Generational Dynamics World View

[pbrower2a]

(03-01-2022, 11:50 PM)Eric the Green Wrote:

(02-28-2022, 04:08 PM)galaxy Wrote:

(02-28-2022, 02:27 PM)Eric the Green Wrote:

(02-27-2022, 10:42 PM)galaxy Wrote:

(02-27-2022, 10:07 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: We have arrived at a point similar to when FDR declared the USA the arsenal of democracy.

Not the same turning, but I'm beginning to feel like Ukraine is acquiring the same symbolism as West Berlin had.

Everyone's posting "слава україні" all over the internet now...it's not much of a stretch to imagine that, if there had been internet in 1963, those posts would have been "ich bin ein berliner."

The speed and universality of the spreading of this news is something to behold. Everyone is talking about it. People I know who are completely apolitical and barely follow news know all the details. Regardless of how this ends, there is something big happening in the 4T West. This is not going to fizzle out and is not going to be forgotten.

It's also interesting to watch the behaviors of countries around this. For the West, even though they're technically not involved, it's obviously a 4T war, while for Ukraine it's very clearly a 1T war* (and it's only becoming more clear that the US History analogy is the War of 1812). While the West continues to panic, Ukraine continues to respond with a truly incredible level of calm and unity.

It really does look like regeneracy has arrived in Europe. Suddenly all these countries are relearning how to do quick and decisive action. They are quickly losing the 3T apathy that they've held onto deep into this turning. There seems to be almost a feeling of these countries "rediscovering" that such a thing is possible by "following Ukraine's example." The sense of general powerlessness against crises that has pervaded Western populations and governments since the 4T began may be beginning to weaken, and not a moment too soon.


*Ukraine's 1T very clearly began following the revolution in 2014. Russia's 1T may have also begun in 2014, or it may have been a few years earlier, but certainly no earlier than 2008 - in any case, 2014 is when the 1T mood became firmly set in place in the country, anything preceding was some level of 4/1 hybrid.

And as another saecular note which some may find useful, the actual fighters are mostly Adaptives (all of those under age 35-40 or so), and Zelensky is a Civic (born 1978, an equivalent birth year in the USA's cycle would be around 1992 or 1910, roughly).

Ukraine is the Checkoslovakia of this 4T. The turnings are nearly universal now. But certainly this is 4T for the America/British saeculum, and Europe is almost the same or maybe a year or two behind the USA. This can only be a 4T event for Ukraine, if the turnings have any meaning. This is a fight for survival. Ukraine is on Europe's cycle now, not Russia's. But Russia doesn't really have turnings, because it is an authoritarian state that never changes or grows. The saeculum only occurs in countries that progress through the planetary dynamic.

We've been over this...any society with a concept of "history" and "generation" will have turnings. That's almost every society in the modern world except for literal hunter-gatherers. Russia and Ukraine are both 1T, with their 4Ts beginning in the late 1980s or early 1990s and lasting until 2014.

Here's a map:



The whole 1T region entered a 4T around the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union. They all exited the 4T sometime between roughly 2006 and 2014 (general trend: further west = entered 1T earlier).

*Algeria entered a 3T in 2011 while most of the Arab countries entered a 4T. I'm not sure exactly how it ended up almost exactly one full turning behind all of its neighbors as well as its former colonizer, but it's definitely there.
*Ireland is having what must be the mildest 4T in all of history.

That is a cool map. You do well with graphics and concepts. As usual I don't quite agree with them, although I don't claim to be right. We've been over this, but remember if you can my point, that a saeculum is a movement. All movement is from one place to another, and all movement travels in cycles. No vehicle can move unless it be perched upon a circular accessory. So, saecula exist in societies that are moving. The may go into reverse for a while, as the USA has for 40 years. But eventually they decide whether to keep moving or stop moving. When they stop, the hurricane has dissipated and lost steam and it loses its eye and becomes a mere tropical depression. That's what a saeculum is.

The word saeculum comes from Rome, because the 100-year cycle was detected and described by observers, and was celebrated in a great festival as a 1T began with the Pax Romana in the time of Caesar Augustus. There was some movement in society, and despite many slaves there, many common people participated in the affairs of state and society. Still, it was slow movement and slow progress by modern standards. It was like a level 1 hurricane. The empire replaced the republic in that very 1T, and the movement got more tepid and finally the societ was exhausted and the movement and the saeculum stopped.

In the Dark and Middle Ages, there was virtually no saeculum. S&H could not define one. Mike has tried, but the result is something in which turnings are rather vague and arbitrary. Dark and Middle Age society had no saeculum because it did not move anywhere. It did not progress. Children did what their fathers did. There were no generation gaps, and no difference between generations. So, no generation cycle. 

And this is a key point: hurricanes need to soak up a lot of water, and it needs to be warm. The saeculum got stronger in The West because more people were involved. As the Enlightenment and the Revolution brought down the barriers to most people participating, the saeculum speeded up from 100+ in the early Renaissance to 80-84 years. The first one to speed up was the one that ended with the Revolution; it lasted about 90. The second one ended in the Civil War; it may have been somewhat truncated as the North speeded up while the South stalled, and had to be forcefully joined to the northern saeculum. So, being a slave medieval society, it may not have even had a saeculum of its own.

You have a suggestion of why the former Confederacy took so long to escape the impediment of its past. The people in best position in which to repudiate that past were the Freedmen who had no ties to the past. They were forming commercial and educational institutions and even exercising political power -- except that such was crushed. Fifty years or so after the Civil War the complete destruction of such activity appeared in the formation of the Second Klan (which had many of the characteristics of Italian fascists and German Nazis before those demonic causes came into existence). This is the time in which the bulk of the Confederate statues went up, symbolizing the complete and utter defeat of the hopes of Southern blacks.

