I'm a sceptic that the 4th Turning started in 2008

[Tim Randal Walker]

I suspect that the next 1T will be a weak 1T, but will otherwise resemble the last 1T in being a drab, corporate period. I kind of hope that the Millenials will follow in the Progressive foot steps and found some institutes.

Some years ago I read NextGen, which predicted that society would soon enter a renaissance period. At this point, I don't really expect to see one during my life time.

[Einzige]

A weak 1T is exactly right. As I said,expect localism, degrowth, "Small Is Beautiful" and other Unravel-ly themes to dominate. Tiny homes with green cars parked out front will be the beau ideal of aging Millennials, an attempt to stave off the Megacrisis through individual action - what one would expect from the Heroes of a Megaunraveling. It isn't going to be nearly enough.

Even communities with reactionary characters can adopt this mindset as part of a package deal: in exchange for "going Green", you get to keep your provincialism awhile longer.

Education too will be further individualized and atomized; we're already slooooowly shifting towards on-line education.

[Tim Randal Walker]

During the last 1T television was basically limited to a handful of channels. Commentators mentioned that early television gave people common references. So in that limited aspect it was a unifier.

If television survives as a distinct medium, it may well be viable only if it consolidates down to only a few channels. Think of much of the programming being news, weather, and sports. Plus cheap to produce reality shows, cooking shows, etc.

[Eric the Green]

(07-28-2020, 12:33 PM)Tim Randal Walker Wrote: I suspect that the next 1T will be a weak 1T, but will otherwise resemble the last 1T in being a drab, corporate period.  I kind of hope that the Millenials will follow in the Progressive foot steps and found some institutes.

Some years ago I read NextGen, which predicted that society would soon enter a renaissance period.  At this point, I don't really expect to see one during my life time.

In the larger cycle, we are in a renaissance period. So, it is certainly possible. But it requires higher expectations, and that's where we are lacking now.

[Eric the Green]

(07-28-2020, 11:14 AM)Tim Randal Walker Wrote: I recall an old thread of the paleo 4T site.  It compared the intensities of different Awakendings.   Yes, one would expect any Awakening to be intense, but some were more intense than others.

Comparing American 2Ts, among the more intense were the Transcendental and Boom 2Ts.  That colonial era 2T (don't recall the name of it) was less intense than those two, with the Missionary Awakening being even less intense.

As for the Great Power saeculum, why would it be deemed a Mega-Awakening?  Which turning other than the 2T-which wasn't that intense for a 2T-reminds one of an Awakening?  Does the Gilded Age remind one of an Awakening?

I expect that a Mega-Awakening would feature a 2T as powerful as the  Reformation.  And before that, a 1T  with something rather interesting to offer-possibly a renaissance of sorts.  As for 3T, at least a strong spiritual afterglow in early Unraveling.

This picture does accord with our place on the greater cycle of civilization, which is similar to the Renaissance/Reformation era, although ours is more like the Augustine Age and the following years of the Roman Empire. This cycle doesn't line up with a mega-saeculum with four turnings though, so the characterizations similar to mega-turnings would stretch over approximately one and a half saecula.

A period of transition, with strong new beginnings and devastating endings, full of conquests and migrations and falls of empires, is followed by a renaissance or golden age era. If that's where we are, then that's why we can expect or are experiencing a mild 4T compared to the previous ones, like the 4T of the Elizabethan Age.

The next 1T could be quite strong. If the economy is put on a new green basis, with a boom in new industries and a repeal of Reaganomics, permanent this time, this could bring back prosperity and a middle class again. It won't be as prosperous as the American High in circa 1950s, at least not for the USA alone, because we are not a stand-alone great power atop the ruins of the old age, but ever-more firmly embedded in the new world civilization. THAT is what is being born and growing in our time, despite the reaction against it by those resisting the trend such as Trump and Johnson et al.

[Einzige]

(07-28-2020, 01:00 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: The next 1T could be quite strong. If the economy is put on a new green basis, with a boom in new industries and a repeal of Reaganomics, permanent this time, this could bring back prosperity and a middle class again.

Verily, you are a Prophet, because this is precisely what is going to be done - an attempt to convert capitalism as it currently exists over wholesale to a 'Green' footing. Tiny homes and photovoltaic cars.

But this isn't enough to prevent the ending of the Anthropocene (e.g. the production of solar panels themselves is not a Green process, and emits a great many greenhouse gasses). The problem is inherent to the lifecycle of work under modern capitalism. This issue cannot be dealt with through green capitalism, and will not be dealt with at all until a Crisis makes dealing with it inevitable.

Your solution is Mega-3T to the core - consume; just consume differently.

[Mikebert]

(07-28-2020, 12:26 PM)Einzige Wrote: Now, we did get a lot of physical infrastructure out of the last High - the Interstate Highway System, NASA, etc.

Did we get much in the way of social infrastructure? Was there much society building at all? In a past 1T we got... the Constitution. Nothing comparable in the 1950s and 60s.

I firmly believe that the Millennial 1T has more Unraveling characteristics than prior First Turnings. Even the widespread adoption of television, contributing to the social atomization of entertainment, is 3Tish.

There was the Civil Rights movement that was accomplishing its primary goal of achieving de facto African American suffrage and ending Jim Crow as the 1T was coming to an end.

[Eric the Green]

(07-28-2020, 12:03 PM)Einzige Wrote:

(07-28-2020, 11:14 AM)Tim Randal Walker Wrote: I recall an old thread of the paleo 4T site.  It compared the intensities of different Awakendings.   Yes, one would expect any Awakening to be intense, but some were more intense than others.

Comparing American 2Ts, among the more intense were the Transcendental and Boom 2Ts.  That colonial era 2T (don't recall the name of it) was less intense than those two, with the Missionary Awakening being even less intense.

