Episode 172 - The Fourth Turning Part I - Cycles of History
Max and Aaron dive into the theory of the Fourth Turning and the cycles of history as put forth in the 1997 book of the same name by Strauss and Howe.
CORRECTION: Jerry Seinfeld is a classic boomer, not in Gen X
Tune in to episode 173 for Part 2, which will cover out evaluation of the theory, and how we think this fourth turning will go.
Links
Book: The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy - What the Cycles of History Tell Us About America's Next Rendezvous with Destiny
Van Neistat: We are in a Fourth Turning.. what does that mean?
Related Episodes
Episode 85 on the Metaculus Prediction Engine which often covers social issues
Transcript
Max Sklar: You're listening to The Local Maximum, Episode 171.
Time to expand your perspective. Welcome to The Local Maximum. Now here's your host, Max Sklar.
Max: Welcome, everyone. You have reached another Local Maximum. And today is a bit of a milestone on The Local Maximum, not a milestone, because we did record in this room last time, I believe, Aaron. But welcome to the show, first of all, and today we are recording some video. So wave to the camera over there. This is a little bit of a weird setup, I know, I think we should have multiple cameras, multiple angles, don't you agree?
Aaron Bell: Baby steps. Let's not go whole hog into a new studio right away.
Max: Every time we do, so usually you get a new studio, and it's all set up like a professional podcaster. It's all set up, and they have their things on the wall and everything. What I'm going to do is, every time I record a video in here, I'm going to add one extra piece. Okay? And then it's going to, and people can guess what that one extra piece is. And then after a while, it will look pretty good. What do you say about that?
Aaron: Yeah, I'm gonna keep my eyes open for the Easter egg.
Max: Okay, cool. All right. So today we're talking about one of the most fascinating topics that I think has come up. It's called The Fourth Turning. And it is, it's one of these theories of history. I become interested in this stuff first of all, as someone who is interested in emerging technology. This kind of theory does not come up a lot when you talk about technology and people in, who are doing startups and things like that. But social and political trends do matter, and so I feel like it's a big part of the puzzle. And this book has been talked about, particularly in recent years, because of how many, it's a 1997 book. It's by William Strauss and Neil Howe. Neil Howe is still an active author, and he's on YouTube and stuff. I believe, William Strauss has passed away in the meantime.
When we say this is what he wrote, I'm usually talking about Neil Howe, but I don't know who wrote what. But it's, a lot of people say, hey, this book is explaining a lot of what's happening now, all of the social unrest, all of the craziness, all of the things that have happened to us in the 2010s, and now in the 2020s. And so I was like, “Alright, I better read this book.” And even though I didn't agree with it fully, it was, it was a very fascinating read, and I'm looking forward to talk about. I think what we're gonna do today is, first we're going to go into a basic description of what this book is saying what its theory of history is, then we're gonna evaluate, then I'm gonna have a few words on my evaluation of the theory, what I think about it, and then we're gonna look at some of the predictions that it made. Were they right? Were they wrong? And then finally, we're gonna end with how do we use these lessons to adapt to changing times? And who wins the fourth turning, if there is a winner of the fourth turning? So I think that's my table of contents. Did I get that about right?
Aaron: I think so. We got a lot ahead of us here. Okay, a lot of ground to cover.
Max: Cool. I feel weird, because I'm not giving a... I'm not looking at the camera. But I guess this is, this is what it's going to be like. Hopefully, we can make, well whatever. Video is video.
Aaron: We’re learning as we go here.
Max: Yeah. Okay. So, the book makes a distinction between linear time and cyclic time. And they say a lot of us in the West look at time linearly. So we look at history as basically a list of events that are slowly building up to something. Even if you look at old religious texts, scriptures, history is running in a linear fashion.
Aaron: So does that mean that the Bible is a book, it's got a beginning, a middle and an end. When we talk about history, we talk about things on a timeline, which is, line is right in there. They're linear. It's kind of built into our expectations, our perception there.
