Generational Dynamics World View

[John J. Xenakis]

** 04-May-2020 World View: S&H vs Generational Dynamics

(05-03-2020, 01:52 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote: > One change to the theory I associate (perhaps wrongly) with my
> meeting with S&H a long time ago. Originally they viewed their
> theory as non-partisan. You could supposedly be conservative or
> progressive and support it. I pointed out that in each crisis,
> there was a conflict between what existed prior to the crisis and
> an improvement that came with the crisis. There were conservatives
> who were the bad guys, and progressives that got to write the
> history books. Kings came to have no power. Slaves were freed. The
> government started regulating the economy and working for the
> people. Fascism was defeated and crisis war ended. ...

> From that meeting on, the crisis was portrayed by S&H as much
> darker.

I don't know when you met with S&H, but this sounds like the 90s to
me.

I separate S&H's writings sharply between the Generations book and
the Fourth Turning book. The Generations book is brilliant, and
synthesizes thousands of sources into generational patterns.

As I've said before, Generational Dynamics depended heavily on this
material. GD is Chaos Theory and Complexity Theory combined
with System Dynamics applied to generational flows. System Dynamics
combined with the S&H Generations patterns tells what can be
predicted, and Chaos Theory tells what cannot be predicted. The
terms "conservative" and "liberal" and "progressive" are totally
meaningless in the Generational Dynamics framework. They make
no sense whatsoever.

I also think that S&H got things pretty much right in the 1995
Fourth Turning book, particularly the prediction of a major
crisis between 2005-25, which I always interpreted as WW III.

The Fourth Turning book was brilliant as well. The problem is the TFT
community has abandoned the theory in that book. In particular, they
completely lost the thread by abandoning the WW III prediction,
essentially rejecting their own theory.

I wrote about this at length in a response to David Horn a year
ago:

*** 25-Jul-2019 War with China
*** http://gdxforum.com/forum/viewtopic.php?...907#p46907

The point is that Neil Howe and David Kaiser completely lost it by
turning the Fourth Turning into a purely left-wing political
prediction. Today, nobody in the TFT community would dare to predict
a world war, since that would mean that Trump would become a national
hero like Roosevelt and Lincoln. It's all political.

(05-03-2020, 01:52 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote: > My casual observation is that Generational Dynamics tries to mix
> orthodox S&H with a traditional conservative perspective. My view
> is that you can’t do that. S&H’s system as extended explains how
> societies can grow and change. How is the cultural inertia of no
> change overturned with a sudden crisis period where many problems
> get solved after long resistance?

There's so much wrong with this paragraph that it's hard to know where
to start. S&H does not in any way explain how societies can grow and
change, except for America prior to the year 2000. S&H says nothing
about any other country, or about America in the 2000s. There's no
such thing as "orthodox S&H," except as a sociological explanation
of American generational changes prior to 2000.

There is nothing "convervative" about Generational Dynamics. On
Breitbart I was called all kinds of names, such as "globalist scum."

Let's take some examples.

Let's start with the word "High" to describe the era following a
crisis war. This word doesn't make any sense, except to America in
the 1950s. It doesn't even apply to Germany in the 1950s. GD uses
the "Recovery Era," which applies to everyone.

Let's take the Sri Lanka generational crisis civil war that climaxed
in 2009. I was writing about this war frequently, and in January 2008
I identified it as crossing over into a full-fledged crisis war. By
the beginning of 2009 it was clearly about to reach a climax. The war
had been going on since the 1970s, and pretty much every news report
in the world was predicting that the war would continue for many more
years. I predicted that the war would end, because this was a crisis
war climax. I was right and almost everyone else in the world was
wrong.

I mention this because it shows how I incorporated traditional S&H theory
into Generational Dynamics, but that it had absolutely nothing to
do with liberal or conservative politics.

After the war ended, Sri Lanka entered a generational Recovery Era.
I won't go into details, but there was absolutely nothing "High"
about it.

So those are some problems with S&H's treatment of Recovery Eras.
Now let's turn to their treatment of Awakening Eras.

S&H describe it as some kind of spiritual awakening that somehow
launches the entire four-cycle saeculum in a way that never made
any sense to me, while it's pretty clear that the saeculum is
launched by the Crisis era not the Awakening era.

I've developed a great deal of information about how Awakening eras
work. How an Awakening era proceeds depends on whether the preceding
crisis war was an external (geographic) war or an internal tribal or
ethnic civil war. I've written about this many times, so I won't go
into detail here, but I've applied this to many examples, including
Paul Biya in Cameroon, Pierre Nkurunziza in Burundi, Paul Kagame in
Rwanda, Yoweri Museveni in Uganda, Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe, Joseph
Kabila in DRC, or, outside of Africa, Bashar al-Assad in Syria, Hun
Sen in Cambodia and Maithripala Sirisena in Sri Lanka.

So I hope you get the point, Bob. Generational Dynamics is definitely
not a "mix of orthodox S&H with a traditional conservative
perspective," an idea that's totally absurd.

So I'll repeat what I wrote above. Generational Dynamics is Chaos
Theory and Complexity Theory combined with System Dynamics applied to
generational flows. System Dynamics combined with the S&H Generations
patterns tells what can be predicted, and Chaos Theory tells what
cannot be predicted. GD applies to all countries at all times in
history, not just America and England. (In fact, I've even proven
that, under reasonable assumptions, it applies to any evolving
intelligent life at any place in the universe. What does S&H say
about that?) The terms "conservative" and "liberal" and "progressive"
are totally meaningless in the Generational Dynamics framework. They
make no sense whatsoever.