Generational Dynamics World View

[pbrower2a]

(05-07-2020, 06:42 AM)John J. Xenakis Wrote: ** 07-May-2020 World View: Crisis era climax

(05-05-2020, 11:38 AM)Warren Dew Wrote: >   True but irrelevant.  David is wrong because Crisis wars are not
>   driven by rationality in the first place.

>   It was crazy for Japan to attack Pearl Harbor, and even the
>   Admiral carrying out the attack knew that and said so at the
>   time. It still happened.  Crisis wars are driven by irrational
>   actions during irrational Crisis periods.

>   Even if a nuclear war would drive us back to the Stone Age, which
>   as you point out it wouldn't, that wouldn't mean that it wouldn't
>   happen.

>   I am curious, John, if you think something other than a war could
>   end a Crisis era.  If Covid-19 were bad enough, could it
>   substitute for a Crisis war?

A generational Crisis era can only end with an explosive genocidal
climax of a crisis war that traumatizes the entire population.  This
is necessary so that people on both sides -- winners and losers --
will be horrified by their own actions, and the actions of their
opponents, so much that they agree to finally stop fighting and take
steps (Recovery Era) to prevent any such conflict from ever occurring
again.

World War II was as horrible as it was because of the criminality of all Axis Powers except Finland and of the criminal and incompetent leadership two of the main Allies (China and the Soviet Union). As such it makes the opposing sides of the American Civil War, the Franco-Prussian War, the struggle for Italian unification, the Mexican Revolution of 1867, and the Meiji Restoration look like gentlemen by contrast. (The Taiping Uprising in China of 1861 was unbelievably horrible by the standards of the time). Whether the Crimean War was one of the Crisis Wars of the general era is in doubt. The Crisis wars of the earl latter half of the nineteenth century were savage enough, but contemplate whether you would rather have been a slave in the Confederacy or the Third Reich. Had you been a subject of the Soviet Union, would you have rather come under the dominion of Bismarck -- or Hitler?

It takes a Hitler or a Stalin (or a Timur Lenk or Genghis Khan) to make losing a war such a horrid fate. I can imagine how bad the American Civil War would have been if instead of promising Emancipation the American leader had told the slaves to rebel against their masters and kill their families -- or in a scorched-earth situation the slave-owners would have massacred their slaves rather than allow them to be freed by Union forces. Maybe there is something to Judeo-Christian ethical principles in a jihad against the Third Reich.

Is the world churning out the likes of Hitler and Stalin now? Or, for that matter Genghis Khan or Timur Lenk? Apparently not. The model is of FDR and Churchill -- win the war and act with mercy toward the defeated. The defeated might come to recognize what a bad idea war is. So waging war can look like a very bad idea for at least the length of at least one Howe and Strauss saeculum.     

   

Quote:What we've seen in the past is that crises like pandemics generate
their own generational patterns that operate independently of the war
cycle.  There is a similarity to the war crisis in that it must
traumatize the entire population and be so horrific that there is a
universal decision to take steps to keep it from happening again.
Then, 58 years later, there's false panic led by retiring people who
are afraid that the crisis will occur again.  The two major American
examples in the 20th century are the Spanish Flu pandemic, which
triggered the false swine flu panic in 1976, and the 1929 stock market
crash, which triggered the false stock market panic of 1987.

This pandemic, unlike the Spanish influenza of a century ago (3T) and the swine flu of 1976 (2T), happens when most of the world is in Crisis mode. Nations are regimenting their economies to fit the needs of the time, with people giving up much to stop the spread of one of the most horrible plagues in history. The disorganized response to the Spanish influenza panic ensured a far-greater death toll than might otherwise have happened. Swine flu? Many of us who lived through it forget it now. People are willing to shut down much of their economies and endure high unemployment, shortages of goods, and the denial of some activities that in ordinary times make life complete just to prevent millions of deaths. 

I see Donald Trump as a lagger and not a leader in this Crisis. That will hurt the agendas of those who backed him so that they could hasten the achievement of their agendas. Failure does not bring about success in other things. CO)VID-19 will cause us to change many of our habits just so that we can attend religious services, concerts, lectures, theater performances, celebrations (we will be missing the 75th anniversary of V-E day), holidays, trips to the beach, bar mitzvahs, and quinceaneras. Even dating is on hold, and many marriages have been deferred. 

Things will be back to normal after COVID-19 is no more, but normal in some different ways. I expect new safeguards for the circulation of air in mass conveyances from submarines to jetliners with subways and city buses in the middle. School will return and libraries will open again. Movie theaters, museums, restaurants, and sporting arenas -- likewise when safe. Institutions will make adjustments or reform -- and those that can't will die. Whatever our class, religion, ethnicity, region, or occupation we all share a common danger; such is a Crisis event. Nobody needs shoot anyone, although this Crisis has imposed mass death typical of a bungled war. We are roughly a week past the number of American military deaths of the Vietnam War and about twenty days away from the number of American military deaths of World War II. 75,000 and counting in America alone.       

Quote:Another possible example, requiring additional research, is the
Sedition Act of 1919, leading to mass extrajudicial arrests of
radicals and anarchists.  This is similar to Lincoln's suspension of
habeas corpus, which happened 58 years earlier in 1861, and allowed
extrajudicial arrests rebels and dissenters.

Not quite. Probably because Trump-haters are rightly more scared of a little virus than of the anger of a petty man with a potty mouth, we don't even have mass protests of Trump policies. If anything, Trump has egged on his supporters to challenge State governments that have yet to open the doors on venues in which COVID-19 could spread like a forest fire up a hill of dry brush and trees under the stress of severe drought. If you think that Donald Trump can go after his political opponents... about half the American adult population consists of dissidents. 

Besides -- Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus amounted to little in practice even if war made it a necessity; the Sedition Act occurred in a panicked mood because many conservatives feared that what was going on in Russia (and for a short time Germany and Hungary) could happen here.  

Quote:At any rate, the interesting thing is that the concepts of a war cycle
saeculum also apply, in a different way, to other kinds of crises,
creating another saeculum that is independent of and coexists with
whatever the current war cycle is.  They also intersect with the "58
Year Rule": a society enters the Fourth Turning exactly 58 years after
the crisis war climax, and a society experiences a false panic exactly
58 years after the other crises.

The telling measure is the extinction of memory of a generation about 105 years after that generation is first born 
and about 85 years after the last cohort of that generation is born.  All their lives a generation rails against what reminds them of what was most ominous in their youth despite such things being tempting to younger people. In the end when too few of a generation are around to stop something that younger adults find attractive that is all too ominous to the generation then dying off, the temptation wins.