As for the Great Power saeculum, why would it be deemed a Mega-Awakening?  Which turning other than the 2T-which wasn't that intense for a 2T-reminds one of an Awakening?  Does the Gilded Age remind one of an Awakening?

I expect that a Mega-Awakening would feature a 2T at least as intense as the Boom Awakening.  I would expect that either the 1T  would have rather interesting to offer.  Possibly a renaissance of sorts.  As for 3T, at least a strong spiritual afterglow in early Unraveling.

The 2T of a Mega-2T wouldn't be as emotionally intense as the Boom Awakening necessarily if it were Apollonian in character. The Missionary Awakening was not emotionally intense, but it was intellectual in character. It focused far less on personal values and more on big social ideas than the Boom.

I consider the whole Great Power saeculum a 2T because it introduced new concepts like unionism, socialism and anarchism to the American scene which the mainstream of American life continues to define itself against. And I consider the whole of the Millennial saeculum an Unraveling because we have spent virtually all of it fighting against those Great Power saeculum ideas, first in the Cold War and then in the reactionary period following it. This entire epoch has been reactionary with respect to the Great Power's new anti-capitalist viewpoints; the coming Megacrisis will probably compel their adoption in the Megahigh of the 22nd century.

A Mega-2T would have to feature an intense Awakening, just as you consider the mega-3T to have a longer and more characteristic 3T.

The socialist era is the second revolution of modern times. It began before the civil war, but expanded during the great power awakening or missionary awakening.

However, an unravelling is not a period in which the people (or "we" as you put it) fight against the previous Awakening. Although I admit that among Generation X, there was a strong tendency to do that. Nevertheless, archetypally the unravelling is a period in which the ideas of the Awakening are fought over and further developed. It is not a period only of resistance to the previous turning.

And our saeculum has not spent all its energy fighting against socialism and socialist-anarchism. In its 2T, it expanded social government to a large degree in the Great Society, and saw the birth of movements as significant as those of the previous saeculum: principally the green movement and environmentalism, upon which all of our future society must be based, but also the ideal of ending war, and a much greater dedication to respecting diversity and freedom among races, genders and religions. John Lennon's song kind of summed it up, he being a member of the visionary war-baby group that includes Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden.

Our era seems like a mega unravelling to Generation X because our unravelling was long and our 4T is mild. But this was entirely due to astrology and the planetary cycles, and to major sudden catalytic events. A Uranus-Pluto conjunction can't be denied. It disrupts and transforms. So when it happened between 1963 and 1969, it cut the strong 1T off at only 18 years, starting with JFK's sudden death. The following 2T during this conjunction was so intense that it was burned out toward the end and only lasted 20 years. And the previous 4T ended too soon because of Hitler's western invasion in December 1944, so the entire saeculum began too early. The cycle is just slowing down and catching up, that's all. The saeculum must be about 82-84 years, because the planetary returns that define it won't be denied. So we won't be through with this one until after the Uranus Return in 2027.

A true mega 2T would also strongly emphasize new spiritual movements and new religions. These did occur in the missionary awakening, as they do in all awakenings. But the rest of the saeculum was very materialist and outward oriented. You can't make that into a mega-awakening just by saying a revolutionary movement occurred. Revolutionary movements define the entire modern age, not one saeculum. The Consciousness Revolution 2T brought in the spiritual and holistic new age culture, which is the basis for all the counter-cultures and cultural creatives that will continue to develop in our new world civilization. 

Just because Generation X has been so unusually cynical and resentful of Boomers, does not erase what has been born. But Generation X now needs to fulfill its role as pragmatic managers of the crisis, and help the other generations put our new saeculum on a sound and sustainable basis. It can only do that by accepting and working with the Awakening ideas of the Consciousness Revolution, the Green Revolution and the Green New Deal. It can't be based on Reaganomics, nor on its Marxist opposite alone. And Generation X can also recall its own spiritual awakening in the circa 1990 period, and build its spiritual life and feeling of communion on it. No new civilization today can be based on materialism/physicalism, because it denies the source of all life. All civilizations that are sustainable must be based on spirit.

Socialism depends on an industrial civilization with industrial workers, and is a scheme for the workers to take it over. We are now in a post-industrial, ecologically-based civilization. This began in the sixties, and so did the Information Age. Nuclear war since 1945 has also made great power wars obsolete. All this sets our era apart from that which saw the growth of socialism. Its ideals are still valuable and sound, as are those of individual rights, freedoms and democracy. The new green synthesis includes and transcends these two earlier modern movements. The Green New Deal is the way forward now. It must be increasingly adopted in the coming century. Those who are truly "woke" like Ms. AOC understand all this.

[Einzige]

(07-28-2020, 01:33 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: A Mega-2T would have to feature an intense Awakening, just as you consider the mega-3T to have a longer and more characteristic 3T.

This intensity however could just as easily be an intellectual intensity as an emotive one.

The Missionary Awakening was probably our most intellectually driven Awakening in American history. There was real debate on the anti-capitalist Left in that period in a way that there simply was not in the Boom.Awakening: in other words, there was more real content on the Missionary end of things than among the Boomers.

Quote:The socialist era is the second revolution of modern times. It began before the civil war, but expanded during the great power awakening or missionary awakening.

To the contrary, we have not yet entered a socialist period. The working-class has not abolished capitalism.

Quote:However, an unravelling is not a period in which the people (or "we" as you put it) fight against the previous Awakening. Although I admit that among Generation X, there was a strong tendency to do that. Nevertheless, archetypally the unravelling is a period in which the ideas of the Awakening are fought over and further developed. It is not a period only of resistance to the previous turning.

The Unraveling is definitely a period in which the concepts of the Awakening are stymied and resisted. And the entire Millennial saeculum has been one massive reaction against socialism, the idea of the Great Power saeculum. Literally from the word gp, from 1946, socialism and Communism were vilified and attacked Right and Left (the individualist hippies had little time for the Old Left).