Southern whites could define the New Deal "for Whites only" in an Apartheid-like system about a decade before Apartheid arose in South Africa. That's one way in which to 'stunt growth'. World War II would challenge that and establish the seeds of destruction of that order. America was fighting for its life against a racist slave system. Black soldiers returned after having proved themselves competent fighters. Northerners who usually avoided the South as boring and depressing 'discovered' Florida, but had to go by car on surface roads like US-1, US-17, US-19, US-23, US-27, US-31 (only to Montgomery), and US-41 through "Kukluxistan". To be sure, many of those who went by road were relatively old and were in too much of a rush to confront it, but they did tell their kids.

Knowing that a disproportionate number of the white people who would eventually challenge the practices of "Kukluxistan" were Jewish, I can just imagine some of the travelers' tales.

Aside from the less-consequential stories of tourist traps in Florida and giving a warning to keep the family dog out of reach of alligators who exploit the aggression of the top predator of the northeastern quadrant of the United States



(In a violent confrontation with one of these, you lose, so it is above us in the food chain; for a large predator that potentially has Man on the menu, all that keeps us safe from these fellows is good behavior. Ours and theirs. Who tamed whom?)


to turn dogs into dinner came stories of separate waiting areas, "NO COLORED PERSONS SERVED HERE", and substandard living conditions (poor for most whites and horrible for blacks), and the heavy use of a certain abominable word in contrast to the then-neutral word in Yiddish (it is the literal translation of the German word for "black", as Yiddish is really a German dialect)... their kids were more judgmental. That fueled the Civil Rights struggle. Only after its success could the American South join the gentlemen's club, so to speak.


The following two saeculum could be called level 4, very well-defined, with more and more people involved. The speed was a little faster than average too. Until neoliberalism and Reagan came in, that is. The saeculum has slowed in our recent third turning, which was 24 years long, and although some 4Ts are shorter and concentrated, ours will drag on as long as a typical turning of any kind. Or, it may never end.

Quote:Russia does not progress. It is stuck in authoritarian rule, and may never escape. Such societies are like ancient or medieval empires. The best they can hope for is a level one hurricane lasting 100 years or more. The best you can say about Russia is that it has had moments when a hurricane seemed to be forming, and then it falls apart again. The 1860s was some kind of awakening under tsar Alexander II. It was crushed in 1881 under Alexander III. It did not dissolve into cultural conflict between factions like a typical western 3T. It merely was repressed. Then came the great war and the Revolution. A 4T began in about 1902 that lasted for well over 40 years, without a single break. Following this was more stagnation. Some kind of awakening gradually took hold, climaxing in the 1990s. But since Putin took over, the seaculum has stalled again. It is not in any turning that I can discern, certainly not a 3T. It has just stalled ever since then, with no turning going on at all. I guess that's a bit better than saying it has no saeculum at all over these years since the 1860s, but certainly before then it never had any turning at all. And it just can't seem to get one going that continues consistently. It is not a modern nation. It is a creepy totalitarian stick in the mud and a menace to everyone else. No nation can be in a saeculum if the people are not allowed to participate in it, and in which no change occurs.

I wouldn't be so sure. I have suggested that smart and curious American youth learn Russian and imbibe deeply into Russian intellectual life, and I do not take that statement back. Surely you saw the 2014 Winter Olympics, probably most memorable for the pageantry of the opening ceremony. We Americans are reminded that Serge Rachmaninov and Igor Stravinsky aren't "ours". Putin is about the same age as Nicolae Ceausescu was at the end of twenty years of tyranny. In democracies, very old leaders like Churchill in the 1950's and Biden today know that there is much  that they can't get away with. Putin has been surrounded by yes-men at a time in which his judgment and rational processes fail him. The great figures of Russia in science, art, music, and literature have shown that Russia can do much right. Politics and economics? Not so much.

The political and economic heritage of Russia can change rapidly and even suddenly. So it was in the American South.

Quote: That is the danger that we face in the USA too. Our neoliberal 3T has not entirely ended, and we have not faced up to our Crisis. We have an almost 80-year old president, the only viable leader available to us, who is trying feebly to push and push and get the wheels moving again. But so far he can't seem to get it beyond some potholes in the road, especially a pothole named Joe Manchin. But the window for possible action on the climate emergency is closing. We have this decade only left to stave off tipping points to hothouse earth, and nothing to look forward to but continued disaster and decline after then if we don't act now. All the result of the neoliberal bullshit that Americans sheepishly followed into the ditch during the late 2T and 3T. The vehicle of the saeculum, the movement of the hurricane, is still stalled in this ditch.

"Our" economic elites have done everything possible to commit us to a perpetual 3T as a time of increasing depravity in commerce, culture, and politics. It can be lucrative, but it is still rot. Those elites are out of touch with realities that can and will hit them hard because those elites can shield themselves from the effects. They will not be the peasant farmers of Bangladesh who will lose their livelihood feeding textile workers who might be their cousins. They will not be the ones who must watch their backs as middle-class certainties give way to the perils of the ghetto. (That's not racial; some white people are becoming quite "ghetto" in behavior even if they have not abandoned "whiteness". I'll avoid meth and opioid addicts irrespective of ethnicity). They will have overseas bank accounts safe from expropriative taxation.


OK, Biden stumbled on some words in his State of the Union Address last night (March 1)...but with a few adjustments we get the idea, plain and clear. It is a call for a new way of life well rooted in the best that America has been. Much of our problem is crony capitalism, and if you want to know how bad crony capitalism is when it permeates everything, just look at Russia. Just look at the cost of insulin for Type-I diabetics.

Much of a 4T is the squeezing out of bad habits, many of those arising from the recent 3T. Neoliberal economics is one of the bad habits that must die.