Max: But there's also a little bit, so some cultures emphasize cyclic time, as in time goes in a circle and things repeat itself over and over, kind of like the seasons or a life cycle. And apparently, many Native American cultures, they look at time in a cyclical way.
Aaron: The first thing that comes to mind is the Mayan calendar, which I can't remember what year it was. There was a big deal that, “Oh, no, the Mayan calendar is coming to the end!”
Max: 2012. Yeah, I remember that.
Aaron: It was literally a giant stone circle was the item that recorded the calendar.
Max: So I have a Mayan calendar when you walked in, you saw, I have a Mayan calendar on the wall. I got that in 2009 at Chichen Itza.
Aaron: I hope you got a good deal on it. Because usually when calendars are almost at the end of their useful life, they can sell them for super cheap.
Max: I can't read the calendar, so I don't know. Yeah, right, there's only three years left of the 1,000-year cycle. But I took a picture of myself with it on December 21, 2012, because I was like, This is the end of that calendar. Nothing happened on that day, of course, although it could have marked the beginning of this fourth turning for all we know. That's probably as good a date as any.
But there are examples of cycles, particularly political cycles, in Western political thought. You look back at like Plato and Aristotle, they talked about cycles in Greek history. The Bible also does have some sort of narrative repetition in it for sure. This is just something that the authors want us to be aware of, and that they want us to think about in terms of, as opposed to something called whig history, which is the assumption that history is building towards something better and better, no matter what. Which is one way to look at things. There is progress. Like I don't, some people say that whig history is totally discredited. I'm not so sure.
Aaron: What word does whig come from?
Max: Oh, W-H-I-G. So like—
Aaron: As in the Whig Party?
Max: Yeah. So it's like, so I'm not really sure, but I'm assuming it means like, you know, rationalist, enlightenment situation.
Aaron: Gotcha. The Whigs haven't been a going concern in the US for a couple centuries.
Max: Yeah. Yeah, they got wiped out by a fourth turning. That's actually true. Yeah. We're coming to one. So if you don't know what it is yet, Fourth Turning is a wipe out, social and political movements. So what are the four turnings? So basically, the book says, there are a bunch of cycles in history, and the main one we want to talk about is this. I think it's a saeculum, I'm not really sure how to pronounce it. But it's essentially the length of a human lifetime, so 80 to 90 years. They usually cut it off at 80, so that it's a nice round number. And then they say, well, usually things repeat itself just as, the world that you were born into is repeating itself just as you're reaching your life expectancy.
Aaron: Now, you mentioned before that this is not the kind of concept that you hear talked about a lot in like the tech sector. And I assume that part of that is that most tech endeavors are not thinking on the scale of a full human lifetime, that they're, they have much shorter horizons or a deeper rationale to why that's not—
Max: I mean, well, Elon Musk is certainly thinking in terms of long life spans. If you talk to Alan Turing, and around the middle of the 20th century, and one of the founders of AI, he was talking about, well, I think AI is going to be here in 2050, 2100. So yes, certainly, there are thinkers that are looking out, you know, very far ahead. But yeah, I mean, that's part of it. Also, I do think that technologists tend to look at the world in the Ray Kurzweil sense where it's like we have, we're sort of just exponentially building to the next, the order of magnitude better chip, an order of magnitude, you know, speed up of internet, an order of magnitude, more sensors, etc, etc. And so it's sort of seen as, like a built up of one layer upon the next.
Aaron: Technology is very much in love with things like Moore's law.
Max: Yes, exactly. Moore’s law. That’s right.
Aaron: What's more, certainly, that's, that's not cyclical, and so it doesn't really fit with this saeculum structure to history, although I haven't checked how it lines up. But I would imagine that the first and second industrial revolutions and the computer revolution line up in an interesting fashion with some of these cycles that are being proposed.
Max: You know, I haven't actually thought about that. And that's an interesting point, I kind of want to return to that.
