Looking Toward The Next High

[pbrower2a]

(05-24-2018, 06:59 PM)TheNomad Wrote:

(05-24-2018, 06:28 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: I think that in saying that the wars domestic and foreign will be less severe and not armageddon or holocaust, that I am not doing the boomer thing you suggest. Many others in these forums believe things will be much worse. From the resistance to change I see, I can't see that it's anything but a brick wall that needs to be punched down. I don't think it's because I want it that way; it's been that way for 40 years, and increasingly so. And it seems to me that a crisis of the kind that S&H predicted will happen because of it.

I don't think the airport thing is anything but an irritant. No I certainly don't think 9-11 changed America. It was an excuse for the military industrial complex and "neocon" war mentality just to continue as it had been before the Cold War ended. It was business as usual resuming, not because boomers wanted it that way, but because the MIC wanted it that way. And there are wars in all turnings; a 4T war has been a total war fought with the intent of gaining unconditional surrender; Iraq and Afghanistan were not that.

I totally get that you don't want to call the other side evil. Rhetoric can be a problem, but I have never subscribed to the idea that it's the main problem. If people are determined in their actions solely by reaction to bad rhetoric, then they are not paying attention. It's the problems themselves that are the problem, not how we talk about them.

I'm sure we want a lot of the same things. There will be plenty of people in America who do so that a consensus will eventually develop, but more new folks have to come on the scene and older ones leave, and a lot of the folks resisting change will need to be convinced or forced to stop resisting and cooperate instead of being so attached to the ideologies they hold: free market, religious right, etc.; a resistance that unfortunately makes a crisis necessary that hasn't happened yet.

I don't buy that today's 18-year olds are artist archetypes. I know David Hogg calls himself a millennial, and so do the others. Only the 14-year olds are artists. We can disagree about that though, and that's cool. I just see no basis for speeding up the saeculum. It is 82 years long, and is proceeding just as I predicted. We can't always get what we want. The 4T may not be as severe as some fervent boomers or others want, but it may not be as quick and easy as you or some others prefer either. I don't quite understand why some S&H followers somehow think the saeculum will suddenly speed up and go by faster than they said it would, especially in regard to the lynchpin of the whole cycle, the great crisis that returns every 80+ years. We ain't seen nothin' yet.

The seeds are being planted for a 1T, because the possibility exists now that a millennial surge supported by older folks in positions of power facilitating it will establish the moral and political tenets that will power to victory in this 4T, and be the foundation for the 1T consensus to come. That was no different from what happened with the declaration of independence, or the reaction to the Dred Scot decision in the abolitionist movement, or the New Deal and the reaction to Pearl Harbor. Lots of fighting was still ahead, and it's ahead of us now, just as the students at the March for Our Lives rally say.

So describe the continued Crisis as you see it.  Who is involved at all generational levels, what exactly will be the war of unconditional surrender, who fights in it, by what mandate do you see people sending millennials and artists into the woodchipper, etc.  Fighting as you describe it mean these people are going to sign themselves up and their protective parents are going to let encourage and support them.  Remember, Nomads are too old to be fighting this war, the one thing I learned about Heroes is they do not get sent down the drain under any circumstance. 

Artists are 18 right now if you keep the bracket at 2002.  Born after the beginning of Crisis, never knowing what it was like prior to the Crisis, coming to age IN the Crisis.

The successful completion of a Crisis requires that the bad 3T behavior that precipitated the Crisis or made it particularly destructive must die. For America, that implied that the tendency toward a bubble economy had to be so discredited that the stock market valuations of 1929 and would not reach the nominal highs of the 1929 bubble until 1952, that the pseudoscience of eugenics would need to be disgraced (the racist ideology of Nazi Germany would be exposed for its consequences while out of practical concerns America would have to give opportunities to ethnic groups then marginal as recent immigrants, as it is hard to keep former "Major Kowalski" or "Lieutenant Commander Rossi" out of the middle class after the Second World War ended), the mindless mass culture of the 1920s would have to become irrelevant, and gangsterism would have to be extirpated.  If we Americans don't solve those problems ourselves, then maybe some other power will do such for us on terms of their choosing -- as we did to Italy, Japan, and in Germany (at least the American zone of occupation).

No, we didn't have to extirpate Goethe, Verdi, or Hokusai. Of anything, Americans were told to appreciate them if they so desired. Goethe didn't put people into concentration camps, Verdi might as well have been an American, and Hokusai had nothing to do with the Bataan Death March. But we did put an end to fascist politics. We closed the concentration camps and torture chambers -- and prosecuted those who made them so horrible much as we prosecuted Capone-era gangsters.  (The Nazi Party was the worst syndicate of organized crime ever -- was it not?) We gave the vote to women in Italy and Japan because women were less likely to fall for extremist, militaristic causes than were men. We insisted that racism and religious bigotry be expunged from the educational process along with militarist values.

If we do not extirpate the neo-con militarism, gangs such as MS-13, the influence of the Russian Mafia upon politics and business, the gun culture (sport hunting and target shooting exempt), and the extreme economic inequality... then someone else will.

The generational cycle may not predict when 4T events culminate in the establishment of a new social order, but it certainly establishes a window of time in which such is possible. Events that define the end of a 4T happen rapidly. At some time, the Apocalypse loses its sustainability. The taste of destruction becomes unpleasant even for the victors. That will be in at most five years. From the Boston Tea Party to the ratification of the Constitution was slightly less than twenty years. From the Panic of 1857 to Juneteenth was about eight years. From the nearly-simultaneous accessions of FDR and Satan Incarnate in their respective countries to V-J day was a little over twelve years. 


One biological reality has made this Crisis Era different from the others: the increased life-spans that have allowed people to remain active in public life into their seventies and eighties. It is worth remembering that Abraham Lincoln, who was only in his fifties, was seen as an old man in his time. FDR was 62 when he died. In the 2020 election, Boomers may still be relevant -- and the youngest will be 60. Six-zero. With good habits (avoiding tobacco and heavy drinking, having a reasonable weight, and remaining intellectually and physically active) that the GI generation introduced, there will be plenty of active, if undeniably old, Boomers. But if the optimum for a Crisis Era is an aging Idealist, the second-best choice is a Reactive who has little of a personal agenda, respects precedent and protocol, eschews corruption, has no cynicism, and is erudite and flexible.  Obama may have been the ideal post-Crisis leader, but we got him early. He may not have been ruthless enough to deal with the well-heeled opponents who could still buy the political process, but at least he did not sell out to them. Trump did sell out to them after promising everything to everyone, and that is a disaster. 

Unless Republicans succeed in rigging the next midterm (seemingly anything is possible in a 4T, much of it bad) and the next Presidential election, we just might let elections solve our political pathology.