Alternating 4T pattern explained

[Eric the Green]

(08-19-2021, 02:19 PM)galaxy Wrote:

(08-19-2021, 10:58 AM)jleagans Wrote: Hmm, here's a theory I pieced together that sounds like where this thread was going (at the start):

My theory argues that turnings start at actual TURNING point events, seemingly alternating between DARK turnings that usher in the turnings with darker national attitudes (2T and 4T) and GOOD turnings that have more optimistic national attitudes (1T and 3T).  

4T=Dark=Stock Market Crash (1929)
1T=Good= End of WW2 (1945)
2T=Dark = JFK Assassination (1963
3T=Good= End of Stagflation (1982)
4T=Dark= 9/11 (2001)
1T=Good= Widespread Covid Vaccine Distribution (2021)

I still can't fully figure out the reconstruction/gilded age/progressive era turnings (ESPECIALLY the 1910's move to the 3T, so if anyone knows that era feel free to share )

This is far too simple of a classification.

This is how national moods work (please excuse the messy MSPaint drawing):



The reason you feel that 9/11 was such a dark turn is because every major event during a 1T or 3T intensifies the progression in mood. The moods do not change "smoothly," they move in jumps. 9/11 was a big jump.
For another example, WW1, another "third-turning crisis," was followed by an increase the cynicism and hedonism of that era to the extremely high level that the 1920s decade is famous for.
The most recent 1T seems to stand out for a notable lack of mood-intensifying events. I suppose Kennedy's election could count as one, sort of starting off the euphoric national mood of the 1960s decade (which peaked around 1967 to 1969 or so), but there really isn't much else. Perhaps 1Ts are a bit more gradual in general.

(it should also be noted that 4Ts are more complicated than this, but that's a topic for another thread)

I like the graph.

The way things worked out in our 2T was that the mood was probably brightest in the first year, 1964, and even that was tempered by the JFK assassination. But for those who were actually awakening, 1966-69 was certainly euphoric. But for others in those years the War in Vietnam or reaction by conservatives to the euphoric ones, and then worries over pollution from 1969 or earlier, and the general mood of protest, riots and more assassinations, darkened the mood a bit, as post-modern disillusion with progress began.

I don't know if the mood has brightened much during this 4T. Maybe a little as Biden's leadership is re-assuring after the Trump debacle. So, it seems in this saeculum that the 1T mood was brighter than in other saecula, because the USA was on top of the world, although cold war and nuclear fears were worrisome; but since then the mood has been a bit darker for longer than the graph indicates for the average archetypal saeculum. Perhaps with "Morning in America", initially the 3T saw an uptick in the national mood after the stagnant years of the late Awakening.

[galaxy]

(08-19-2021, 03:53 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: I don't know if the mood has brightened much during this 4T. Maybe a little as Biden's leadership is re-assuring after the Trump debacle. So, it seems in this saeculum that the 1T mood was brighter than in other saecula, because the USA was on top of the world, although cold war and nuclear fears were worrisome; but since then the mood has been a bit darker for longer than the graph indicates for the average archetypal saeculum. Perhaps with "Morning in America", initially the 3T saw an uptick in the national mood after the stagnant years of the late Awakening.

Well, like I said in the post, 4Ts are more complicated. 2010 to 2015 was a period of pretty steady brightening, at least in my memory. 2017 to 2019 was too, in a different way. I'd say 2015 was the last time I would have said I was personally optimistic about the future if you asked me (before learning about the saeculum in late 2020, obviously).

Of course, this is a personal view, influenced by my own lived experience, having never lived in a truly positive national mood. So a mood that seems "bright" to me may be absolutely dismal to those who experienced the 2T or even the early 3T (the "Morning in America" part of the 3T).

[galaxy]

(08-19-2021, 03:53 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: Perhaps with "Morning in America", initially the 3T saw an uptick in the national mood after the stagnant years of the late Awakening.

Thought I'd add this, inspired by the beautiful mild weather where I live today:

When autumn first begins it's often quite a relief after the heat of summer.

Sometimes it can even feel the same as the start of spring: like a bright and welcoming new beginning.

[Tim Randal Walker]

I have to wonder about weak 1Ts...are they more "active" or hedonistic than high 1Ts? Or can we anticipate that society will have a sense of exhaustion? Instead of being one of the great barbecues of history, a weak 1T-even without an emphasis on conformity-might be a dull, bland time. Almost a blank turning.