Quote:And our saeculum has not spent all its energy fighting against socialism and socialist-anarchism. In its 2T, it expanded social government to a large degree in the Great Society, and saw the birth of movements as significant as those of the previous saeculum: principally the green movement and environmentalism, upon which all of our future society must be based, but also the ideal of ending war, and a much greater dedication to respecting diversity and freedom among races, genders and religions. John Lennon's song kind of summed it up, he being a member of the visionary war-baby group that includes Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden.

(A) Welfare capitalism is not socialism. Socialism is the abolition of production for exchange and the inauguration of production for use as the generalized mode of production within society. And too the Great Society took place amidst the backdrop of the War in Vietnam- a war against socialism.

(B) The Boom Awakening counterculture was ultra-individualistic and by no means had any real anti-capitalist commitments. Even Bernie Sanders is simply a social democrat - his policies would leave production for exchange untouched.

Quote:Our era seems like a mega unravelling to Generation X because our unravelling was long and our 4T is mild. But this was entirely due to astrology and the planetary cycles, and to major sudden catalytic events. A Uranus-Pluto conjunction can't be denied. It disrupts and transforms. So when it happened between 1963 and 1969, it cut the strong 1T off at only 18 years, starting with JFK's sudden death. The following 2T during this conjunction was so intense that it was burned out toward the end and only lasted 20 years. And the previous 4T ended too soon because of Hitler's western invasion in December 1944, so the entire saeculum began too early. The cycle is just slowing down and catching up, that's all. The saeculum must be about 82-84 years, because the planetary returns that define it won't be denied. So we won't be through with this one until after the Uranus Return in 2027.

I don't believe in astrology.

Quote:A mega 2T would also strongly emphasize new spiritual movements and new religions. These did occur in the missionary awakening, as they do in all awakenings. But the rest of the seaculum was very materialist and outward oriented. You can't make that into a mega-awakening just by saying a revolutionary movement occurred. Revolutionary movements define the entire modern age, not one saeculum. The Consciousness Revolution 2T brought in the spiritual and holistic new age culture, which is the basis for all the counter-cultures and cultural creatives that will continue to develop in our new world civilization.

Religion and spiritualism are now reactionary with respect to the movement against the dominant civilization. The real content of Awakenings is this movement, socialism.

Quote:Just because Generation X has been so unusually cynical and resentful of Boomers, does not erase what has been born. But Generation X now needs to fulfill its role as pragmatic managers of the crisis, and help the other generations put our new saeculum on a sound and sustainable basis. It can only do that by accepting and working with the Awakening ideas of the Consciousness Revolution, the Green Revolution and the Green New Deal. It can't be based on Reaganomics, nor on its Marxist opposite alone. And Generation X can also recall its own spiritual awakening in the circa 1990 period, and build its spiritual life and feeling of communion on it. No new civilization today can be based on materialism/physicalism, because it denies the source of all life. All civilizations that are sustainable must be based on spirit.

Your practical vision extends as far as Green Capitalism and no further, because you greatly overemphasize the spiritual and cultural components of historical movements while understating the material aspect

No civilization which is sustainable can be based on capitalism. It can at best mitigate its environmental destruction by selling a "Green" lifestyle- photovoltaic cars, tiny homes, &etc. This is insufficient to do more than slow down environmental degradation.

Quote:We are now in a post-industrial, ecologically-based civilization. This began in the sixties, and so did the Information Age.

This is the prevailing dogma, but it's incorrect. There was no massive change in the mode of production since the 1960s; it is still based on the exploitation of surplus value and the money-commodity-money chain. Capitalism exists as it has existed. The "Information Age" has at best introduced new methods of social control and increased the tempo of productivity within capitalism. And this is all.

Man cannot live on the Word alone, but on bread grown from the ground. I find your spiritualism Idealistic and your emphasis on the Information Age misinformed.

[Eric the Green]

(07-28-2020, 12:26 PM)Einzige Wrote: Now, we did get a lot of physical infrastructure out of the last High - the Interstate Highway System, NASA, etc.

Did we get much in the way of social infrastructure? Was there much society building at all? In a past 1T we got... the Constitution. Nothing comparable in the 1950s and 60s.

I firmly believe that the Millennial 1T has more Unraveling characteristics than prior First Turnings. Even the widespread adoption of television, contributing to the social atomization of entertainment, is 3Tish.

Garish entertainment and middle class materialist display was typical of the gilded age, and also of the "Augustine Age" of the early 18th century following the war of Spanish succession. The American High was a first turning par excellence, and defines it traits. Corporate expansion was second to none. The Space Age spurred new technology.

The Constitution can also be defined as 4T. S&H say that in a 4T, new institutions like this are founded. The 13th/14th amendment was a comparable achievement at the end of its cycle. At the end of our previous 4T, the United Nations was founded. If you want to understand our times, you can't just look at one country anymore. We are a global civilization since the world wars, and since the final rush of European imperialism and imperial wars circa 1890-1900 too. So the UN is the foundation of our civilization, and is just as significant as the founding of the United States of America and the First Republic of France. Global trade was codified and the European Common Market developed-- the foundation of the EU. Also, the previous 1T continued the development of the New Deal in the USA, and preserved and expanded upon it. The world war provided a new tax and social government structure which continued into the 1T, and this equalized society as never before and created a middle class. Labor unions became well established and raised living standards for workers. The New Deal was also extended to Europe through the Marshall Plan, which created modern Europe and the Western Alliance along with the founding of NATO and the military-industrial complex. Traditional churches were set up throughout all of our neighborhoods. Suburbia was created, and urban renewal proceeded in a monolithic 1T way. We live in a society built during our 1T and we take it for granted.

