“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. Real hardship will beset the land, with severe distress that could involve questions of class, race, nation and empire. The very survival of the nation will feel at stake. Sometime before the year 2025, America will pass through a great gate in history, commensurate with the American Revolution, Civil War, and twin emergencies of the Great Depression and World War II.” – Strauss & Howe – The Fourth Turning
“Reflect on what happens when a terrible winter blizzard strikes. You hear the weather warning but probably fail to act on it. The sky darkens. Then the storm hits with full fury, and the air is a howling whiteness. One by one, your links to the machine age break down. Electricity flickers out, cutting off the TV. Batteries fade, cutting off the radio. Phones go dead. Roads become impossible, and cars get stuck. Food supplies dwindle. Day to day vestiges of modern civilization – bank machines, mutual funds, mass retailers, computers, satellites, airplanes, governments – all recede into irrelevance. Picture yourself and your loved ones in the midst of a howling blizzard that lasts several years. Think about what you would need, who could help you, and why your fate might matter to anybody other than yourself. That is how to plan for a saecular winter. Don’t think you can escape the Fourth Turning. History warns that a Crisis will reshape the basic social and economic environment that you now take for granted.” – Strauss & Howe – The Fourth Turning
“History offers no guarantees. If America plunges into an era of depression or violence which by then has not lifted, we will likely look back on the 1990s as the decade when we valued all the wrong things and made all the wrong choices.” – Strauss & Howe – The Fourth Turning
“The seasons of time offer no guarantees. For modern societies, no less than for all forms of life, transformative change is discontinuous. For what seems an eternity, history goes nowhere – and then it suddenly flings us forward across some vast chaos that defies any mortal effort to plan our way there. The Fourth Turning will try our souls – and the saecular rhythm tells us that much will depend on how we face up to that trial. The saeculum does not reveal whether the story will have a happy ending, but it does tell us how and when our choices will make a difference.” – Strauss & Howe – The Fourth Turning
“Don’t think you can escape the Fourth Turning the way you might today distance yourself from news, national politics, or even taxes you don’t feel like paying. History warns that a Crisis will reshape the basic social and economic environment that you now take for granted. The Fourth Turning necessitates the death and rebirth of the social order. It is the ultimate rite of passage for an entire people, requiring a luminal state of sheer chaos whose nature and duration no one can predict in advance.” – Strauss & Howe – The Fourth Turning
“The risk of catastrophe will be very high. The nation could erupt into insurrection or civil violence, crack up geographically, or succumb to authoritarian rule. If there is a war, it is likely to be one of maximum risk and effort – in other words, a total war. Every Fourth Turning has registered an upward ratchet in the technology of destruction, and in mankind’s willingness to use it.” – Strauss & Howe – The Fourth Turning
“History offers no guarantees. Obviously, things could go horribly wrong – the possibilities ranging from a nuclear exchange to incurable plagues, from terrorist anarchy to high-tech dictatorship. We should not assume that Providence will always exempt our nation from the irreversible tragedies that have overtaken so many others: not just temporary hardship, but debasement and total ruin. Losing in the next Fourth Turning could mean something incomparably worse. It could mean a lasting defeat from which our national innocence – perhaps even our nation – might never recover.” – Strauss & Howe – The Fourth Turning
the bible for those who want to know the future.
Do you guys realize that something HUGE happens about every 1000 years? Think about it.
This 4th turning stuff is real. Generations come and go, and completely forget what the previous folks had to live through. History repeates itself over and over because people just refuse to learn from it.
Try telling your son what to do and what not to do. He will laugh at you. People have to learn the hard way. Thats why about every 80 years or so things have to melt down to the bone.
Look at history and see.
Einstein said, ” The single most abundant thing on earth is hydrogen. Second is stupidity”
You remind me of Bob Dylan, Admin. The storms that raged when you and I were little children (b. 1962) return now to rage anew as old age beckons us take heed with each grey messenger that takes lodgings about our temples. May we be found worthy of the time and alive to its’ message.
Come gather ’round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You’ll be drenched to the bone.
If your time to you
Is worth savin’
Then you better start swimmin’
Or you’ll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin’.
Come writers and critics
Who prophesize with your pen
And keep your eyes wide
The chance won’t come again
And don’t speak too soon
For the wheel’s still in spin
And there’s no tellin’ who
That it’s namin’.
