Thoughts On Where We Are, and Where We're Going

[Bob Butler 54]

(09-11-2018, 10:15 AM)David Horn Wrote:

(09-11-2018, 08:35 AM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote: Not a 4T!  A 2T!  Mumble...  

There is a slight uptick in the spiral of violence.  Suicides are pushing for a splash before exiting the scene.  This does not seem linked to any particular political movement, so I am not counting it as a large change in the spiral.  The media is exploiting and boosting the trend by reporting it to an extreme.  You have to kill more people to get lots of impact for your act.  As they once put it, anything to sell papers.  It is blood money.

I think this may be the end point: muddle through and let the next 2T settle the argument philosophically … or not.  Our grandchildren may decide to chop the country into separate nations, and let the teams relocate to areas they find more to their liking, though I see that as a 4T-type effort.

Come to think of it, the blue awakening was pretty much a new thing.  The key central emotional parts of the early American awakenings were highly religious.  The 2T as a social and political movement was pretty new with the 1950s and 1960s, with Martin Luther King and successor movements.  This may be what I'm seeing in the change in the pattern of history, a shift from the Industrial Age pattern to the new age.  Things move faster in the 2T.  The new values, once they go critical, are social, political and implemented faster.  There isn't a slow brewing of an unravelling.  Think the Civil Rights Act, the wave of environmentalism, the softer implementation of the Domino Theory.  The unravelling seems dominated by a counter awakening, an attempt by conservatives to turn back the clock.

If the nature of cultural change has already happened, if we have already seen a new age 2T, we are seeing a new style of transformation for the new age.  The new transformation might be something unlike the Industrial Age 2T or 4T with the Conciseness Revolution as a model for what we are likely to see.

But I will stick to what I have been saying about not being in a classic Industrial Age 4T.   There is a time in the late 3T to early 4T where the new values are shouted loudly enough for people to know them, but the government and people are not united enough to try to implement them, and the eventual Champion has not been elected yet.  The military catalysts (Lexington Green, Fort Sumter, Pearl Harbor) have not occurred yet.  The war hasn't started yet.  Maybe a brave speech has redefined what we are fighting for, such as the Four Freedoms speech.  Maybe the big speeches have to wait until near the climax, such as the Gettysburg Address, Lincoln's Second Inaugural or the Iron Curtain speech.  The Constitution, the post Civil War amendments, the formation of the United Nations, become attempts to nail the thing down, a 'permanence' of the new values for a while, a sign that the 1T has arrived.

But we have not seen yet a nation united in purpose, a successful attempt at making the new values universal.  What we have seen is the see saw, with the conservatives and progressives taking turns at having their innings.  We progressives certainly hope the see saw will flip at least one more time, perhaps thee more times.  It is not clear that Trump has totally discredited Reagan.  The middle of the country could blame Trump, not a failure of Reagan. 

We will see.  I have often called cultures stubborn.  It seems that the S&H fanatics are no exception, would prefer to stick with seeing the old pattern.