12-18-2020, 05:28 AM
(12-02-2020, 05:18 PM)Tim Randal Walker Wrote: Repeating myself.....
Trying to be optimistic about the future.......
1. Crisis of 2020. (weak and/or non-standard 4T?). 2. Weak 1T? 3. Awakening (likely of the Apollo type). 4. Unraveling. 5. Projected Crisis of 2100. 6. "High"? 7. Awakening (likely Dionysus type).
With number 7 I am projecting about a century into the future, based on the double rhythm. Trying to project beyond that starts to seem like science fiction.
(Note-some countries may have a double rhythm that is reversed to the USA, so their next 2T may be of the Dionysus type).
1. COVID-19 looks like the Crisis event, as it causes mass death on the scale of a costly war.
2. That depends on whether Americans largely renounce the worst aspects of the recent Unraveling or institutionalize them. It will be a sordid 1T, and so will be the rest of the upcoming cycle, should America fully accept the Reagan-Trump ethos in which the sole purpose of life is to reward those already rich and the culture goes completely commercial and low-brow.
3. This depends upon the consensus of cultural identity emerges at the end of the Crisis of 2020. My guess that the optimum for an economic elite that wants a reactionary world view would sponsor country music and hagiographic treatments of the economic elites. (Yuck!) Such would surely inspire a reaction that brings about the diametric opposite, which would be brainy, international, antiquarian, and anti-rich. Count in such a case for an era of major reforms.
4. Way too early except to express what sort of world emerges in a 3T: hedonistic, materialistic, mindless, and inequitable. Unraveling eras always end in political and economic ruin.
5. Global warming could about then culminate in horrific levels of economic and social distress, especially if food supplies dwindle with an increasing population. Such could bring about Hitler-like leaders all over the world... even in America!
Our world must either reverse, halt, or greatly slow global warming just to prevent disruption in the food supply about 60 years from now. America, as one of the biggest consumers of energy, must greatly reduce its use of fossil fuels. Let's recognize this reality: however much we take our food supply for granted, our bounty of food production is closely tied to climatic realities of temperature and precipitation. Unpleasant as a blizzard may be, farmers need them for some of the richest crops of grain in the world. There is no technological fix for hunger, but there is one reliable social fix: mass death on a scale that none of us can excuse.
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.