Aaron: The emphasis is much more on social-political, rather than technological, but are they interwoven?
Max: Yeah, I want to make the point that part of that, one of the things that he does mention in the book is that the... where you are in the saeculum defines how technology is going to be used. So for example, the nature of Facebook today would have been different if Facebook was invented 40 years ago in a second turning as opposed to a fourth turning. I think the example he gave was television, where, in the first turning America. And we haven't even gotten into the turnings yet. But in first turning America, television sort of meant conformity, everybody was watching the same stuff for the first time. And it brought our accents together, we're all getting the same news, same stations.
But you know, during the third turning, it was all about splintering in splinter groups. Now, part of that was the technology. But I think his argument was, well, no, if the television was invented, and then it was a third turning, it would be, it would be splintering from the get go, even though you can only have a few channels versus, because it's the social attitude of the people that affects the technology, just as much as the technology could affect the social attitudes of people. Because I tend to think that a lot of our social problems stem, or social, not problems, social atmosphere, stems from technology, I still think that. But after reading the book, it's like, “Hey, wait a minute. Maybe our social atmosphere is also affecting technology and how it manifests.”
Aaron: Yeah, there's a bit of a chicken-egg situation going on there. Although the first place that my mind jumped to when you were talking about technology being influenced by the— which cycle, which turning it's developed in, since I know wars have a prominent place in the turnings.
Max: Yeah. All of them, by the way.
Aaron: That certainly, war has a very dramatic impact on what technologies are brought to the fore, and even given the same technologies, how they are implemented that… It's the whole military industrial complex, and kind of the DARPA thing that just because an idea is going to be deployed in a very different way in the context of a military need rather than a commercial one.
Max: Yeah. Yeah.
Aaron: But that's, that's showing my personal and professional bias sneaking in there.
Max: Yeah. All right. So why don't I just talk about the fourth turning, and bring that up? Because a lot of people—
Aaron: Let’s take a step back to the big picture here.
Max: Yeah, okay, so each turning is 20 years. And that's why I kind of think we talked about decades a lot, because a 10-year is really a half turning, and there's kind of a coming into it and the coming out of it. I thought about that a bit. So, the turnings that he gives are there, the first turning is a high, where there is a high degree of conformity. Basically, the people in society are all on the same page. People are... Also, can be very successful because society kind of feels good about itself. On the other hand, if you're kind of an outcast in that era, you don't really have a, you don't really have anywhere to go, if you want to fix things in society, you don't have anywhere to go. So that's kind of the down side of the high of the first turning, but that's just the way it is.
In the second turning they call an awakening. And it's usually kind of a flourishing of new ideas. Let's say, so the high has lasted for a long time. By the way, everyone who describes these things is describing them a little different. So this is my takeaway. We just watched a video on YouTube where somebody talked about his kind of conception of it, which I also noticed was a little different from the book, and I'll post that online. This is my takeaway. The second turning is an awakening, where you've had this high, where people feel good about themselves. High degree of conformity, but now you get a little bit of pushback in terms of where society is going to go. This is when a lot of religious upheavals take place. This is when people seek spiritual enlightenment, seek new ways of doing things, and there could be a lot of turmoil in a second turning, just as there's turmoil in a fourth turning, which we'll get to.
But the turmoil in the second turning has a specific flavor to it, where it's more, it's spiritual upheavals. And you might have heard of the Great Awakening and the Second Great Awakening. We all have learned this stuff in high school and I don't even remember half the stuff but those were all awakenings.
Aaron: So is that primarily internal as opposed to external, or is that not necessarily a generalization you can make there?
Max: I think it's yes, I think he would say it's an internal kind of battle. Like an internal toward the self type situation.
Aaron: I hadn't thought of it that way. I was thinking more in terms of the nation and its people, because I'm probably drawing too many conclusions from our current/most recent cycle, which started you know, with the post war World War Two era. And in that case, the awakening would be, you know, the 60s, 70s. And the cultural upheaval that occurs.