For the loser now
Will be later to win
For the times they are a-changin’.
Come senators, congressmen
Please heed the call
Don’t stand in the doorway
Don’t block up the hall
For he that gets hurt
Will be he who has stalled
There’s a battle outside ragin’.
It’ll soon shake your windows
And rattle your walls
For the times they are a-changin’.
Come mothers and fathers
Throughout the land
And don’t criticize
What you can’t understand
Your sons and your daughters
Are beyond your command
Your old road is
Rapidly agin’.
Please get out of the new one
If you can’t lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin’.
The line it is drawn
The curse it is cast
The slow one now
Will later be fast
As the present now
Will later be past
The order is
Rapidly fadin’.
And the first one now
Will later be last
For the times they are a-changin’.
Jim, a general question about turnings with regard to OWS. It seems that in previous Fourth Turnings the Hero generation didn’t exactly rise up and overthrow the previous generations. That seems like more of a Second Turning thing. Howe has noted many times that there is not much of a generation gap between Boomers and Millennials (I’m 21 and I listen to the same music as my parents) like there was between the GIs and the Boomers. So, that’s why I’m still a little unsure of what’s going on here with OWS. There is a lot of well-deserved inter-generational anger, but isn’t a Fourth Turning supposed to be more cooperative as everyone works together to solve the Crisis and establish a new order?
Also, what’s your email?
Harry
I’ve been trying to wrap my mind around the Millenial – Boomer dynamic. I’m working on a new article about it. The heroes did follow the Prophet leaders in the last Fourth Turning, but there was no hero generation in the Civil War Fourth Turning because it came 10 years too soon. Turnings are about mood change. You can’t predict what the mood change will create. It appears that there are many middle class Boomers at these protests with their Millenial offspring. It looks like this is developing into class war. In that case middle class Boomers could lead middle class Millenials against the upper class Boomers.
One thing is for sure. This will not calm down. It will intensify.
My email address is [email protected]
Horrifying prophecy. i am not sure that I agree with the complete despair and misery that is predicted.
Stan,
Sober now ?
TR says:
“Horrifying prophecy. i am not sure that I agree with the complete despair and misery that is predicted.”
Guess what?
Reality doesn’t give two shakes if you “believe” in it, or not.
We are at a point in our society, history and lives, where we can either heed all the signals and prepare.
Or hope for the best, refuse to SEE the world for what IT IS – not what we wish it to be – and do nothing.
I choose to at least TRY to protect my little darling.
You, along with most sheep, will choose to “hope” and refuse to see what is happening even as you sit in cold homes with empty bellies.
Grandpa always told me, “wish in one hand, shit in the other, see which fills up first.”
And, his more PC, “..work like everything you do depends on you, pray like it depends on god…”
Now is the time to face facts and prepare. At least for some of us.
“Wild, dark times are rumbling toward us, and the prophet who wishes to write a new apocalypse will have to invent entirely original beasts, so terrible that the ancient demon symbols of Saint John will seem like cooing doves and cupids by comparison.”
Heinrich Heine
The only moral grounding I can see is to oneself, pleasure, money. Very little attention is paid to our fellow man. Example the federal debt, pensions which break cities, counties and states. That moral standard will tke us into a darkness no one want to go. Most believe it is not them that will pay the price. They also see what is about to happen. So, most want to get what they want now while they can. That is where we are headed. Can we be saved maybe, but I dont see anyone who canr do it. RP gets eletced he gets wacked just like JFK.
@Hollow man: You sound distinctly like you have a slight nihilistic bent to you. So do I and more power to us both.
We are mathematically screwed and you can’t rationally argue with mathematics. We’ll you can argue but you lose every time.
The only thing going in our favor is man’s ability to change direction in recognition of different conditions or situations. That’s a general statement and does not apply as far as any single individual is concerned.
If the human race – in sufficient numbers – recognizes and buys in to what reality is telling us about our country and a lot of the world being busted, too many unfunded liabilities, climate changes that are happening faster than predicted (regardless of the cause), we may lessen the impact of collapse. May lessen.
My nihilist side says it will never happen as we, being marginally intelligent apes in a very unforgiving universe simply do not have the moxie or brains to change our actions sufficiently, in the name of “public good” to pull it off.
We are, probably sooner than later, going to suffer hugely for our hubris.
MA