02-03-2017, 09:20 AM
(02-03-2017, 08:46 AM)Dan Wrote: http://www.businessinsider.com/book-stev...?r=UK&IR=T
Quote: President Trump's adviser, Steve Bannon, is on the cover of this week's Time magazine, and in the piece it is revealed that Bannon deeply believes in a theory about America's future laid out in a book called "The Fourth Turning: What Cycles of History Tell Us About America's Next Rendezvous with Destiny."
This fact should concern every American.
In the book, authors William Strauss and Neil Howe theorize that the history of a people moves in 80-to-100 year cycles called "saecula." The idea goes back to the ancient Greeks, who believed that at a given saeculum's end, there would come "ekpyrosis," a cataclysmic event that destroys the old order and brings in a new one in a trial of fire....
http://www.businessinsider.com/book-stev...?r=UK&IR=T
Anyone can read into Howe and Strauss whatever they want. Yes, there can be a literal trial by fire -- even the Holocaust. But a 4T can also topple the idols that stand upon clay feet...
My interpretation is that the 4T forces a harsh simplification of a culture and political reality that have used complexity to enforce the will of corrupt elites who serve only themselves and compel others to suffer for those elites. I see Donald Trump as an exaggeration of corrupt elites out for themselves alone. Such elites are particularly vulnerable in a 4T as they enforce sacrifices among the masses and give nothing in return except survival in peonage.
History does not work to the benefit, or even survival, of corrupt elites who hold that their power can crush resistance to their selfishness and amorality. I see Donald Trump as someone who can cause the breakdown of the economic prosperity and political safety that we have thought 'natural' since the late 1940s. (There have been some reforms and of course technological progress, but those have well served the Establishment as well as the People, but that has more enforced the perception than challenged it).
Whatever Donald Trump has in common with such 4T leaders as Samuel Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, Benito Juarez, Karl Mannerheim, FDR, or Sir Winston Churchill except for being part of an Idealist generation completely escapes me.
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.