How different is Western Europe's saecular timeline?

[Tuss]

(12-07-2016, 08:01 AM)Odin Wrote:

(12-07-2016, 05:56 AM)Tuss Wrote: Where are you from, Remy?

As a European, I largely agree with you and I think it's approximately the European experience. I used to claim the 2T ended in 1977. Nowadays I settle for 1980. So from the viewpoint of the theory it would seem we were ahead of the US. Or maybe it's just that this forum is heavily dominated by lefties who refused to accept the world had changed until Reagan's second term, by which time they were forced to wake up and smell "the Morning in America". For a good part of the early 80's, they instead retreated to their dens, where they made exciting forecasts, trying to persuade each other how Reagan sure enough was soon to drop the bomb. Subconsciously, nuclear Armageddon perhaps appeared more palatable to idealistic Boomers than admitting they could have been wrong about anything.

Reaganism was just as much an expression of the Awakening as the Counterculture, they are the right and left sides of the same beast. Underlying both was rebellion against the technocratic mindset that had developed over the course of the Great Power Saeculum and took full control during the last 4T, the mindset criticized famously by urban planning theorist Jane Jacobs.

Think you are right in your observation, but the interpretation is wrong. The "rebellion against the technocratic mindset" is not due to a certain Turning. Rather, it's a feature of the Boom generation's collective psychology, which then gets processed through different Turnings. It's what the authors so succinctly hit at in TFT when they wrote: "Boomers sought to be "together" people - not together like the uniformed corps of the 1930s, but together as a synchronous "good vibration". Boomers perceived their generational kinship as what Jonathan Cott called "the necklace of Shiva in which every diamond reflects every other and is itself reflected."" (p. 190)

What we have here is the Boom's disgust for formal authority, order, hierarchy and framework in any shape or form. This repudiation, which deep down is to a large extent probably just a rebellion against the Boom's square Civic parents, will then express itself throughout every Turning in which the Boom has a substantial influence, being molded and processed by the Turning in question.

Hence, during the Awakening, it's about tearing down order and a functional framework in order to make way for a utopian vision of one kind or another, wherein a perfect individualism is combined with a perfect collectivism (which naturally is an impossibility). When that fails you get the privatized version during the 3T, when it's about setting free the "inherent creativity" of the individual, for instance in the workplace by introducing horizontal structures, privatizing everything, shifting responsibility from the organizational to the personal level etc. Finally, in the 4T Crisis, you get this micromanaging surveillance state, the enormous emphasis on rightful moralistic thinking on part of every single individual. In one word, the tyranny of political correctness, which itself is a reflection of trying to maintain order and status quo when the formal institutions to do so (for instance free speech or the separation of personal opinion from dutiful obedience) have already been dissolved.

Just look at a pivotal enabler to the 2008 financial breakdown: the ratings institutes, that were set up to monitor the integrity of bonds, CDO's etc. Turns out they were in private competition with each other for the fees of accepting the financial instruments as legit. Anyone would have realized that ratings institutes must be impartial, and thus could only have fulfilled their purpose as government agencies staffed by salaried officials, with no stake in the promulgation of the product as such. But no, that would have been fulfilling a framework function; it would have smacked too much of statism, order and formal hierarchies. Boomers, like Greenspan, Bernanke and their ilk, preferred an anarchic solution and naturally handed it over to the supposedly self-regulating market. That's your "rebellion against the technocratic mindset" for you in all its glory, Fourth Turning style. And it has the mindset of the Boom generation all over it.

So to sum up, what you have observed is not a mindset that fits only with a certain Turning, but a mindset inherent to a certain Idealist Generation, to some extent maybe to all Idealist generations. Thus, I agree that "Reaganism" also featured it, but in a certain 3T kind of way. I mean, it wasn't like Reaganism went away. Take Tony Blair for instance. If this was a Turning matter and not a generational one, you'd have a 2nd Turning that lasted throughout the entire 90's at least!