Max: He puts it in the early 80s too.
Aaron: But then that was very much kind of internal to the nation. There were global things going on there. But we were much more concerned with the internal and I guess it makes sense that both the within ourselves piece of that applies there as well.
Max: Yeah. So it's, yeah, yeah. So I would say it's more internal, but you could have, you know, one of the points that he makes is, there's no prescription on what events are going to happen like the Coronavirus pandemic could have any time. Country could be attacked at any time. It's just depending on where you are, in the saeculum, people are going to tend to react differently to that. So you got your second turning, spiritual upheaval, third turning comes around. Now it's like, okay, people are doing their own thing, kids are becoming alienated. Instead of arguing with each other, like you do in an awakening, and seeking enlightenment, people kind of seek more individualistic goals.
Aaron: So this is the polar opposite of that era of conformity. It happens at the high. We've had an awakening of discovery, and now everybody's pulling apart.
Max: Right, right. Okay. And so you sense the opposite of the high, right, you kind of see how you got from the high to the awakening, but now... or from the high to the awakening to the unraveling, right. Okay. So society starts to unravel. You have individuality, which is good. We all grew up in unraveling, I feel like it's kind of a negative term. But he also describes it as like kind of middle aged retirement, if you're talking about the life cycle. So that's not necessarily a bad time. And oftentimes, a lot of societies, a lot of catching, a lot of economic booms happen.
Aaron: Including the boom of the 90s. And the early dot-com boom
Max: And the 1920s, yeah.
Aaron: Right. But what happens after the 1920s?
Max: Okay, so basically, you have a more individuality, society pulled apart, and then you have to skip 20 years and get conformed. You get that 1950s. How does that happen? Well, the answer is, some crazy stuff has to happen in between. and that's what’s called the Fourth Turning, where there is essentially a crisis, or a series of crises, that make people revamp the institutions and the way of thinking and essentially, one group wins the fourth turning, if you could say that, or if I mean, look, in case of American Revolution, I guess one group wins the fourth turning in America. Britain is still Britain, you know.
And I guess the Civil War could have gone the other way, too, in which case, we have two countries, but then you kind of end up in a stable piece at the end. So the new order, the new, the new normal, let's say, which is kind of scary when you think about it when, you know, I know, there's a conspiracy like, you know, all the all the rich guys, Davos are trying to impose a new normal on us or a great reset. And I actually don't think that history and events work like that. I don't think a small group of highly influential people can just say, “Oh, this is the way things are gonna go.” I think they kind of lose control of things real fast. I feel like they're aware that they're, like, influential people are obviously trying to affect this outcome, whether they realize it or not.
Aaron: Yeah, when talking about influential people, this whole fourth turning saeculum theory is, I would say, the main counterweight against the Great Man theory of history, that, that it's not saying.
Max: So what's, what is great man theory?
Aaron: Oh, the great man theory would well to to go ahead and Goodwyn the argument right off the bat, that if Adolf Hitler hadn't been born, then World War Two wouldn't have happened. That the individual makes the history. And i think that Strauss and Howe would argue that it might have had a very different outcome, but the the critical conflict that happened, it would still happen at that time, roughly, and it would probably have a pretty similar nature, even if it wasn't precisely Nazis fighting your Axis and Allied powers and you know, Mussolini and Hitler. Other individuals would rise into very similar roles, and we would have a somewhat similar outcome.
Max: Yeah. I mean, they did say, look, war is not inevitable, you know, so a lot of this stuff is not inevitable. But it's just, yeah. And a fourth turning, that's when you could have a total war.
Aaron: And this is, like we were saying before, this is counter to a lot of the way that we learn history, because when history is a bunch of names and dates, then what can it be but the story of certain individuals who altered the course of history. This is saying that there are forces and powers in motion there that are not captured by that.