[pbrower2a]

(10-09-2021, 11:15 AM)Tim Randal Walker Wrote: I have to wonder about weak 1Ts...are they more "active" or hedonistic than high 1Ts?  Or can we anticipate that society will have a sense of exhaustion?  Instead of being one of the great barbecues of history, a weak 1T-even without an emphasis on conformity-might be a dull, bland time.  Almost a blank turning.

What is likely more important is how destructive the 4T is. If the pre-Crisis institutions are weak, or the enemy in an apocalyptic war is particularly destructive, then it is clear that the 1T will long have survival and recovery -- picking up the pieces -- as the focus. Figure that the countries hit hardest in the Crisis of 1940 (China and Poland) had weak institutions before the Crisis and experienced genocidal enemies. Figure that Polish Jews were the bulk of the middle class of small-business owners, and that their disappearance into gas chambers ensured that the only possible market sector in Poland after WWII was agriculture. The Soviet-sponsored Polish Commies had little difficulty collectivizing industry because much of it was German-owned during the war, including what had been taken from Jews.  China experienced a horrific 4T whether under Japanese dominion, the authoritarian regime of Chiang Kai-Shek, or the "communes" or "soviets" of the Chinese Communists. The Republic of China had little authority beyond the cities even before the Japanese invasion. The commies established the institutions that included "socialized" industry,

Crises typically end in one of three ways: euphoria over victory (USA), exhaustion in a hollow victory (Netherlands), and calamitous destruction and dislocation whether in victory (Poland, Soviet Union, China) or defeat (Japan, Germany). Maybe there is a settlement that the result is "the best of all possible worlds" as in Italy or Finland, which is an intermediate.

A 1T is likely to be conformist because a 1T rejects the shady practices, mindless hedonism, and shaky institutions of the preceding 3T. If the 4T ends with the foundations of a new and unprecedented prosperity, then hedonism and consumerism prevail -- but the hedonism and consumerism will not be mindless. Speculative booms that precipitated the financial panic that gutted the economy and destabilized the political scene worldwide will no longer be possible. Large-scale consumer lending, as on housing (if only for white people),  will be closely tied to savings. Lenders will be obliged to make conservative assumptions, and so will borrowers. People will not be able to bet on appreciation of value of assets as they might have been during the previous bubble. The sort of fraud in which a real-estate lender sold real estate to someone who could have never paid off the loan barring high inflation in the expectation that the borrower would default and that the lender could sell the property to someone else similarly gulled (Oh, you're making only $25K a year! Just sign here and you get title to an $800K house. Now you are not an accounting clerk; you are an auditor).  Negative amortization and predatory lending are frowned upon in a 1T even if they are offered in a 3T because... well, the Good Lord isn't making more real estate, and if the borrower defaults, there will be another buyer paying even more. The lender basically pockets the down payment.

So suppose that we end up in an apocalyptic war that destroys America's large cities and leaves millions of people homeless and hungry. What happens? The first order of business will be to restore the food supply, and people will be drafted for all practical purposes as farm labor. Food production comes first, and illusions about having successful careers as car salesmen, accountants, or K-12 teachers come to an abrupt end. Along with the former middle class also come demobilized soldiers. Once the danger of famine ends (farm labor is a miserable way of life), other things can be put back together. If one is able to do construction labor, then one goes quickly from farm labor to the skilled construction trades that one once did. Society then goes through priorities of importance, like supplies of water and electrical power and motive power for vehicles. At some point people start producing and selling luxuries. Until then it is a harsh 1T.

[galaxy]

(06-25-2021, 01:31 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: My suggestion is that Russia has never had a saeculum. It is just too primitive. A country in which the people never have any voice, nor any law other than tyranny, can scarcely have a saeculum.

4T: 1905-1928*
1T: 1928*-1953
2T: 1953-1973 (roughly 1973 - the stagnation began gradually)
3T: 1973-1991
4T: 1991-2014? (2014 is latest possible date, may be earlier)
1T: 2014 or earlier-present


*Things get a little messy around this time. The 4T-1T transition is somewhere between 1923 and 1933. 1928 seems like the best fit to me, but there are other possibilities.

[pbrower2a]

(12-28-2021, 12:36 AM)galaxy Wrote:

(06-25-2021, 01:31 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: My suggestion is that Russia has never had a saeculum. It is just too primitive. A country in which the people never have any voice, nor any law other than tyranny, can scarcely have a saeculum.

4T: 1905-1928*
1T: 1928*-1953
2T: 1953-1973 (roughly 1973 - the stagnation began gradually)
3T: 1973-1991
4T: 1991-2014? (2014 is latest possible date, may be earlier)
1T: 2014 or earlier-present


*Things get a little messy around this time. The 4T-1T transition is somewhere between 1923 and 1933. 1928 seems like the best fit to me, but there are other possibilities.

