03-12-2019, 05:35 AM
(03-11-2019, 05:25 PM)Jessquo Wrote:(03-11-2019, 04:59 PM)Eric the Green Wrote:This is not an alternative view. I agree with most of this comment. The GFC and Geat Recession helped trigger the Trump election which has in turn exacerbated political polarisation in what was already a politically polarised society. That does not mean that the Crisis began in 2008. It just means that the events of the unravelling contributed to the events of the crisis. That's always the how it happens. WW1 in the unravelling contributed to WW2 in the Crisis. The rampant risk taking and extreme inequality of the 1920s contributed to the Depression of the 1930s. Essentially the beginning of the unravelling is what I imagine you deem to be the beginning of the crisis. The difference is I split these periods up by severity. The excesses of the Mission period always contributes to the beginning of the unravelling. The Neoliberal, globalisation and deregulation ideology of the 80s and 90s mission caused an unravelling backlash in the form of Islamic terrorism, economic recentment, political polarisation and financial instability.(03-11-2019, 04:15 PM)Jessquo Wrote:(03-11-2019, 02:36 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: Thanks for your thoughts. Contributions from new posters are appreciated, even if people may disagree.
I like the idea that there are many grey champions, not just one. I thought back in 1997 that Hillary might be one; that didn't quite work out
2008 works quite well as the neo-crash that opened the 4T, much like the last crash did. The Trump election just confirms our crisis condition. People being deceived by demagogues and nationalist racists happened in the last 4T too, and Trump is Mussolini reincarnate, and this also resembles the Dixie hotheads.
I agree very much that this crisis resembles the 1854-1865 crisis more than 1929-1945. I even extend it back a few years before 1854.
I predict this crisis will be longer than average, and the slower rate of change today and longer-lived generations means the saeculum will run it's full 84 archetypal length. Look for the climax in the mid 2020s. Count on it
Our views are similar. I also think that the climax will occur around the mid-2020s and the resolution around 2028. However, I believe that's only a 12-year crisis because according to my 6 turning cycle the crisis did not begin until 2016. The GFC was nowhere near as significant as the 1929 Crash and Great Depression, the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act, the Boston Tea Party, the Glorious Revolution, the extraordinarily high death rate during the settlement period or the desolation of the monasteries. The GFC is similar to the Depression of 1920-21 in significance. That event also occurred during an unravelling, not a crisis.
It's a plausible view. The alternative view is that the economy didn't really recover from the 2008 crash very much, and its affects abroad helped spur the Arab Spring revolts and civil wars and revolutions worldwide, which brought the rise of right wing, authoritarian and nationalist trends in Europe and Britain in reply, and the similar rise of Trump in the USA.
Our 4T is a cold civil war, whose start preceded the great recession, but the rise of the Tea Party after 2009 made it worse and paralyzed congress and statehouses in deadlock for a decade, and meanwhile climate change has continued to get worse too, and helped fuel the revolt, with 2010 as the time of the great oil spill and 2008 the rise of gas prices that helped trigger the recession. And the gun violence crisis is growing too and becoming unacceptable to the millions who rose up against it in the Spring of 2018, and this also continues to fuel the cold civil war. The debt also got worse under Obama for a while, thanks to the recession, and now again under Trump, thanks to his policies.
I imagine GFC stands for the Great Financial Crisis; but 2008 was more than that and generally is known as the start of the Great Recession.
Having read Generations back in 1989, I came to recognize the preliminary situation before the Crisis Era. If the start of the recovery from the dangerous time is the Regeneracy, then the verbal opposite is either a breakdown or a degeneracy.
So imagine a society in which the burlesque shows (or their temporal equivalent) become increasingly raunchy, a celebrity circus becomes a surrogate for taste and moral authority, business practices degrade because people think of quick profits and ignore the long term. economic inequality and class privilege become objects of admiration instead of contempt, and intellectual achievement becomes an object of ridicule. Politics coarsens and becomes increasingly corrupt and irresponsible. Delights of the flesh become sacred and moral restraint becomes old-hat.
Corruption, inequality, and depravity all either create, expose, or intensify the rot that can destroy the alleged structure of society. Corruption may enrich a few, but it wastes economic resources. Inequality never creates a social concord. Depravity entices for a while and then gets boring or offers no satisfying sequel to its devotees. People look to speculation for profit instead of building small-scale businesses that might really pay off in a decade or two after dedicated, hard work; speculation is far easier. 'Easy money', often the result of pushing leverage to a preposterous extreme, becomes attractive while honest toil is for suckers.
Then it all collapses. Speculation fails as economic bubbles burst. Inequality that people could trivialize because people were making easy money begins to hurt. Raunch becomes a bore. The politicians so lauded in the latter part of the 3T suddenly have no solutions. Stores of wealth (sacrilege expressions such as "The Good Lord isn't making more real estate" that people accept as Gospel truth suddenly showing themselves empty) suddenly lose most of their value. Despair and cynicism emerge as defaults when economic failure becomes the new norm. Celebrity circuses lose their appeal, and a culture of mindless entertainment becomes a bore.
The conservative solution is to return to the market as the arbiter of success and failure, fostering mom-and-pop businesses to fill niches that the corporate dinosaurs left behind when everything collapsed. The liberal solution is to alleviate extreme need. So long as people recognize the need to commit to low-yield, long-term investments that require one to build a customer base. the conservative and liberal solutions can intertwine well. It may surprise people that the best time ever in America to start a small business was the Great Depression. Labor, real estate, raw materials, and merchandise were cheap. Taxing authorities could not exact much. Businesses had to rely upon service and the reputation for such instead of spending on advertising for the simple reason that markets were small. Customer loyalty was high in part because an employee with an extended family knew the need to attract the most accessible people (the kinship network) as customers.
Do things go back to that? Maybe. A 4T is not the sort of time in which an Enron or Madoff scam is possible. There is no easy money. Government can spend big on relief efforts and the restoration (or improvement!) of infrastructure, but that must have an obvious payoff. There's nothing glamorous about starting a diner that offers cheap, bland fare in which Mom and Pop open for breakfast, kids come home from school to prepare food and do dishes in time for the dinner customers, and the business closes just around bedtime for small children. That may be all that is available when the corporate giants left over from better times aren't hiring.
If that isn't good enough for you, then contemplate the horror of fascism, which has nothing to offer but suffering and death after it destroys your soul as it destroys scapegoats. Or Bolshevism which gives you nothing but the barest needs (from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs -- heck, a plantation owner got from his field hands that he literally owned and made sure that his slaves did not starve if they worked as demanded and never demanded human dignity) while a bureaucratic elite exploits the masses as severely as is possible even if the State owns everything and decides everything. Or maybe some religious hierarchy that saves your soul by destroying such freedom as you thought God-given.
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.