Max: I actually, I actually am not sure I totally, I still think there's room for both. Because I still think it's like, hey, you could be a leader that comes along. And you can change things, but you have to kind of go with the grain of the social moment at the time. So you can't, in other words, I can't become president in 1950, there was no election in 1950. But let's pretend. I can't become president in 1950. And, you know, bring about a return to the 1920s, for example, like that's just not possible.
But who was president in the 1950s? Truman, Eisenhower, they couldn't have made very different decisions. And I think those two men were actually pretty well suited for that decade. Sometimes they say, there's their leaders, political leaders who come around who are not well suited for their times at all, or they're trying to—
Aaron: But that's almost a tautology, because yeah, how could they not be well suited? Otherwise? They wouldn't have risen to that level. But I guess there's some counterexamples to be, to talk about.
Max: Yeah. There are plenty of counter examples to that. In fact, I think we actually have one now. But we can get into that.
Aaron: You can pick your choice, whether we're talking about the current occupant of 1600, or the previous one.
Max: If you want to be influential, you have to take that into account, and you're not going to change where people are. Let me put it this way. If you're 25 years old, you can make good decisions, you can make bad decisions, you can alter the course of your life, but you're not going to be you know, when you're 75, you're not going to be able to live like you were 25, and vice versa. It's just not going to happen. You have to “act your age,” essentially.
Aaron: Yeah, that makes sense.
Max: A lot of what they do is they speak in analogy, which is the way we learn, it's interesting, but I'm always kind of careful about how far does this analogy go? Because this is, they talk about this, they use the analogies a lot. The life cycle of a human being to the saeculum. Where obviously the end of the crisis is death and birth. And they use the season, that seasons, the four seasons. Okay, I get why those analogies work, but how far can you take those analogies? I'm not so sure.
Aaron: Well, to make maybe a slightly different metaphor, you're talking about you, you kind of have to go with the flow with the types of changes and actions that you can take in a certain part of the cycle. There's a commonly discussed topic, and particularly in the technology world, an idea before its time. That you can have a great idea for an innovation or technology. But if the time isn't right, it doesn't matter whether it's a great idea or not, it has to be the right idea at the right time. And right. I think that's a little bit of what this is.
Max: In this case, we're talking about political ideas or social ideas as well. Right. So there's a little bit more to this. They talk a lot about generations, because they're demographers and they talk about Millennials and Gen X and Boomers. People are talking about Boomers all the time these days.
Aaron: Strauss and Howe coined the term Millennial?
Max: Yes, yes.
Aaron: So we have them to thank/blame.
Max: So your life experience is going to be based on what part of the saeculum in which you were born? In other words, what age are you at the crisis, what age you're going to be at the awakening? And if you're lucky enough to live a full life, then you live out an entire saeculum worth of events. And some people live beyond that to see you know, the next, you know, to repeat a turning as well. Basically, these four generations have archetypes of what type of person kind of grows up in that generation. So maybe I'll go through the four, which one do you want to start with? Give me a generation. Pick a generation, any generation.
Aaron: Well, let’s end with the hero. So to end with that, so who do we start with?
Max: So we'll start with the Artists’ Generation. The last one of that is, so the last Artists’ generation is the Silent Generation. They were born, so I don't have the dates in front of me, but they were born during World War Two, or before into the 30s and late 20s. So my grandmother, for example, is a Silent Generation. Joe Biden is the only president ever elected from the Silent Generation. Mount Rushmore has four leaders from four different types of generation. So Teddy Roosevelt is obviously not Silent Generation, but he was from the Artists’ Generation before that. So they're called Artists because they were growing up during a crisis. Current Silent Generation today were growing up during the Depression, World War Two crisis. Not growing up, not like, so I feel like—
Aaron: Also so children born today, would they be the next Artists’ Generation?
Max: So it's, yes, but it's unclear to me, and I think this is after this book was written. So if I were to make the generations to line up with this book, I would say that Millennials should go up to say, to the year 2000, or 2005, maybe. The next Artists’ Generation should be Gen Z, which starts, but now they're saying Gen Z really starts in like 1995 or 2000. It's uncertain.
