mood. Remnants of the old social order will disintegrate. Political and economic trust will implode. Real hardship will beset the land, with severe distress that could involve questions of class, race, nation, and empire. Yet this time of trouble will bring seeds of social rebirth. Americans will share a regret about recent mistakes—and a resolute new consensus about what to do. The very survival of the nation will feel at stake.
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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. If there is a war, it is likely to be one of maximum risk and effort—in other words, a total war.
“There is a mysterious cycle in human events,” President Franklin Roosevelt observed in the depths of the Great Depression. “To some generations much is given. Of other generations much is expected.
The first European explorers often saw in this fresh land mass—this New Atlantis, El Dorado, or Utopia—an authentic opportunity to remake man and therein put an end to history. Successive waves of immigrants likewise saw themselves as builders of a millennial New Jerusalem, inaugurators of a revolutionary Age of Reason, defenders of “God’s chosen country,” and pioneers in service of a Manifest Destiny.
In young adulthood, the passionate Boomers were set to vacate for the more pragmatic 13ers, whose survivalism would be born of necessity. In childhood, the neglected 13ers were about to be replaced by the more treasured Millennials amid a resurgent commitment to protect and provide for small children.
Try to unlearn the obsessive fear of death (and the anxious quest for death avoidance) that pervades linear thinking in nearly every modern society. The ancients knew that, without periodic decay and death, nature cannot complete its full round of biological and social change. Without plant death, weeds would strangle the forest. Without human death, memories would never die, and unbroken habits and customs would strangle civilization.
As Arthur Wing Pinero has written, “The future is only the past again, entered through another gate.”
the inconceivable Buddhist kalpa (4,320,000,000 years).
The Third Great Awakening (1886–1908; climax, 1896) began with the Haymarket Riot and the launching of the global student missionary movement.
Between two generations, these dramatic survey results show how a new persona can entirely transform the emotional texture of people who come of age two decades apart.
During a Crisis era, Prophets enter elderhood, Nomads midlife, Heroes young adulthood, and Artists childhood. During an Awakening era, Heroes enter elderhood, Artists midlife, Prophets young adulthood, and Nomads childhood.
For the young hero, the elder prophet is not necessarily an ally. He (or, often, she) can also be a lethal enemy, as Medea was for Theseus and as the crone sorcerers were in Snow White and The Wizard of Oz. Yet more often, as Campbell notes, the young hero’s close bond with a wise elder is essential to his ultimate success. Like Merlin, he will be a loving teacher. Like Obi-Wan Kenobi, he will feel the unseen Force of the universe. Like Gandalf, he will rescue the young hero through mysterious mental powers. Like Mickey’s Sorcerer, he will warn against the dangers of hubris. In the end, the
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When we encounter sacred myths of young prophets (Abraham in Ur, Moses in Egypt, Jesus before the Roman magistrate), the dominant image of persons roughly forty years older is typically one of expansive wealth and rationalism, resplendent in power but bereft of values (Hammurabi, the Pharaoh, Pontius Pilate). While the Hero Myth ends in the palatial city, the Prophet Myth starts there.
These Prophet Myths reveal what Jung would call the shadow of the aging hero archetype. The Hero is seen not through his own eyes, but through the fresh vision of the youth Prophet. The one who sees that the emperor has no clothes is not one of the emperor’s own peers, but a child who dares to speak the truth.
Rhett predicted that Scarlett’s children “will probably be soft, prissy creatures, as the children of hard-bitten characters usually are…. So you’ll have to get approval from your grandchildren.” In Mitchell’s story, Rhett and Scarlett represented the (Nomad) Gilded Generation;
What these modern myths illustrate is this: Your generation isn’t like the generation that shaped you, but it has much in common with the generation that shaped the generation that shaped you. Archetypes do not create archetypes like themselves; instead, they create the shadows of archetypes like themselves.
These myths suggest that for any generational differences to arise at all, a quaternity of opposing archetypes becomes a logical necessity. How else could young heroes emerge, if not in response to the worldly impotence of self-absorbed elder prophets? 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.
A key consequence of these cross-cycle shadow relationships is a recurring pattern that lies at the heart of the saeculum: an oscillation between the overprotection and underprotection of children.
following an Awakening, Prophetled families curtail the freedoms of Hero children.
Heroes, for example, always appear as children after an Awakening and come of age during a Crisis. Prophets always appear as children after a Crisis and come of age during an Awakening.
A Hero generation grows up as increasingly protected post-Awakening children, comes of age as the heroic young teamworkers of a Crisis, demonstrates hubris as energetic midlifers, and emerges as powerful elders attacked by the next Awakening.
Cadwallader Colden,
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.