I see the 1914-1945 period of Russian/Soviet history as a Crisis era on the whole (containing the unmitigated disasters of WWI and WWII as well as the brutal collectivization of Soviet agriculture) with some tendencies toward an abortive 1T during the NEP period (which Stalin aborted) and the years immediately following the Great Purge (until Hitler aborted that). The Soviet Union experienced mass death on a scale rarely seen in inhuman history, including as much as half the Holocaust. The Soviet Union stumbled its way through the final years of the Stalin era The Soviet Union could no longer act in Crisis mode, and the Crisis that was mostly Stalin came to an end with his end, Doctors' Plot notwithstanding. After some economic recovery, Stalin might have forced even more Crisis had he survived, but once he died, almost all top leaders of the USSR wanted no more Crisis. It was just too personally dangerous for them.

Can a Crisis last thirty years? Sure -- if in a succession of waves of Crisis-like politics, economics, and war.

The "Stagnation Era" coincides with the general suppression of what might have been an Awakening Era.

All countries need some 1T (High -- or at least recovery) for sorting out the wreckage and establishing peacetime institutions, an Awakening Era/2T for brushing away some mental and cultural cobwebs (do you remember the insipid mindlessness of GI mass culture, as in music? Just take a look at what people have cast off at a Goodwill and see what 1960's discs you want to take home. You will not find any gems such as the Beatles' White Album or the Beach Boys... or any good jazz or soul. You will find sentimental claptrap completely out of style now and forever, the sort of music that anaesthetizes a spirit while curing nothing). Then it needs an Unraveling to find material alternatives to pretentious posturing of pseudo-intellectual hacks and trying out entrepreneurial solutions. Then comes the Crisis to break the corruption and inequity -- if all goes well.

[Eric the Green]

I agree with brower on this. I think world war two and the Stalin-imposed famines and purges extended the Crisis period in Russia that may be attributed to world war I and the Revolutionary War. The effect of this extended horrific crisis on Russia was to slow down their national saeculum and put them on the global calendar of the world's dominant saeculum (ours), as happened elsewhere too at this time. Our times since the 1890s IS the birth of the global society, and the great wars that brought down the old world and separate ouselves from it so decisively were the birth pangs. "A little messy" ha ha. Catastrophic, actually; more so than experienced by any other nation in those times. But, to some extent, the old cycle that was on an earlier schedule, as suggested by galaxy, could still have some relevance. Nations today still have their own unfolding, but they can't escape the larger global cycle now either.

Is Russia in a 1T? Does Russia even have a saeculum, as I wondered before? It is not a very good 1T. The nation is declining, and the people are not happy. That the Putin tyranny appears stable and increasing could fit, but are we to define a 1T solely as a period when a tyrant increases his grip on power and is able to suppress dissent successfully and dream of military expansion?

[pbrower2a]

It takes a leader of extreme competence and callousness to preserve a Crisis era or to return to one once the Crisis has abated and a recovery seems underway. Such a leader is Josef Stalin or Mao Zedong (Hitler may have been that, too, but he bit off more than he could chew and offed himself as his world collapsed around him, so it may not be Marxists alone that can do this. Think also of Trotsky's concept of Permanent Revolution). If all human life is 100% expendable and one has no responsibility for public welfare, then a despotic leader might be able to overpower the generational cycle. I can easily imagine a 75-year-old Stalin initiating nuclear warfare except that the Grim Reaper got him.

The better sort of Idealist leader... Garibaldi, Juarez, Lincoln, Churchill, FDR, Mannerheim, or Adenauer ... recognizers the grave human cost -- literally the full graveyards -- of a Crisis Era. They want to win their Crisis because they cannot imagine a desirable alternative to victory (OK, Adenauer was handed a defeated fraction of Germany) or at least a tolerable settlement at the conference table. The Enemy can go to Hell, but the genuine proof of victory isn't so much a line on the map as a better world. These people have enough knowledge of history to recognize culpability of businessmen, politicians, figures of mass culture, and wayward academics (some of them good friends of a score years earlier or even fewer) but enough decency to decide that the end of the bloodletting is the desired end. Maybe murderers who have ordered mass death must die, but that is the norm with those who commit armed robberies and kill someone in the process. The better world is an economic order built more upon investment and work than upon speculation that resembles (3T) gambling, a political pattern better described with justice instead of vengeful populism, and a revival of small-scale institutions. That implies peace, and no new apocalypse. One apocalypse is one too many, but sometimes that is what one gets.

