Quarantine Shaming and Emergence of Groupthink

[pbrower2a]

(03-23-2020, 07:41 PM)TheNomad Wrote: I did not sense the material portrayed any archetype as positive or negative, good or bad.. they seemed rather ambivalent and academic.

Just imagine people predicting in 1909 that the age-old Hohenzollern, Hapsburg, and Romanov dynasties would collapse at the end of what would be the worst war since antiquity, that the cultural consensus of the Victorian Era would implode, that chemistry and the newfangled aeroplanes and horseless carriages would make warfare even deadlier, and that youth born in the latter part of the nineteenth century would become to a large extent the most cynical and callous people who ever lived. Imagine an upheaval in Russia that brings about one of the most brutal tyrannies ever known.The world licks its wounds from the war and even (in most places) gets new and benign governments -- but the era of Thomas Masaryk collapses with the market economy in 1929 to bring to the world the closest thing to an Antichrist that has existed since the time of Nero.  If you were to predict the deeds of that Antichrist to include the Holocaust, then people of 1909 would have asserted that such things are impossible because people do not do such things anymore. 

The future can be an absurdity, but it happens nonetheless.    

Quote:My opinions about the Prophet archetype (or whatever it is you are saying) is from me.  I mean, from me while being influenced by the concepts in the books.  Like I said, I never sensed the authors were empassioned about anything except in The 4th Turning, they billed it as "prophecy" and maintained a rather strong push that something Dark was coming.  The 4th Turning was written in the 90s.

The last Crisis includes some of the most obscene tales of inhuman history ever. Anyone who told us to expect much the same around 2020  would be ridiculed as a hysterical alarmist. Howe and Strauss reminded us of something else: that the biggest difference between the Crisis of 1940 and the Crisis of 2020 was that the atom bomb came into existence only toward the end of the Crisis of 1940, and that if only one country could build an atomic bomb before 1945, practically any country with the GDP of the state of New Mexico can build or buy one now. 
 

Quote:If you ever listened to the audiobook version of 4th Turning (forward narrated by the actual authors) they still seem highly academic and don't really take any passioned stance except at certain moments.  You can actually hear their inflections.

That is the safest way to make predictions of the future: to make them without passion. Making predictions of the future with great passion? That's for religious hucksters who take Revelation too seriously. Seven trumpets, seven seals, Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse...

(Were I God I would have inflicted plagues upon Germany like those against the Egyptians, and deputized a Messiah at the time of Kristallnacht ... and if Hitler did not get the message I would have transmuted some lead object into U-235 and detonated it).

Quote:Even still, I wouldn't expect "passion" to play any role in science.  You seem to pose science as the equalizer, but science is by nature devoid of any passion or values, it simply makes suppositions and hypotheses.  

Histrionics and science do not go well together. People use science to achieve their ends. 
 

Quote:I think I have a really good understanding of the basics of the framework.  How the cycles work, which follows what, how the archetypes fit in and how they are shaped by the Turnings, by how they were raised, and by how their parents raised them and how THEIR parents were raised before.  It seems to be all about that.

As I understand it, adults may see themselves as offering the obvious way in which to raise children, often to give children what they lacked. So why do those parents' children not turn out like them? Because those young parents will not expose their children to the deficiencies of life that those adults experienced as children! The GI Generation raised Boomers, to the extent possible, in a world of material comfort and certainty that GI children lacked in hardscrabble childhoods. In contrast, Boom parents had little problem (in many cases) accepting as a norm that children  would have to shoulder responsibilities of debt early so that their X and Millennial children would work harder and longer for less so that there would be more wealth under the command of investors. 

Quote:Yes, I do think once Prophet diminishes and the values-based approach is abandoned we will see worker ants almost possessed by a spirit of Solving instead of bickering.  That's my opinion, but it's also laid out in the framework.

Maybe -- but the 'unnecessary bickering' becomes necessary again as the world becomes a soulless machine that demands complacent obedience and conformity. As the Awakening approaches, kids who never knew the Crisis first-hand start to ask inconvenient questions. 

Quote:High and restructuring happens when Prophet is passing on.  I don't think that's a mistake or coincidence.  Priority goes to solutions rather than values.  Some say they are not mutually exclusive, but if we are dealing with Turnings.  Why are the problems getting solved when the Prophet archetype transitions from the deathbed to the crib?  I mean, I didn't create that swing, it's from the authors.  They made this format.

No solution is perfect. Mindless consumerism was the lubricant of the High, in which time people believed a smooth-talking second-tier actor who pitched "Progress is Our Most Important Product". Mindless consumerism was the definitive expression of conformity, even if it implied chain-smoking (progress, of course, to an early death from cancer, emphysema, or heart failure. Few people knew that at the time, and the comparative few who did knew enough to keep their mouths shut. Mindless conservatism also kept people from questioning the validity of colonialism (colonies were great places for selling wares to captive markets) or neo-colonialism (likewise) and of course to defend against the Communist menace. 

Deficiency of a virtue leads to people getting that virtue, and eventually that virtue becomes a perverse parody of itself in glut. In the end people question the merit of that virtue as people who created it off go off to the nursing home or the grave -- and we again have a glut. That is a big part of the cycle.