11-22-2017, 07:36 PM
(11-22-2017, 06:39 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: > ... or responsible people decide after the Crisis is over that
> perpetrators of the worst deeds will be severely punished, that
> waging war on the losing side will be treated with pardons and
> amnesties (American Civil War), and that further bloodletting will
> not be tolerated. So long as the bloodletting continues, the
> Crisis is not over.
> Could it be that the more advanced a country is in such measures
> as formal education, GDP per capita, and life expectancy that it
> is less likely to implode in a bloody civil war? OK, there are
> exceptions. India is very poor compared to what Yugoslavia was
> under Milosevic, but it has great ethnic and religious divides.
> At one point I looked at the per capita income in various
> countries and found that China (a few years ago) was right in the
> middle. The only significant country similar in per capita income
> was Mexico. It would have been easy to say that the middle-income
> countries in income were Mexico and China, and that everything
> else was 'rich' or 'poor'.
> Yes, China is 86 (Japanese takeover of Manchuria) to 67 (Communist
> takeovers of outlying areas of China) years away from its last
> Crisis Era, so it is likely in Crisis mode. A development bubble
> invariably leads to a financial panic. How will the Chinese
> leadership deal with that?
Just because there's bloodletting doesn't mean that the
Crisis hasn't ended. Think of the Korean War, for example.
I think that the part of The Fourth Turning book that most
impressed me and stuck with me is the description of the
crisis climax. Here's some text starting with page 257:
Quote:> The catalyst can be one spark or, more commonly, a series of
> sparks that self-ignite like the firecrackers traditionally used
> by the Chinese to mark their own breaks in the circle of time.
> Each of these sparks is linked to a specific threat about which
> the society had been fully informed but against which it had left
> itself poorly protected. Afterward, the fact that these sparks
> were <i>foreseeable</i> but poorly <i>foreseen</i> gives rise to a
> new sense of urgency about institutional dysfunction and civic
> vulnerablity. This marks the beginning of the vertiginous spiral
> of Crisis. p. 257
> Once this new mood is fully catalyzed, a society begins a process
> of <i>regeneracy</i>, a drawing together into whatever definition
> of community is available at the time. Out of the debris of the
> Unraveling, a new civic ethos arises. One set of post-Awakening
> ideals prevails over the others. People stop tolerating the
> weakening of institutions, splintering of the culture, and the
> individualizing of daily behavior. Spiritual curiosity abates,
> manners traditionalize, and the culture is harnessed as
> propanganda for the purpose of overtly reinforcing good conduct.
> History teaches that, roughly one to three years after the initial
> catalyst, people begin acknowledging this new synergy in community
> life and begin deputizing government to enforce it. Collective
> action is now seen as vital to solving the society's most
> fundamental problems. p. 257
> A Crisis mood does not guarantee that the new governing policies
> will be well designed or will work as intended. To the contrary:
> Crisis eras are studded with faulty leadership and inept
> management -- from President Lincoln's poor record of choosing
> generals to President Roosevelt's collassal blunders with such
> alphabet soup agencies as the AAA, NRA and WPA. [p. 258] What
> makes a Crisis special is the public's willingness to let leaders
> lead even when they falter and to let authorities be authoritative
> even when they make mistakes. Amid this civic solidarity,
> mediocre leaders can gain immense popular following; bad policies
> can be made to work (or, at least, be perceived as working); and,
> as at Pearl Harbor, even a spectacular failure does not undermine
> public support. Good policy choices pay off quickly. (In an
> Awakening, by contrast, even the best leaders and plans can fail,
> and one misstep can destroy public confidence.) [pp. 257-258]
> Private life also transforms beyond prior recognition. Now less
> important than the team, individuals are expected to comply with
> the new Fourth Turning standards of virtue. Family order
> strengthens, and personal violence and behavior now face
> implacable public stigma, even punishment. Winner-take-all
> arrangements give way to enforceable new mechanisms of social
> sharing. Questions about who does what are settled on grounds of
> survival, not fairness. This leads to a renewed social division
> of labor by age and sex. In the realm of public activity, elders
> are expected to step aside for the young, women for men. When
> danger looms, children are expected to be protected before
> parents, mothers before fathers. All social arrangements are
> evaluated anew; pre-Crisis promises and expectations count for
> little. Where the Unraveling had been an era of fast-paced
> personal lives against a background of public gridlock, in the
> Crisis the pace of daily life will seem to slow down just as
> political and social change accelerates. p. 258
> When society approaches the <i>climax</i> of a Crisis, it reaches
> a point of maximum civic power. Where the new values regime had
> once justified individual fury, it now justifies public fury.
> Wars become more likely and are fought with efficacy and finality.
> The risk of revolution is high -- as is the risk of civil war,
> since the community that commands the greatest loyalty does not
> necessarily coincide with political (or geographic) boundaries.
> Leaders become more inclined to define enemies in moral terms, to
> enforce virtue militarily, to refuse all compromise, to commit
> large forces in that effort, to impose heavy sacrifices on the
> battlefield and home front, to build the most destructive weapons
> contemporary minds can imagine, and to deploy those weapons if
> needed to obtain an enduring victory. p. 258
> The Crisis climax is human history's equivalent to nature's raging
> typhoon, the kind that sucks all surrounding matter into a single
> swirl of ferocious energy. Anything not lashed down goes flying;
> anything standing in the way gets flattened. Normally occurring
> late in the Fourth Turning, the climax gathers energy from an
> accumulation of unmet needs, unpaid bills, and unresolved
> problems. It then spends that energy on an upheaval whose
> direction and dimension were beyond comprehension during the prior
> Unraveling era. The climax shakes a society to its roots,
> transforms its institutions, redirects its purposes, and marks its
> people (and its generations) for life. The climax can end in
> triumph, or tragedy, or some combination of both. Whatever the
> event and whatever the outcome, a society passes through a great
> gate of history, fundamentally altering the course of
> civilization. pp 258-59
> Soon thereafter, this great gate is sealed by the Crisis
> <i>resolution</i>, when victors are rewarded and enemies punished;
> when empires or nations are forged or destroyed; when treaties are
> signed and boundaries redrawn; and when peace is accepted, troops
> repatriated, and life begun anew.
> One large chapter of history ends, and another starts. In a very
> real sense, one society dies -- and another is born.
> p. 259
It's this "great gate" that's always stuck in my mind, and it's a
concept that relevant to many of the historical examples that I've
looked at.
China's crisis climax occurred in 1949 when the Communist Revolution
ended. India's occurred in 1948 when the Partition War was settled
(though eastern India was on a separate timeline that climaxed in
1971). For Mexico it was in 1921 at the end of the Mexican
Revolution, putting Mexico into a "fifth turning" today.
Although one society dies and another is born, the new society still
inherits memories of the old society. Those memories are passed on to
the survivors' children in highly filtered form (each side remembers
the other side's atrocities, but forgets its own), and those children
begin to act on them in the Awakening era.
