Category: Book Quotes of the Day

If a generation’s shadow is two phases of life older (or younger), then a generation’s matching archetype is four phases of life older (or younger). “It is one of nature’s ways,” Igor Stravinsky once observed, “that we often feel closer to distant generations than to the generation immediately preceding us.” The affinity between grandparent and grandchild is universal folk wisdom.

The one who sees that the emperor has no clothes is not one of the emperor’s own peers, but a child who dares to speak the truth.

To do this correctly, we must link each of today’s generations with a recurring sequence of four generational archetypes that have appeared throughout all the saecula of our history. These four archetypes are best identified by the turnings of their births:

• A Prophet generation is born during a High.
• A Nomad generation is born during an Awakening.
• A Hero generation is born during an Unraveling.
• An Artist generation is born during a Crisis.

Biologically and socially, a full human life is divided into four phases: childhood, young adulthood, midlife, and elderhood. Each phase of life is the same length as the others, capable of holding one generation at a time. And each phase is associated with a specific social role that conditions how its occupants perceive the world and act on those perceptions.

Over the millennia, man has developed three ways of thinking about time: chaotic, cyclical, and linear. The first was the dominant view of primitive man, the second of ancient and traditional civilizations, and the third of the modern West, especially America.

The next Fourth Turning is due to begin shortly after the new millennium, midway through the Oh-Oh decade. Around the year 2005, a sudden spark will catalyze a Crisis mood. Remnants of the old social order will disintegrate. Political and economic trust will implode.

• The First Turning is a High, an upbeat era of strengthening institutions and weakening individualism, when a new civic order implants and the old values regime decays.
• The Second Turning is an Awakening, a passionate era of spiritual upheaval, when the civic comes under attack from a new values regime.
• The Third Turning is an Unraveling, a downcast era of strengthening individualism and weakening institutions, when the old civic order decays and the new values regime implants.
• The Fourth Turning is a Crisis, a decisive era of secular upheaval, when the values regime propels the replacement of the old civic order with a new one.

While the rebound was powered by an abundance of money at low interest rates, the Fed found itself ejected from the driving seat. Having made such a mess during the collapse, it had lost whatever prestige it once possessed.

That weekend Churchill had the star of The Gold Rush, Charlie Chaplin, as a guest at Chartwell, his country house in Kent–they had met in Hollywood when Churchill was visiting the United States in October 1929 at the tine of the crash. Over dinner Chaplin opened the conversation by saying, “You made a great mistake when you went back to the gold standard at the wrong parity of exchange in 1925.”

The editor of the Economist, Francis Hirst, who had fallen ill on a trip to the United States and was convalescing in Atlantic City at year’s end, captured the mood. “Rich people who have not sold their stocks feel much poorer…. The first result therefore, has been a heavy decline in luxury buying of all sorts and also a large amount of selling of such things as motor cars and fur coats, which can now be bought secondhand at surprisingly low prices. The favored health resorts have suffered… a very great number of servants, including butlers and chauffeurs, have been dismissed.”