The Gilded Generation (Nomad, born 1822–1842) lived a hardscrabble childhood around parents distracted by spiritual upheavals. They came of age amid rising national tempers, torrential immigration, commercialism, Know Nothing politics, and declining college enrollments. As young adults, many pursued fortunes in frontier
boomtowns or as fledgling “robber barons.” Their Lincoln Shouters and Johnny Rebs rode eagerly into a Civil War that left them decimated, Confederates especially. Having learned to detest moral zealotry, their midlife presidents and industrialists put their stock in Darwinian economics, Boss Tweed politics, Victorian prudery, and Carnegie’s Law of Competition. As elders, they landed on the “industrial scrap heap” of an urbanizing economy that was harsh to most old people. (American: Ulysses Grant, Mark Twain, John D. Rockefeller, Louisa May Alcott, William James, Sitting Bull; Foreign: Lewis
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Whether the American High was a good or bad era is beside the point. What matters is that, in the seasonal rhythms of history, it was a necessary era. It cleaned up after the Crisis that came before and set the table for the Awakening to follow. It lent America an infusion of optimism and constructive energy and a staleness that later had to be rooted out.
Boomer kids were made to feel welcome not just by their own parents, but also by their communities. They became the targets of libraries, recreation centers, and other civic entities that had in the Crisis been the domain of working adults (or, today, of recreating seniors). Surrounded by such open-handed generosity, child Boomers developed what Daniel Yankelovich termed the “psychology of entitlement.”
Judy Blume exhorted parents to expose their children to every possible human catastrophe. “They live in the same world we do,” she insisted. She and other Silent authors launched a New Realism bookshelf for children, targeting subjects (like abortion, adolescent cohabitation, child abuse, family-friend rapists, and suicide) that prior child generations had never encountered.
Ask today’s young adults how they were raised, and many will tell you that they raised themselves—that they made their own meals, washed their own clothes, decided for themselves whether to do homework or make money after school, and chose which parent to spend time with on weekends (or side with in court).
As Heroes replace Nomads in childhood, they are nurtured with increasing protection by pessimistic adults in an insecure environment.
The Silent are well on the way to becoming the first generation in U.S. history never to produce a president.
Just wait for Biden lol
Many Boomers who preach honesty and sacrifice will remain personally self-indulgent. Like Bill Gates (whose ecofriendly mansion has a garage for twenty cars), the Cultural Elite will consume heavily while pretending otherwise.
Seizing the new generational discovery, a barrage of media began portraying everything X as frenetic and garbagey.
Today’s youths often regard their own circles of friends as too diverse to be thought of in collective terms. To them, X stands for nothing, or everything, or (as Kurt Cobain sang) “oh well, whatever, never mind.”
Where the Silent grew up just when a hungry society wanted to invest, 13ers grew up just when satiated society wanted to cash out.
Where the Boomers were the most alibied and excused criminal generation in U.S. history, 13ers have become the most incarcerated. Roughly one-third of all 13er black males are either in prison, on probation, or under court supervision. Today’s convicts are perceived as incorrigible, deserving not of rehabilitation but of pure punishment—from butt-caning to merciless execution.
Political surveys show 13ers to be somewhat more conservative, considerably less liberal, and far more independent than older generations are today or were at like age.
Drew
Where the cutting-edge fertility issues of the Awakening pertained to taking pills or undergoing surgery to avoid unwanted children, the Unraveling is marked by advances in fertility medicine, preemie care, and other technologies to produce desperately wanted children.
Parents are stressing a values nurture, aided by a huge new bookshelf on the subject. Bennett’s Book of Virtues, the Unraveling’s best-selling children’s book, has a medicinal cover, scant humor, and eleven teachable virtues that do not include individuality or creativity. Millennials are not being raised to explore the inner world (Boomers figure they can handle that just fine) but rather to achieve and excel in the outer.
A Crisis era begins with a catalyst—a startling event (or sequence of events) that produces a sudden shift in mood.
9/11
A Crisis mood does not guarantee that the new governing policies will be well designed or will work as intended. To the contrary: Crisis eras are studded with faulty leadership and inept management—from
What makes a Crisis special is the public’s willingness to let leaders lead even when they falter and to let authorities be authoritative even when they make mistakes. Amid this civic solidarity, mediocre leaders can gain immense popular following;
Playing to win but half-expecting to lose, Nomad generations enter midlife with a sense of exhaustion.
Through the centuries, Nomads have starred in the role of midlife marauder, of the graying, picaresque, and (sometimes) corruptible adventurer who always finds a way to get the job done: Francis Drake and John Hawkins; Benjamin Church and Jacob Leisler; Robert Rogers and Daniel Boone; Ulysses Grant and Boss Tweed; Huey Long and George Patton.
A global terrorist group blows up an aircraft and announces it possesses portable nuclear weapons. The United States and its allies launch a preemptive strike. The terrorists threaten to retaliate against an American city. Congress declares war and authorizes unlimited house-to-house searches. Opponents charge that the president concocted the emergency for political purposes. A nationwide strike is declared. Foreign capital flees the U.S.
An impasse over the federal budget reaches a stalemate. The president and Congress both refuse to back down, triggering a near-total government shutdown.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announce the spread of a new communicable virus. The disease reaches densely populated areas, killing some.
