skipped an archetype like time before last?

[Kinser79]

(05-13-2019, 10:18 AM)David Horn Wrote:

(05-12-2019, 10:19 PM)AspieMillennial Wrote:

(05-12-2019, 06:32 PM)Kinser79 Wrote: PBR, there is no such thing as a failed crisis.  Every 4T in history has been resolved at some point.  Often through a war or civil war.  Sometimes not.  Often with economic calamity, but sometimes not.  War and economic hardship do not in themselves indicate one is in a 4T.  Indeed in the so-called American High of the 1950s there was not one, not two, but four recessions.  There was also a very bloody war--though most people seem to have forgotten about it these days.

The point of a 4T is that it ends the saeculum.  This is an inevitability.  I believe that the current 4T will fizzle out setting the stage for the Mega Crisis which is a whole saeculum long and will end approximately in 2100.

How bad is a mega crisis?

First, you have to agree that such even exists, which is dicey at best.  To accept the idea of a Mega-Crisis, you have to accept the idea of the Mega-Saeculum.  The idea is attractive, since it looks like a social science equivalent of fractals: each level made of larger versions of the same "shape" as the level below it.  Thus, a mega-saeculum consist of four standard saecula, each having an equivalent nature to one of the turnings within that saeculum.  Taken to extreme, Turnings can then be deconstructed into roughly 5-year segments, and so on, until the idea becomes totally ridiculous.

I would disagree.  It seems that on average each turning has four phases where it establishes itself, has its quick and dirty ideological cores established, these two cores duke it out, and then resolves itself. 

As for large civilization archs the Mega-saeculum fits well.  In what I call the Late Medieval Mega-Saeculum we had the Arthurian Saeculum which acted like a 1T, the Reformation the 2T, the English Civil war being 3T with the Napoleonic wars being a 4T.  At the end of the Napoleonic wars feudalism in the case of Western Europe was dead.  Thus started the Modern Mega-Saeculum around 1814ish with the 1T lasting until at 1871 at the latest, which probably explains why Europe is about 10-15 years behind the US we started the Modern Mega-Saeculum earlier than they did, perhaps because we had less underbrush that needed to be burned off. 

The Cold War acted as the primary driver in the current Saeculum and indeed the numerous culture wars in Western Europe and the US clearly indicate that the past saeculum was a Unraveling. 

Where it becomes ridiculous is attempting to make cycles larger than the Mega-Saculum or smaller than the Micro-turning.  They may or may not exist, but it becomes ridiculous due to the Uncertainty Principle.