TV and radio in the 1T was monolithic and dominated by 3 networks, so it was only in the 3T that it became an atomizing experience with the coming of cable and the internet.

[Eric the Green]

(07-28-2020, 02:00 PM)Einzige Wrote:

(07-28-2020, 01:33 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: A Mega-2T would have to feature an intense Awakening, just as you consider the mega-3T to have a longer and more characteristic 3T.

This intensity however could just as easily be an intellectual intensity as an emotive one.
[/quote]
No, an awakening is primarily spiritual.

Quote:The Missionary Awakening was probably our most intellectually driven Awakening in American history. There was real debate on the anti-capitalist Left in that period in a way that there simply was not in the Boom.Awakening: in other words, there was more real content on the Missionary end of things than among the Boomers.

Your definition of content is restricted by your apparent conversion to Marxism. That's better than what I have seen from you before, but saying "content" is only about a debate over capitalism is false.

Quote:

Quote:The socialist era is the second revolution of modern times. It began before the civil war, but expanded during the great power awakening or missionary awakening.

To the contrary, we have not yet entered a socialist period. The working-class has not abolished capitalism.

True, the socialist revolution is unfinished. But it must be synthesized with the previous revolution now, because without democracy and human rights socialism failed miserably and was worse than what preceded it. And it must be combined with the green movement because otherwise socialist industry destroys the Earth and dehumanizes life. And there is no working class anymore; the class structure is different now and most people are not in it.

Quote:

Quote:However, an unravelling is not a period in which the people (or "we" as you put it) fight against the previous Awakening. Although I admit that among Generation X, there was a strong tendency to do that. Nevertheless, archetypally the unravelling is a period in which the ideas of the Awakening are fought over and further developed. It is not a period only of resistance to the previous turning.

The Unraveling is definitely a period in which the concepts of the Awakening are stymied and resisted. And the entire Millennial saeculum has been one massive reaction against socialism, the idea of the Great Power saeculum. Literally from the word go, from 1946, socialism and Communism were vilified and attacked Right and Left (the individualist hippies had little time for the Old Left).

Quote:And our saeculum has not spent all its energy fighting against socialism and socialist-anarchism. In its 2T, it expanded social government to a large degree in the Great Society, and saw the birth of movements as significant as those of the previous saeculum: principally the green movement and environmentalism, upon which all of our future society must be based, but also the ideal of ending war, and a much greater dedication to respecting diversity and freedom among races, genders and religions. John Lennon's song kind of summed it up, he being a member of the visionary war-baby group that includes Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden.

(A) Welfare capitalism is not socialism. Socialism is the abolition of production for exchange and the inauguration of production for use as the generalized mode of production within society. And too the Great Society took place amidst the backdrop of the War in Vietnam- a war against socialism.

(B) The Boom Awakening counterculture was ultra-individualistic and by no means had any real anti-capitalist commitments. Even Bernie Sanders is simply a social democrat - his policies would leave production for exchange untouched.

Quote:Our era seems like a mega unravelling to Generation X because our unravelling was long and our 4T is mild. But this was entirely due to astrology and the planetary cycles, and to major sudden catalytic events. A Uranus-Pluto conjunction can't be denied. It disrupts and transforms. So when it happened between 1963 and 1969, it cut the strong 1T off at only 18 years, starting with JFK's sudden death. The following 2T during this conjunction was so intense that it was burned out toward the end and only lasted 20 years. And the previous 4T ended too soon because of Hitler's western invasion in December 1944, so the entire saeculum began too early. The cycle is just slowing down and catching up, that's all. The saeculum must be about 82-84 years, because the planetary returns that define it won't be denied. So we won't be through with this one until after the Uranus Return in 2027.

I don't believe in astrology.

That doesn't matter. The cyclic connections demonstrate its truth.

Socialism just became passe, when it was not resisted. The hippies ignored it because it no longer answered the needs of the time, which were for quality of life, not just survival. Socialism only answers material needs. That is not enough on which to build any life, culture or civilization. You Einzige still need the Awakening.

"Socialism is the abolition of production for exchange and the inauguration of production for use as the generalized mode of production within society." I'm not sure what you mean by this "mode." A totally collectivized society, if that's what you mean, is a pipe dream as fully as it was in the 1840s. It can never be established. The attempt to establish it by revolutionary coercion created monsters. Capitalism has been a foundation for civilization for 4000 years.

That's a good point about the War in Vietnam, but the salient point about that war was that 1) it failed, and 2) it was resisted. Resistance to that war virtually created the Third Revolution! That war itself discredited wars against socialism forever. The Cold War ended, and socialism as you describe it faded away and doesn't really exist anymore, and can't be resurrected by revolution or by any other means. There is no trend now at all toward abolishing capital. Socialism only exists now as social programs. Exchange can never be abolished, even if one tries to establish it as happening within a collective. Every breath you take is "exchange." That's what life is. That's ecology; that's the new organizing principle. It preserves the value of the individual and the collective at the same time. The only way forward now is synthesis.

Quote:

Quote:A mega 2T would also strongly emphasize new spiritual movements and new religions. These did occur in the missionary awakening, as they do in all awakenings. But the rest of the seaculum was very materialist and outward oriented. You can't make that into a mega-awakening just by saying a revolutionary movement occurred. Revolutionary movements define the entire modern age, not one saeculum. The Consciousness Revolution 2T brought in the spiritual and holistic new age culture, which is the basis for all the counter-cultures and cultural creatives that will continue to develop in our new world civilization.

Religion and spiritualism are now reactionary with respect to the movement against the dominant civilization. The real content of Awakenings is this movement, socialism.

