(02-03-2017, 04:45 PM)SomeGuy Wrote: Again, already addressed. The character of the generations is determined by their ages during social moments, and their character in turn spurs their reactions to events, generating social moments. Moralistic elders, pragmatic managers, and conformist youth cause society to react dramatically to problem deferred by the previous period, enabling drastic institutional and political change. The society is exhausted and then falls into relative political stasis (not so much no forward movement as no movement side to side, a static trajectory if you will), which in turn becomes confining and spurs a spiritual crisis as the rising, indulged generation questions whether other directions are possible. Conciliating and indecisive leaders, idealistic and divided managers, and an atomized youth lead to a sort of societal drift, which causes problems to build up which are then addressed in the next 4T, and so the cycle repeats. This is very basic S & H.
Yes, but have you taken it to the next step? Where do moralistic elders, pragmatic managers, and conformist youth come from?
Per S&H, the experience of living through a social moment creates the peer personality of birth cohorts based on the phase of life they occupy. Moralistic elders in a 4T are the self-adsorbed mid-lifers in the prior 3T and the rebellious rising adults in the 2T. This means today’s moralistic elders (prophets) were the same people who were rising adults in the previous social moment.
OK, so consider my mom and I. My mom was a rising adult until November 1973, and so spent nearly a decade of the 2T (and the most eventful portion) as a rising adult. I became a rising adult in March 1981, and spent nearly four years of my rising adulthood in a 2T. My mom spent more the twice the time as a rising adult in a 2T than I did, and lived through the time of the most radical change--and yet she was an artist and I am a prophet.
But S&H were on to something. I saw the 2T/3T happen in real time, and noted the phenomenon, although I did not know what it was. Years later when I read Generations I thought, aha that’s what that was.
But their mechanism doesn’t give the generations its says should form. Based on phases of life, I should be a core Xer since I grew up in a 2T, spent my rising adulthood in a 3T, and am spending my mature adulthood in a 4T, which is supposed to be the experience of a Nomad, but I do not have the peer personality of a Nomad. Clearly, what makes me a prophet archetype was not the phase of life I occupied during the turnings. It’s something else.