Stalin and Mao, as I understand them, had no use for any social complacency. When things started to get excessively individualist and placid, they saw horror. They needed to destroy real and imagined opposition and break down any New Order that had anything other themselves as the focus. Thus came forced collectivization and purges. They had some ideological beliefs that held that revolution in the service of Marxism-Leninism was nigh elsewhere, but it seemed not to happen in the 'decadent' capitalist countries. International war would force such a 'revolution'.

For this to be a matter separate from a contemporary ideology one must look to another time. The Crusades? One great victory mandated another, and with such a victory would come mass persecutions of heretics and infidels. Maybe that is the unspoken predecessor of Trotsky's "permanent revolution" or the continuing struggles of Stalin and Mao. For history to go there must be self-correcting respites (1T) from apocalypse, the intellectual challenges to ossifying institutions by smart outsiders (the 2T or awakening), and then the small-scale and often desperate gambles of a 3T to establish what works and what doesn't before a saeculum to sort everything out in a Crisis.

We are learning a few things the hard way in this Crisis. "Anything goes" means that all sorts of horrible things from AIDS to COVID-19 are possible. Institutions are necessary, but some are too corrupt to save. Sometimes we discover the hard way the harsh truth that getting one's way means self-harm. "Every man for himself" means that all too many people end up broke and isolated.

Crisis Eras are dreadful, but remember well: getting rid of bad habits is usually well worth the personal cost -- and the delights that came with indulgence in those old bad habits.

[Dustinw5220]

(12-29-2021, 03:07 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: I agree with brower on this. I think world war two and the Stalin-imposed famines and purges extended the Crisis period in Russia that may be attributed to world war I and the Revolutionary War. The effect of this extended horrific crisis on Russia was to slow down their national saeculum and put them on the global calendar of the world's dominant saeculum (ours), as happened elsewhere too at this time. Our times since the 1890s IS the birth of the global society, and the great wars that brought down the old world and separate ouselves from it so decisively were the birth pangs. "A little messy" ha ha. Catastrophic, actually; more so than experienced by any other nation in those times. But, to some extent, the old cycle that was on an earlier schedule, as suggested by galaxy, could still have some relevance. Nations today still have their own unfolding, but they can't escape the larger global cycle now either.

Is Russia in a 1T? Does Russia even have a saeculum, as I wondered before? It is not a very good 1T. The nation is declining, and the people are not happy. That the Putin tyranny appears stable and increasing could fit, but are we to define a 1T solely as a period when a tyrant increases his grip on power and is able to suppress dissent successfully and dream of military expansion?

My personal opinion is while I agree that most of the world has caught up with us in the saeculum (we're becoming a global society, after all), I think it may still be a bit confusing/murky with certain nations exactly what turning they're currently in  (especially the ones that were on a significantly different schedule to ours prior to the Great Depression and World War II), and some nations are still doing their own unfolding whilst not being able to really escape our larger global cycle (and that's where it gets tricky). For example I believe it was even Neil himself that once said that the Islamic world was about a turning behind ours (I think according to him their 1T was 1961-1979 while their Awakening began in 1979 and ended sometime in the early 2000s), but as you pointed out they also experienced some VERY 4T like events back in 2011. I wonder if their possibly going through an 'anomaly' similar to ours in the Civil War saeculum (and if that's causing their saeculum to speed up and catch up with ours), and if their current generation coming of age is a Nomad/Civic hybrid much like the Gilded (though even for that work, it would still make sense for BOTH their 3T and 4T to be at LEAST 15-16 years long)? At any rate, how exactly Islam's cycle is unfolding is certainly an interesting topic worth debating and speculating. 

I do agree with both you and Mr. Brower that Russia had a LONG 30 year 4T, and I also believe that's the consensus S&H themselves shared (I would maybe even argue that their 1T possibly started a few years AFTER ours did, I think either Neil or Strauss themselves said at one point that they didn't think their 4T ended until 1949), one possibility is that their 4T began around the time World War I ended and I'm sure they were hit hard by the 1918 Flu Pandemic (which would surely be a MAJOR Crisis event in ANY county approaching a 4T constellation). Russia is still such an oppressive dystopian dictatorship that my theory is that they were still stuck in the old world/post-medieval saeculum until World War II (if they're not still there now). If Russia IS currently in a 1T (which I doubt), it's certainly not one I would ever want to have (in fact, if it was still stuck in the old world saeculum, it would actually FAR more likely still be in a 3T than in a new 1T by now). From what I can remember though, S&H both thought that Russia's cycle (mostly) caught up with ours after World War II, with them even saying that their Baby Boomer generation equivalent had their own Awakening rebellion in the 60s and 70s (but that it was MUCH darker and bleak/dire than our own).