Quote:Just because Generation X has been so unusually cynical and resentful of Boomers, does not erase what has been born. But Generation X now needs to fulfill its role as pragmatic managers of the crisis, and help the other generations put our new saeculum on a sound and sustainable basis. It can only do that by accepting and working with the Awakening ideas of the Consciousness Revolution, the Green Revolution and the Green New Deal. It can't be based on Reaganomics, nor on its Marxist opposite alone. And Generation X can also recall its own spiritual awakening in the circa 1990 period, and build its spiritual life and feeling of communion on it. No new civilization today can be based on materialism/physicalism, because it denies the source of all life. All civilizations that are sustainable must be based on spirit.

Your practical vision extends as far as Green Capitalism and no further, because you greatly overemphasize the spiritual and cultural components of historical movements while understating the material aspect

No civilization which is sustainable can be based on capitalism. It can at best mitigate its environmental destruction by selling a "Green" lifestyle- photovoltaic cars, tiny homes, &etc. This is insufficient to do more than slow down environmental degradation.

Quote:We are now in a post-industrial, ecologically-based civilization. This began in the sixties, and so did the Information Age.

This is the prevailing dogma, but it's incorrect. There was no massive change in the mode of production since the 1960s; it is still based on the exploitation of surplus value and the money-commodity-money chain. Capitalism exists as it has existed. The "Information Age" has at best introduced new methods of social control and increased the tempo of productivity within capitalism. And this is all.

The "dogma" is correct, and it's far more up to date than going back to Marx. If you survey the landscape of civilization, you find that the factories have been abandoned and its work style gone. Work now must be smart work. Capitalism continues, but your equation of capitalism and industrialism is false. Since the sixties, the major turning point of our times, it is the machine itself that is the oppressor. Remember Mario Savio's words. Revolution now is people power pushing against a machine to make it stop unless we're free. The information age allows revolutions to be mobilized more quickly. I don't believe it is a cure all and is not without flaws, but the mode of production and organization of society is quite different now than what it was in the days of the assembly line. Knowledge and creativity is at more of a premium now than obedience, time clocks and schedules.

No capitalist calculations and values can omit any longer any effects on the environment and the climate. Life is the foundation of life; we can't destroy life and hope to survive. Industry was based on fossil fuels. Green civilization must be based on renewables. False propaganda that says this is not sufficient serves only the interests of materialistic industrial-age Capital.

Quote:Man cannot live on the Word alone, but on bread grown from the ground. I find your spiritualism Idealistic and your emphasis on the Information Age misinformed.

I prefer Jesus' formulation, thanks anyway Idealism precedes materialism, always and forever. Cynical determinism always fails, because it has no life and no consciousness.

The ground is correct. But the ground, the Earth, and living beings that it grows, are alive, not materialistic and thus dead. Efficient cause and effect from past to future is not life! And life cannot be explained by mechanical cause and effect at all. Life is now. It is creative and spontaneous. A civilization based on taking over industry is no longer sufficient. Production must be based on ecological principles. In an ecology, everything is interdependent and alive. It is not based on death and on domination of one class or species over another.

[pbrower2a]

(07-28-2020, 02:00 PM)Einzige Wrote:

---

Einzige

(07-28-2020, 01:33 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: A Mega-2T would have to feature an intense Awakening, just as you consider the mega-3T to have a longer and more characteristic 3T.

This intensity however could just as easily be an intellectual intensity as an emotive one.

The Missionary Awakening was probably our most intellectually driven Awakening in American history. There was real debate on the anti-capitalist Left in that period in a way that there simply was not in the Boom.Awakening: in other words, there was more real content on the Missionary end of things than among the Boomers.

The Boom Awakening was intellectually weak and shallow for an Awakening. Psychedelic twists are not enough to make a great Awakening in culture. Note well that what followed was a 3T that at times featured extreme anti-intellectualism. Shopping malls, prosperity-cult religion, Reagan, and reality TV. Yuk!

Quote:

Quote:The socialist era is the second revolution of modern times. It began before the civil war, but expanded during the great power awakening or missionary awakening.

To the contrary, we have not yet entered a socialist period. The working-class has not abolished capitalism.

America has become one of the purest plutocracies in the world, almost rivaling what one expects under a military junta or in some oil-rich society in which the royal family owns the oil resources. Plutocracy requires a populace addled into compliance or acquiescence or scared into subservience. Creating a culture in which material gain and indulgence is  the only expression available for most peopole and assuring that most fail is one way to create mass dissent.

Quote:

Quote:However, an unravelling is not a period in which the people (or "we" as you put it) fight against the previous Awakening. Although I admit that among Generation X, there was a strong tendency to do that. Nevertheless, archetypally the unravelling is a period in which the ideas of the Awakening are fought over and further developed. It is not a period only of resistance to the previous turning.

The Unraveling is definitely a period in which the concepts of the Awakening are stymied and resisted. And the entire Millennial saeculum has been one massive reaction against socialism, the idea of the Great Power saeculum. Literally from the word gp, from 1946, socialism and Communism were vilified and attacked Right and Left (the individualist hippies had little time for the Old Left).

As the shopping malls face the wrecking balls, as youth turns away from fundamentalist and wealth-cult Christianity, and as numbing media leave a huge void in life that everyone knows about... the man who has brought out the worst in the American spirit becomes a scapegoat for much that has gone wrong. As an exemplar of wealth without responsibility, power without conscience, and privilege without a soul, Trump is easy to despise.

Quote:

Quote:And our saeculum has not spent all its energy fighting against socialism and socialist-anarchism. In its 2T, it expanded social government to a large degree in the Great Society, and saw the birth of movements as significant as those of the previous saeculum: principally the green movement and environmentalism, upon which all of our future society must be based, but also the ideal of ending war, and a much greater dedication to respecting diversity and freedom among races, genders and religions. John Lennon's song kind of summed it up, he being a member of the visionary war-baby group that includes Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden.

(A) Welfare capitalism is not socialism. Socialism is the abolition of production for exchange and the inauguration of production for use as the generalized mode of production within society. And too the Great Society took place amidst the backdrop of the War in Vietnam- a war against socialism.

