How does a 4T fail? Because it doesn't happen?
There has yet to be a fully-benign 3T. A 3T is never a time of social reform; it is instead a time of people sinking to the more primitive drives of selfish indulgence, including the search for quick-buck (but quick-bust) activities. It is invariably a time of underinvestment in anything other than what facilitates the bubble that eventually bursts and turns a 3T into a 4T.
Beware the inverted yield curve, one in which short-term capital is dear and long-term capital is cheap. Such makes the formation of small businesses more costly, and causes people to think twice about remodeling and small-scale expansions.
It is almost never the 4T that fails; it is the society that does. Just think of Germany in the last completed 4T; much that one could expect to happen in a 4T (increasing regimentation of society, homogenization of mass culture, decisive leaders that the public admired (for the time, at least), big spending on showy infrastructure, assertion of technological marvels) happened. What went wrong is obvious enough. The amoral leadership of the Third Reich unleashed war of unprecedented severity and ferocity and got it back. A totalitarian state chose to exterminate people that it had been treating as scapegoats and treated its conquered people with extreme cruelty. The Western Allies won because they could regiment their economies even more swiftly and tightly, because they better used science and technology, had more effective intelligence (Nazi spy agencies ended up spying on each other), and treated occupied peoples well. It is far easier to make a conquest stick if the defeated people have no desire to strike back.
Maybe in time the generational cycle will mute into insignificance because Humanity will have solved all problems of need and the lack of meaning in life. Maybe educational systems will put emphasis more on making the most out of life instead of on making more stuff. Maybe very long lifetimes will ensure that four adult generations are influential at any time. Thus as in the early part of this century the Civic component of adult life will go from very old GIs to Millennial kids just growing up, such will happen with the Silent as much younger Adaptives enter early-adultho0od. Elderly people taking care of themselves, continuing physical and intellectual activity, and thus extending their lifespans into their late seventies and their eighties is a pattern that I have seen among the Silent and now Boomers. Much of what marks (and mars) a time is the absence of a generational archetype at the time...a 4T being so ferocious due to the lack of a strong Adaptive generation, a 1T being so culturally stale due to the decline of the Idealist generation, a 2T having a culture spiraling out of control because there are few credible Reactive types to remind people of truths then forgotten, and a 3T descending into institutional failure because the Civic types who can establish and run powerful institutions are fading out.
This said, I already predict global warming, should it not be addressed effectively and quickly, could bring about economic, institutional, political, and legal chaos that could preclude gentle solutions as the Crisis of 2100.
There has yet to be a fully-benign 3T. A 3T is never a time of social reform; it is instead a time of people sinking to the more primitive drives of selfish indulgence, including the search for quick-buck (but quick-bust) activities. It is invariably a time of underinvestment in anything other than what facilitates the bubble that eventually bursts and turns a 3T into a 4T.
Beware the inverted yield curve, one in which short-term capital is dear and long-term capital is cheap. Such makes the formation of small businesses more costly, and causes people to think twice about remodeling and small-scale expansions.
It is almost never the 4T that fails; it is the society that does. Just think of Germany in the last completed 4T; much that one could expect to happen in a 4T (increasing regimentation of society, homogenization of mass culture, decisive leaders that the public admired (for the time, at least), big spending on showy infrastructure, assertion of technological marvels) happened. What went wrong is obvious enough. The amoral leadership of the Third Reich unleashed war of unprecedented severity and ferocity and got it back. A totalitarian state chose to exterminate people that it had been treating as scapegoats and treated its conquered people with extreme cruelty. The Western Allies won because they could regiment their economies even more swiftly and tightly, because they better used science and technology, had more effective intelligence (Nazi spy agencies ended up spying on each other), and treated occupied peoples well. It is far easier to make a conquest stick if the defeated people have no desire to strike back.
Maybe in time the generational cycle will mute into insignificance because Humanity will have solved all problems of need and the lack of meaning in life. Maybe educational systems will put emphasis more on making the most out of life instead of on making more stuff. Maybe very long lifetimes will ensure that four adult generations are influential at any time. Thus as in the early part of this century the Civic component of adult life will go from very old GIs to Millennial kids just growing up, such will happen with the Silent as much younger Adaptives enter early-adultho0od. Elderly people taking care of themselves, continuing physical and intellectual activity, and thus extending their lifespans into their late seventies and their eighties is a pattern that I have seen among the Silent and now Boomers. Much of what marks (and mars) a time is the absence of a generational archetype at the time...a 4T being so ferocious due to the lack of a strong Adaptive generation, a 1T being so culturally stale due to the decline of the Idealist generation, a 2T having a culture spiraling out of control because there are few credible Reactive types to remind people of truths then forgotten, and a 3T descending into institutional failure because the Civic types who can establish and run powerful institutions are fading out.
This said, I already predict global warming, should it not be addressed effectively and quickly, could bring about economic, institutional, political, and legal chaos that could preclude gentle solutions as the Crisis of 2100.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.