08-04-2020, 11:02 AM
(08-04-2020, 09:11 AM)David Horn Wrote:(08-03-2020, 08:57 PM)RadianMay Wrote: Thus, I do believe that 2008 is clearly not a trigger on the level of the 1929 Depression. If anything, it brought even less change than the 1970s recession, which brought with it the Modern Monetary Theory. Post 2008 just seemed like business as usual.
The current state of things and the apparent desynchronisation between generational constellation and turnings is really puzzling to me.
I'm surprised that you are surprised. This is one case where we are actually fighting the last war, and the tools from that war seem to be working ... at least for now. What's still TBD is the absence of moral outrage by the supposed capitalists. Will they accept the idea that the government will always bail them out, so being great capitalists now means cronyism on steroids? If so, then capitalism has committed suicide. It just hasn't made the transition from the gut to the brain.
A system built almost entirely on private gains and socialized losses will expedite the condition Thomas Picketty described in detail in his magnus opus Capital in the Twenty First Century. Eventually, the imbalance in wealth and power will lead to a state of disorder that the French know only too well. The alternative is an intervention at a massive scale before the rot gets that great, but the only force capable of mounting that intervention just selected as their leader an elderly Silent ill disposed to doing any of that. That's a bigger worry, frankly.
And that last paragraph, David, is why I’m not optimistic (hopeful, yes) about the resolution of this saeculum crisis. The federal political leadership on offer—current or prospective—just does not align with the generational constellation described in the 4T book. Donald Trump, Mitch McConnell, Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, Steny Hoyer, Jim Clyburn, Joe Biden, Susan Rice (if she’s selected as the VP candidate)—each one either a Boomer or a Silent. If we are 4T, shouldn’t these people be mentors, not leaders, by now? We have a sclerotic generation of leadership that won’t yield to a younger generation whose futures are challenged as never before, at least not in my lifetime. By all rights, Barack Obama, as a Gen Xer, should have been the political agent of lasting transformation, especially considering that the constellational timing was ripe, and he had a Democratic supermajority (to start) with which to effect real “hope and change.” It didn’t happen, and maybe that was this saeculum’s only “bite at the apple” to resolve a crisis era successfully.
I’m beginning to weigh the four different crisis resolutions outlined by Strauss & Howe, and some of them are quite discomfiting, especially if you’re a Millennial or Zoomer with much of your life ahead of you. But with the upcoming election, it’s perhaps too soon to seriously contemplate potentially dire outcomes. And if this “crisis” era indeed stretches to 2030, as Neil Howe expects, maybe some of us are just too impatient to see how this saeculum really plays out.