But unlike the plutocracy that we now endure, welfare capitalism has a human face. Production for use and not exchange is possible only with cottage industries serving tiny markets, and those are woefully inadequate.  

Quote:(B) The Boom Awakening counterculture was ultra-individualistic and by no means had any real anti-capitalist commitments. Even Bernie Sanders is simply a social democrat - his policies would leave production for exchange untouched.

... and that is the fault of the Boom Awakening: it was more about breaking free from institutions than about reforming them. 

Quote:

Quote:(deleted because of irrelevance to my argument)

Quote:A mega 2T would also strongly emphasize new spiritual movements and new religions. These did occur in the missionary awakening, as they do in all awakenings. But the rest of the seaculum was very materialist and outward oriented. You can't make that into a mega-awakening just by saying a revolutionary movement occurred. Revolutionary movements define the entire modern age, not one saeculum. The Consciousness Revolution 2T brought in the spiritual and holistic new age culture, which is the basis for all the counter-cultures and cultural creatives that will continue to develop in our new world civilization.

Religion and spiritualism are now reactionary with respect to the movement against the dominant civilization. The real content of Awakenings is this movement, socialism.

The Right found ways in which to co-opt religion and spirituality. Religion can offer Pie in the Sky  When You Die as a substitute for prosperity and justice in This World. Note well that the elites need do nothing to create the pie in the sky. But the Right can make life miserable and demand that people endorse their own suffering, even having to praise their exploiters. 

Quote:

Quote: Just because Generation X has been so unusually cynical and resentful of Boomers, does not erase what has been born. But Generation X now needs to fulfill its role as pragmatic managers of the crisis, and help the other generations put our new saeculum on a sound and sustainable basis. It can only do that by accepting and working with the Awakening ideas of the Consciousness Revolution, the Green Revolution and the Green New Deal. It can't be based on Reaganomics, nor on its Marxist opposite alone. And Generation X can also recall its own spiritual awakening in the circa 1990 period, and build its spiritual life and feeling of communion on it. No new civilization today can be based on materialism/physicalism, because it denies the source of all life. All civilizations that are sustainable must be based on spirit.

Your practical vision extends as far as Green Capitalism and no further, because you greatly overemphasize the spiritual and cultural components of historical movements while understating the material aspect

No civilization which is sustainable can be based on capitalism. It can at best mitigate its environmental destruction by selling a "Green" lifestyle- photovoltaic cars, tiny homes, &etc. This is insufficient to do more than slow down environmental degradation.

The world will be quite different when people recognize that they do not need status symbols. People will still need dwellings of some sort, transportation, food, medical care, a narrow range of temperature, and of course some fun and enlightenment. People who hate their lives either obliterate themselves or turn to revolutionary and destructive revolts.
 

Quote:

Quote:We are now in a post-industrial, ecologically-based civilization. This began in the sixties, and so did the Information Age.

This is the prevailing dogma, but it's incorrect. There was no massive change in the mode of production since the 1960s; it is still based on the exploitation of surplus value and the money-commodity-money chain. Capitalism exists as it has existed. The "Information Age" has at best introduced new methods of social control and increased the tempo of productivity within capitalism. And this is all.

Man cannot live on the Word alone, but on bread grown from the ground. I find your spiritualism Idealistic and your emphasis on the Information Age misinformed.

Donald Trump is a throwback who offers the worst of unbridled capitalism, social elitism, and short-sighted devouring of resources and destruction of the environment. He is failure in many ways and success in none.

[Eric the Green]

(07-28-2020, 12:14 PM)Tim Randal Walker Wrote: It's been years since I read the book...but as I recall the cultural waste land of the Gilded Age was somewhat mitigated.  The Progressive generation founded institutes.  Oddly enough, in that respect the Gilded Age was more fruitful than the last 1T.

I think as I encounter history of institutes and culture, that these were mostly founded in the Awakening period from 1886 onward.

[David Horn]

(07-28-2020, 12:26 PM)Einzige Wrote: I firmly believe that the Millennial 1T has more Unraveling characteristics than prior First Turnings. Even the widespread adoption of television, contributing to the social atomization of entertainment, is 3Tish.

Television in the last 1T was a distributed but fully shared experience.  Everyone watched the same shows at the same time, and talked about them as the shared experience they were.  Other than sports, is there anything like the Ed Sullivan Show? That show introduced more cultural icons than any other by far.

[Tim Randal Walker]

I stand corrected, Eric. Well, the next 2T is expected to be of the same basic type as the Missionary, so maybe it will see some institutes founded?

[pbrower2a]

(07-28-2020, 12:47 PM)Tim Randal Walker Wrote: During the last 1T television was basically limited to a handful of channels.  Commentators mentioned that early television gave people common references.  So in that limited aspect it was a unifier.

If television survives as a distinct medium, it may well be viable only if it consolidates down to only a few channels.   Think of much of the programming being news, weather, and sports.  Plus cheap to produce reality shows, cooking shows, etc.

There is plenty of material (feature films, TV series, and even  cable-made programs) that can appear on TV channels. Reruns can play for years on digital subchannels.

Digital broadcasting originally allowed a longer range (about 120 miles) of signal than did the pre-digital analogue broadcasting (about 80 miles in rural areas, 50 in urban). We could see some of these markets merge, which might be clumsy (let us say Baltimore and Washington) or might not. Having South Bend and Fort Wayne in the same TV market might fit, with much of the broadcasting ending up as a few shared network channels (ABC. CBS, NBC, FoX, PBS, CW, and maybe i and My Network (will those two survive?) There will be more room for 'digital' subchannels. 

