12-22-2016, 07:40 AM
(12-21-2016, 05:01 PM)SomeGuy Wrote: That's nice, Mike. So why does this mean that things have to all resolve by 2020? Seems like you just said that long term inequality (you've really been getting into this Turchin/clyodynamics thing recently, haven't you?) could peak sometime in the early to mid 2020s and fall within an accepted time range for a 4T as defined by S & H.
The S&H cycle is two things. One is a historical cycle like the K-cycle which can be dated using historical events. In this sense the 4T will happen when it happens. If it happens in the 2030's the maybe a future S&H fan will draw this 4T as 2016-2040, the 3T before it from 1992-2016, and the 2T before that from 1968-1992 and the 1T from 1946-1968. The millennial saeculum will be 96 years long, like the old saecula. if 96-year saecula were common at one time, why can't we have one now? Shouldn't the cycle be getting longer now that people are living longer? We have a 70-year old president-elect who is taking on a mature adult role. A 96 year cycle implies a 24-year phase of life and mature adulthood would then run over 49-72. The Donald fits right in. So this future cycle theorist could make a good case.
There is no problem per se with this and it would seem natural to a future someone coming fresh to the cycle in 2050.The problem is that it is a radically different outcome to what someone who read Generations and T4T when they were published would have been led to believe. Obviously the turnings given in the book were too early because the authors did not have the benefit of hindsight, which the person in 2050 has. So they got them wrong.
Now the subtitle of Generations implies that one should be able to make predictions using this cycle. And 2016 is a full half-turning later than S&H anticipated. But there is more. S&H claimed that their cycle is about generations--it’s the title of their first book. And in that book they talked a lot of the generational constellation. This is the core idea, or mechanism through which the successive generations create turnings. If you look at recent generations the constellation does indeed serve as a harbinger of a turning change. But if you look at the older cycle it does not work. This is because the cycle is too long. When the Heroes start getting be born (i.e. when the aligned constellation is supposed to form, elderhood is mostly filled with Prophets, while the mature adult phase of life has a lot of Nomads in it. if you go a dozen years earlier you find a time when the generations fit much better into their correct phases of life. People here noted this long ago, when they could see that in the early cycle the people you would see as GC's we all Nomads, and even a Hero once (Henry Tudor). From this came the concept of an early saeculum with longer generations and the modern ones that actual fit in with the S&H constellation model. Problem solved.
But if this 4T is delayed as I described above (i.e. the "problems" of the cycle are clearly solved in the 2030's and not in the 2010's--which is crystal clear to an observer in 2050) then the constellation did not work for this cycle just like it did not work for the older cycles. It's not really a generational cycle--it’s something else. It would be, in fact, Turchin's secular cycle.
The reason I am bring this up is I have been working on a paper in which I introduce generations as an explanation for Turchin's fathers and sons cycles. I have come up with a simple scheme that uses results from a lot of people working independently of S&H which can generation the S&H turnings rather well, all of them back to the Norman Conquest and forward to the most recent 2T. My problem is this scheme is fundamentally inconsistent with a 4T ending after 2030. The model has the 4T beginning in 2008, which is a few years later than the generational model predicts, but could be explained as variation as long as 2008 is clearly identified as a critical election. An excellent indicator of this would be if Democrats captured a third term in 2016--which 6-12 months ago I thought likely and so was working on this angle. So even though this outcome would likely delay solution of the 4T problem the establishment of a critical election in 2008 would be enough to keep the model viable into the future. But that didn’t happen. There is now zero reason to think of 2008 as a critical election, which essentially pushes the cycle back and destroys the idea that generations have anything to do with it, unless somehow, through the election of Trump, the process is now sped up and we see resolution of the 4T during his first and second terms (or what would be them if he doesn’t run in 2020). That is, he really does manage (directly or indirectly) make America great (economically) again.
So I need scenarios on how this can happen.