(07-26-2020, 03:42 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:(07-26-2020, 01:58 PM)Ghost Wrote: I've recently seen some discussions about 9/11 being the start of the 4T and people remembering it. What do you think about this take on it? These are just estimates, so please don't take this as gospel.
A crisis is sort of two things. It is a period where the prophet - nomad - civic generations fall into the active senior, middle and youth time frames. This period lasts roughly a generation, somewhat over 20 years.. It is defined more by the calendar than anything else.
The second I have called the crisis heart. It is set off by a trigger event. The crisis heart has in the Industrial Age typically taken four or so years to run its course. The trigger event makes the regeneracy inevitable. The crisis heart has taken about four years as it takes the US that long to mobilize, learn the weapons of the time, then push back the fighting lines to leave the other side into a hopeless situation.
September 11th was roughly when the configuration of generations began. It is a little to soon to achieve a consensus as to whether it was a little late or a little early. But an event does not cause a generational boundary. The calendar causes such a boundary.
It is also clear that September 11th was not a trigger. There are typically a bunch of catalyst events leading up to the trigger. September 11 could easily count as a catalyst. It did not, however, make a wide spread transition to the new values inevitable. Maybe if the war in Iraq and Afghanistan had been clean victories. Perhaps if superpowers becoming Neo colonial was accepted without an insurgency starting. If the conservatives in charge had proved that the new values they proposed were a good thing and the people of the USA had accepted them. If all these things had happened, September 11th could have become the first example of conservative values triumphing in a crisis.
But they did not. Insurgency has made attempts at colonialism in the Information Age a bad idea. An insurgency did develop. The ideas behind it came from the old values, and were not.likely to lead to an inevitable acceptance of the new values. The war in Iraq did not become a crisis heart.
I think even events like the Oklahoma City bombing (1995) and the Columbine school shooting (1999) were catalysts (from a domestic POV) to this 4T, as they both arguably made children more sheltered, led to tighter security, and made people more aware of domestic terrorism.