Month: July 2019

In foreign affairs, America’s initial Fourth Turning instinct will be to look away from other countries and focus total energy on the domestic birth of a new order. Later, provoked by real or imagined outside provocations, the society will turn newly martial. America will become more isolationist than today in its unwillingness to coordinate its affairs with other countries but less isolationist in its insistence that vital national interests not be compromised.

When the society approaches the climax of a Crisis, it reaches a point of maximum civic power. Where the new values regime had once justified individual fury, it now justifies public fury. Wars become more likely and are fought with efficacy and finality. The risk of revolution is high–as is the risk of civil war, since the community that commands the greatest loyalty does not necessarily coincide with political (or geographic) boundaries.

Questions about who does what are settled on grounds of survival, not fairness. This leads to a renewed social division of labor by age and sex. In the realm of public activity, elders are expected to step aside for the young, women for men. When danger looms, children are expected to be protected before parents, mothers before fathers.

• A Crisis era begins with a catalyst–a startling event (or sequence of events) that produces a sudden shift in mood.
• Once catalyzed, a society achieves a regeneracy–a new counterentropy that reunifies and reenergizes civic life.
• The regenerated society propels toward a climax–a crucial moment that confirms the death of the old order and birth of the new.
• The climax culminates in a resolution–a triumphant or tragic conclusion that separates the winners from losers, resolves the big public questions, and establishes the new order.

Lacking any guarantee that slow-but-steady, follow-the-rules, and trust-in-the-future behavior will ever pay off, 13ers tend to view the world as run by lottery markets in which a person either lands the one big win or goes nowhere. They have constructed a flinty ethos of self-determination in which being rich or poor has less to do with virtue rather than with timing, salesmanship, and luck. What people get is simply what they get and is not necessarily related to what they may or may not deserve.

Unraveling-era 13ers, males especially, have been hit with a one-generation depression. From 1973 to 1992, the real median income for young-adult males fell by 28 percent, more than it did for the entire nation from peak to trough of the Great Depression. (During those same two decades in which youth incomes were plunging, real median income for seniors rose by 26 percent).

Many Boomers who preach honesty and sacrifice will remain personally self-indulgent. Like Bill Gates (whose ecofriendly mansion has a garage for twenty cars), the Cultural Elite will consume heavily while pretending otherwise.

By the mid-1960s, gerontologists came to believe that thrift, self-reliance, cynicism, conservatism, and Republican voting habits were permanent aspects of the aging process in America. How times change.

Total stability is beyond the reach of any human system.