(12-15-2018, 08:30 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: That's all good, and a high PSI in the 1850s, 1930s and 2010s is spot on with S&H theory and the Uranus cycle too. And if the crisis breaks in the 2020s, it will still be in accord with the S&H cycle very strongly. Political polarization has been unprecedented in the 2010s, if you go by how the parties are polarized in congress rather than just the fact that some makeshift compromises were arrived at. Charts of political opinions which I'm sure we all have seen also show the high polarization of our time.
In the 1850s the intensifying inequality of economic results created a climate in which the Civil War could become such a ferocious carnage. When things are extremely bad, even war can seem like a glorious enterprise for a soldier. Want to live a miserable life working a tiny plot of land, or do you want to take the wonderful opportunity of a quick and decisive war after which all problems will be solved?
War may solve those problems, but it also kills huge numbers of its participants, especially it is run with the assumption that troops are expendable. But that was warfare a century (and WWI ended a little more than a century ago. Subsequent war now kills masses of people in cities, and war plants that employ thousands of workers are obvious targets of air strikes.
Sometimes someone like Mr. Xenakis who says unsettling things is terribly, if repulsively, right.
The peaks of inequality seem to coincide with weak leadership that accedes consistently to the whims of economic elites whose sole idea of goodness is that those elites get whatever they want. (I am not sure that I have it right, but I thought that the peak of economic stress was in the 1920s and not in the 1930s. The Depression solved the problem of inequality by destroying the abstract stores of wealth, a/k/a paper profits). In the 2010s America rescued the financial system earlier than in the analogue of the sequelae of the 1929 Crash, but without solving the problem of inequality. It's the frog-and-scorpion story or the snake-and-little-girl story all over. Now we find that economic inequality is so severe that the fundamentals of middle-class life such as casual dining and the traditional shopping mall are under stress.
Quote:Do I think the crisis is right on schedule starting with the severe financial crisis of 2008, which almost sent our economy into a full-scale depression, and is set to climax in the 2020s just as the 4T did in the 1940s and 1860s before. This time it will stretch to the end of the decade, and that would be right on schedule and is what is predicted by Howe. A 1T is scheduled to begin in the 2030s, so if a crisis climax is put off until that decade, only then will the Strauss and Howe theory be disproven, along with the Uranus cycle that corresponds with it. Even so, my prediction is that the 2030s 1T will be akin to that of the 1870s, in that a calm consensus like that of the 1950s will be less calm, some basic divisions will still obtain, and some continued activism will happen.
It probably will. Voting patters this time may show a rejection of the Devil-take-the-hindmost ideology that overtook America beginning in the 1980s (start of the 3T), intensified into two corrupt booms that could only implode, and after the Right got complete dominion in American political life outside of some state and municipal governments, what may be the most pathological leadership that America has ever had.
Quote:Perhaps the peer review and further developments to the Strauss and Howe theory don't happen because it was not an academically-respected theory, and Turchin's and others were. But Generations was based on a lot of scholarship and research. Their term "Millennials" became part of our language, and their predictions (such as they were) have been proven correct. Perhaps if it is noticed how correct their predictions are, it will gain more peer review by researchers. But absent that, here on these forums their theory has received a lot of valuable extensions, such as cusps, the double rhythm, micro-turnings, revisions to their anomaly, etc. These may also become part of the theory as it develops by more researchers in the future.
I can understand why this theory fails to get academic respect. Most historians and social thinkers have ideological blinders or the blinders of specialization. A Marxist theoretician might hold that capitalism is undergoing its final crisis on the way to 'socialism' and 'communism' when we simply face another boom-and-bust cycle. Historical specialists have their blinders of history based on their specialties (like war and biographies of the most important people) and distrust general theories that encompass mass culture.
The biological cycle which corresponds to one cycle of Uranus (84 years, which may be mere coincidence) has history repeating, more or less, what happened as the people around at the time who remember much the same political, cultural, and economic climate, disappear from death and debility. Political choices are often more irrational than we might want to believe. My rationality and learning caused me to recognize Donald Trump as the worst thing possible in American politics short of someone using a swastika, a burning cross, or a hammer-and-sickle device as a symbol of his beliefs. Millions of others were excited!
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.