Programming that has high production costs or expensive rights for which to pay (sporting events and concerts) will be made available on premium services... but eventually owners of the programming will need to find ways in which to sell it if it is on their hands. Should there be a serious downturn in the economy, then premium material may be rare because there might be too small a market.

[Tim Randal Walker]

I think that the golden age of television has come and gone. But the old electronic mass media may still have a role to play.

[Einzige]

(07-28-2020, 02:44 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: No, an awakening is primarily spiritual.

Eh? This is very far removed from the truth. The double rhythm of Apollonian and Dionysian Awakenings is pretty well established by now.

Quote:Your definition of content is restricted by your apparent conversion to Marxism. That's better than what I have seen from you before, but saying "content" is only about a debate over capitalism is false.

To be sure, the Missionary Awakening had other content as well, such as the genesis of the Fundamentalist/Modernist controversy in American Christianity. But its real action occurred on the anti-capitalist Left.

Quote:True, the socialist revolution is unfinished.

The actual revolution has not yet occurred. Wealth redistribution is not socialism- indeed, capitalism requires redistribution in one form or another; Marx calls this "primary" or "primitive accumulatiom". Capital is not self-starting.

[Qupte]But it must be synthesized with the previous revolution now, because without democracy and human rights socialism failed miserably and was worse than what preceded it.[/quote]

Socialism was not attained in the Soviet Union. What existed - State capitalism - was an improvement upon Czarist feudalism.

Quote:And it must be combined with the green movement because otherwise socialist industry destroys the Earth and dehumanizes life.

Socialism is labor abolitionist. Fordist industrialism belongs to capitalism.

Quote:And there is no working class anymore; the class structure is different now and most people are not in it.

Horseshit. Even white collar brain workers are proletarians.

Quote:That doesn't matter. The cyclic connections demonstrate its truth.

It's pure ideology.

Quote:Socialism just became passe, when it was not resisted. The hippies ignored it because it no longer answered the needs of the time, which were for quality of life, not just survival. Socialism only answers material needs. That is not enough on which to build any life, culture or civilization. You Einzige still need the Awakening.

Those hippies took up careers within the capitalist machine which were more simpatico with their new values.

Adam Curtis demonstrates this at length in his Century of the Self miniseries, and in particular the third episode- Capital found that the new lifestyles created by the Boomer Awakening were marketable, and so set about to incorporate them into itself.

Quote:I'm not sure what you mean by this "mode." A totally collectivized society, if that's what you mean, is a pipe dream as fully as it was in the 1840s. It can never be established. The attempt to establish it by revolutionary coercion created monsters.

A fully collectivized society is the ultimate product of capitalism, which interconnects the world and men more every year..socialism is the product of capitalism.

Quote:Capitalism has been a foundation for civilization for 4000 years.

Try 400.

Quote:That's a good point about the War in Vietnam, but the salient point about that war was that 1) it failed, and 2) it was resisted. Resistance to that war virtually created the Third Revolution! That war itself discredited wars against socialism forever.

Then what was Grenada?

Quote:The Cold War ended, and socialism as you describe it faded away and doesn't really exist anymore, and can't be resurrected by revolution or by any other means. There is no trend now at all toward abolishing capital. Socialism only exists now as social programs.

Social programs are not socialist. They exist to facilitate the money-commodity-money cycle by putting money into the hands of the poor and turning them into consumers.

Quote:Exchange can never be abolished, even if one tries to establish it as happening within a collective. Every breath you take is "exchange." That's what life is. That's ecology; that's the new organizing principle. It preserves the value of the individual and the collective at the same time. The only way forward now is synthesis.

Exchange as generalized commodity production for exchange, as the dominant mode of production within society, however, can and must be abolished.

Quote:The "dogma" is correct, and it's far more up to date than going back to Marx.

Marx himself anticipated networked capitalism. Read Fragment on Machines from the Grundrisse.

Quote:you survey the landscape of civilization, you find that the factories have been abandoned and its work style gone. Work now must be smart work. Capitalism continues, but your equation of capitalism and industrialism is false. Since the sixties, the major turning point of our times, it is the machine itself that is the oppressor. Remember Mario Savio's words. Revolution now is people power pushing against a machine to make it stop unless we're free. The information age allows revolutions to be mobilized more quickly. I don't believe it is a cure all and is not without flaws, but the mode of production and organization of society is quite different now than what it was in the days of the assembly line. Knowledge and creativity is at more of a premium now than obedience, time clocks and schedules.

Again,you badly need to re-read Marx. Especially "Fragment on Machines". Marx anticipated the emergence of a General Intellect and the transition to networked production. This isn't se unforeseen development which invalidates Marx.

[Eric the Green]

(07-28-2020, 02:59 PM)pbrower2a Wrote:

(07-28-2020, 02:00 PM)Einzige Wrote:

---

Einzige

(07-28-2020, 01:33 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: A Mega-2T would have to feature an intense Awakening, just as you consider the mega-3T to have a longer and more characteristic 3T.

This intensity however could just as easily be an intellectual intensity as an emotive one.

The Missionary Awakening was probably our most intellectually driven Awakening in American history. There was real debate on the anti-capitalist Left in that period in a way that there simply was not in the Boom.Awakening: in other words, there was more real content on the Missionary end of things than among the Boomers.

The Boom Awakening was intellectually weak and shallow for an Awakening. Psychedelic twists are not enough to make a great Awakening in culture. Note well that what followed was a 3T that at times featured extreme anti-intellectualism. Shopping malls, prosperity-cult religion, Reagan, and reality TV. Yuk!

But the Consciousness Revolution (again, it should NOT be called the Boom Awakening, as I keep pointing out; an Awakening is not the work only of a prophet generation!!) was YUM YUMMY! Like never before. It deepened enormously our understanding of spiritual religion. It was very deep in every way. Just because in our society Awakenings are suppressed, and therefore you and others don't know what happened or what was written and created in them, does NOT mean it did not exist! The best writers of the Consciousness Revolution were Silent Generation members, as were many great prophets like Martin Luther King Jr. and John Lewis.