[pbrower2a]

Howe and Strauss (and now only Howe, for obvious reasons) go no further back in history  in the study of generations to the Civic-like generation of Christopher Columbus and Leonardo da Vinci. Before then, the medieval world operated on the assumption that those who owned the means of production had absolute power of career and life-and-death over everyone. When any form of religious, political, scientific, or cultural dissent can get one burned at the stake, broken at the wheel, impaled in an iron maiden, or enclosed to die of thirst or suffocation, there isn't much room for innovation. The order is a command economy as pure as North Korea today. Conformity and blind obedience are the ways of animal-level survival. Even the clergy are obliged to offer a horrific Hell to scare everyone into slavish compliance. People live solely to avoid eternal damnation.

It may have been the Black Death that broke some of the assumptions of the medieval world. The pious and the profligate alike could die of the Plague, so people could no longer believe that mass death from disease was a Divine Judgment. The Black Death created a labor shortage and ensured that such agriculture that survived could lose labor without losing output. The medieval guilds in which only a few people operated became more powerful, and people could start businesses.

Aside from printing, still practically a laboratory curiosity due to mass illiteracy, the first semblance of manufacturing appeared in textiles. Bankers started lending against land to finance textile mills. Note well that the English word fabric suggests the material that emanated from textile mills and that the Italian, French, and German for factory are fabbrica, fabrique, and Fabrik. English uses the word fabrication to describe making things in factories. Shipping became more important for connecting the New Rich to foreign luxuries, and thus began the age of navigation.  People start traveling for commercial gain instead of for desperate survival.

[Tim Randal Walker]

I have to wonder if the pattern will see a hiccup during the next few decades. It has been assumed that Mild 4T will lead to a weak 1T, leading to a weak 2T. If America's current 4T is based on a Cold Civil War/Internal Cold War, that leaves other problems to fester.

Imagine this.....

Mild 4T > abortive 1T > Severe Crisis > intact 1T > 2T > 3T > 4T. The Severe Crisis is caused by festering problems reaching a critical mass, interrupting a 1T. Postponed are a full fledged 1T, and the subsequent turnings.

[Tim Randal Walker]

Or, we somehow manage to get through a fully intact 1T, and just after the start of the turning Crisis conditions are imposed on the nascent Awakening. So...

Mild 4T > Weak 1T > 2T/4T? > ?

In an archived thread, "The Saeculum in Ancient Rome", Grey Badger described the results of such a situation. She said that the young Prophets became Silent like, while the Prophet role was assumed by those who had been raised as Nomads.

Using her description, this was how the turnings played out. 1T > 2T turned 4T >3T. So, in the 3T, you had Prophets turned Adaptive, and younger-folk-raised-as-Nomads assuming the Prophet role.

I would speculate that if conditions aren't quite as severe, you could have a rather weak 2T with a 4T over lay. Looking something like this. 4T > 1T > weak 2T/crisis > 3T.


What if Crisis conditions appeared just after the start of a 3T? I recall this being the case for the Irish Potato Famine. The Prophets became Nomad like, and the Nomads-to-be were smothered, growing up to be Adaptives.

[Tim Randal Walker]

Pondering how this 4T is playing out. So, 3T > splinter-y but mild 4T? > weak resolution? > weak 1T.

Awhile back somebody commented that Xers are probably past the point where they could become Gilded like Nomad/Heros. So, during the next 1T Xers may resemble the Lost as they were during the last 1T. I have to wonder if the Millenials will not be empowered, and end up like the Progressives.

Using analogies, the next 1T may have a generational constellation of aging Lost elders, Progressives in the middle, and proto-Prophet kids. Leading to this....

Weak 1T > Unusually weak 2T.

Indeed, the English 2T that roughly corresponded to the Missionary Awakening seems to have been an unusually weak 2T. As I recall, Winston Churchill was a Prophet who came out of that English 2T.

[pbrower2a]

Russia is clearly in a Crisis era. Most people expected Russian armed forces to steamroller their way through Ukraine, with the result of making Ukraine at best a satellite state or compelling its incorporation into some Russian-dominated federation.

Remember well: despotic figures do not mellow with age. They might weaken, but thatis not the same thing.

[Tim Randal Walker]

I think Ukraine is in a Crisis war.

I occasionally look at a couple of Brexit blogs, the one by Jeff Taylor, and Westminster with Michael Heaver. These seem to indicate that Western Europe is now in 4T.