Psychedelics and psychedelic culture offered the greatest potential EVER for opening up creativity and sensitivity. It was not only enough to make a great awakening, it made one. Just because our predominantly technological and materialist society whose spirituality is co-opted by shallow and oppressive religion cannot recognize and value the continuing richness of these arts and ways of living, does not mean they do not exist. You are well-versed in Bach and Mahler and so forth, but how much do you know of ambient electronic music? Not featured on mainstream outlets or recognized by academies, there are still so many artists of this genre everywhere doing so much great work that it boggles the mind, and even I, who hosts an internet program dedicated to it, cannot possibly keep up with it all.

Our 3T was pretty yukky, but I doubt it was much better than the 1920s, except that the yukky parts lasted longer. Still, in its early years I liked very much the Live Aid, the Hands across America, the Harmonic Convergence, and the wide distribution of new age culture and philosophy, and in the middle I liked the raves and the second summer of love and the fall of communism. But shopping malls were created in the 1T; the 3T just made them into huge indoor extravaganzas.

Quote:

Quote:(B) The Boom Awakening counterculture was ultra-individualistic and by no means had any real anti-capitalist commitments. Even Bernie Sanders is simply a social democrat - his policies would leave production for exchange untouched.

... and that is the fault of the Boom Awakening: it was more about breaking free from institutions than about reforming them. 

The hippies set up a new society based on free exchange and higher consciousness. It was a wonderful demonstration of what is possible. But it existed within the predominant materialistic, capitalist society. Nowadays, such a hippie society is too hard to establish because life is too expensive. Predominant capital has become too concentrated. If a middle class is established again and prices come down, perhaps another experiment can be done in the next Awakening. S&H prophecized that "Pepperland will recur".

The Consciousness Revolution established People Power as the primary method of revolution in our times. It aims to stop the machine and clog up the works until change can begin. But you are correct, reforms are needed once the machine stops long enough for freedom to be reborn.

The CR was not limited to utopian experiments by people in their twenties. Powerful reform movements happened and began. The Great Society reforms belong to the 2T, and they were expanded upon. The Clean Air and Water acts and the EPA were major reforms that followed the largest demonstration in world history, staffed by lots of hippies and hippie-elder visionaries-- Earth Day 1970. There could be no better reform than this, and boomers deserve credit for it. Further ecological reform movements continue from that day to this, and Earth Day was re-established in 1990. The civil rights law was followed by the Voting Rights Act, and then the National Organization for Women founded on the exact date of Uranus conjunct Pluto, June 30, 1966. I felt that cosmic energy and verified the correlation I predicted to exist, because there was "something in the air." Remember that. Ralph Nader began the consumer rights movement in 1966 too. That made a huge difference to the safety of what we buy. Also followed the grape boycott, united farm workers, and other movements for hispanics and chicanos. Gay Liberation followed from the Stonewall riot in NY in 1969, and gay marriage and gay rights were important reforms too. Boomers like me participated in these movements, and also staffed the McGovern canpaign. Although it failed miserably, you can't say that those of us who participated in it were not interested in reform, and it paved the way for left-wing candidates today like Bernie Sanders, who will have some influence on Joe Biden if he is elected.

The Consciousness Revolution contained as much reform energy as any other Awakening or 4T.

Quote:The Right found ways in which to co-opt religion and spirituality. Religion can offer Pie in the Sky  When You Die as a substitute for prosperity and justice in This World. Note well that the elites need do nothing to create the pie in the sky. But the Right can make life miserable and demand that people endorse their own suffering, even having to praise their exploiters. 

Quite so, and thus the need for New Age and other esoteric kinds of religion that are based on inner-discovery and eternal principles discovered within, rather than on just another power-play. The New Age as originally conceived and perceived remains, and un-co-opted, even despite its being co-opted by those who allow themselves to be such.

The elites can build their steel and concrete pies high up into the sky like Trump Tower, but it only lasts a few years, and then they must reckon with the hereafter just like everyone else. They must encounter the real pie in the sky when they die. And while still here, they may also discover to their dismay that health is the only real wealth.

But gaining greater knowledge of where we all have to go within just a few years, seems to me the true "last frontier" of exploration and discovery, rather than outer space. Every civilization but ours has recognized this. True life here on Earth must be related to that truer eternal life beyond this life. But instead of belief and dogma, and perhaps some real experience, now we have the chance to scientifically as well as spiritually discover and learn about this other life. That is our greatest project from now on. This life is pitifully short, and unless something remains within the eternal soul, it is utterly meaningless and fruitless. What we pass on to others here? For WHOM? Others who just die in turn? Life in this modern story is but a walking shadow, a poor player fretting and strutting an hour on the stage, and then heard no more. It's a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Thus the increasing nihilistic perception of today that life has no value, and thus our mistreatment of one another in a disposable society. To create a truly sustainable and reformed material society on Earth, we need to rediscover and further-discover Spirit and Soul. So, keep the spirit alive.

Quote:The world will be quite different when people recognize that they do not need status symbols. People will still need dwellings of some sort, transportation, food, medical care, a narrow range of temperature, and of course some fun and enlightenment. People who hate their lives either obliterate themselves or turn to revolutionary and destructive revolts.
 

I wonder if the next 1T will bring back status symbols, like the ones the previous 1T so established and depended upon.

[Einzige]

(07-28-2020, 03:54 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: The hippies set up a new society based on free exchange and higher consciousness. It was a wonderful demonstration of what is possible. But it existed within the predominant materialistic, capitalist society.

So... capitalism. You re-established capitalism within capitalism

Here. Watch this. It's the story of how hippies were assimilated almost effortlessly back into capitalism.