Aaron: That's part of the problem.
Max: And are people born now still considered Gen Z? I think it's probably. we’re beyond that, but I feel like the people born now are still living through the crisis a little bit. So I'm not so sure. Although the Boomer Generation does clip a little bit of World War, like a few years of World War Two into it, just because if you were born in like, 1944, you know, you don't really remember wartime very much.
Aaron: We mentioned that it's 80 years to maybe 90 something. It’s a little fuzzy. It's the same math that makes it tricky to definitively draw the line, where, what year are Millennials and Gen X? There's some fudge factor in there.
Max: Yeah. Okay. So we got to the Artists’ Generation. The next one is the Prophet Generation. Those are the Boomers.
Aaron: That’s prophet as in like, a Messiah, not the Lord of Capitalism.
Max: Yes, yeah. So Moses, for example, is in the Prophet Generation. They give the example like, so I don't know how many people are familiar with the Exodus story. But they give the example of when Moses was, I don't know, was the awakening when Moses killed the Egyptian or when he saw the burning? No, I'm pretty sure it was when he killed the Egyptian, that was the awakening, where he realized that the slavery of the Hebrews is wrong, went to hiding, all that. When he comes back and does all a bunch of plagues and stuff and frees the Israelites, that's the fourth turning in that story. The prophet is usually the ones who are in the middle of their life, are kind of hippies, and then the end of their life, they kind of lead the—
Aaron: I really need to go back and rewatch The Ten Commandments.
Max: Boomers are prophets, I believe. I've gone through some examples. I'm not sure what examples they give in here. So one recent example of like Steve Jobs, I think would be a really interesting one from a tech perspective. But it's anyone in the Boomer Generation, that's like a lot of people. That generation kind of, they grow up in the fifth in a conformist time.
Aaron: Bill Clinton would have been a Boomer president.
Max: Yes. We've had Boomer presidents from ‘93 to last year. Yeah. They're all Boomers. So you grow up in the 50s, and you grow up in other areas, you grew up in a very conformist time. When you're a young adult, you have an awakening, see, rebel, you're the young adults who rebel against that. And then your crisis happens when you're a senior citizen. Alright, so then the next block is the Nomad Generation. They are the most, the current one is Gen X. They are children during the awakening. My takeaway from this is that while the awakening is going on, they're pretty much ignored and left to their own devices. And so I don't know, like kids in the 70s could just do what they wanted. By the time we came around, society was clamping, starting to clamp down on their kids. And now society has clamped down so much on their kids that in Canada, they're like, if someone gets COVID in their class, keep your kid in their room and lock them in there for two weeks. So basically like we were in the downslide of that as Millennials. And I guess kids in the 70s were just allowed to, I don't know, maybe the parents were all, were experimenting with drugs or something. And the kids were just like—
Aaron: It's the stereotypical like, you know, go ride your bikes, go play stickball on the sandlot, be home before it's dark.
Max: Yeah, I'm sure that's true in the 50s, too. But I feel like in the… I guess they're saying that the parents weren't there, and the kids just kind of have to fend for themselves. So Gen X tends to be very independent minded. That's why when they're young adults, you've got the individualistic society. And they are very alienated kids. But, you know, as young adults, they are, they can be, they can also be alienated as young adults, but they're also very good entrepreneurs. I think of Gen X people as entrepreneurs, because most Gen X people I know, in my life, are actually pretty successful and very entrepreneurial. People who are like, 10 years older than me. I don't know, that's just my particular—
Aaron: I can't think of Gen X without thinking of “Friends.”
Max: Yeah. Yeah.
Aaron: I don't know what relevance that brings to this. But that's my first mental association.
Max: I think of, you know, when we were growing up, Boomers were like, look at these kids making millions of dollars selling domain names. Those kids were Gen X.
Aaron: Yeah.
Max: Interestingly enough, a lot of people in Bitcoin today are… Yes, there's a lot of Millennials, like me, and some other people, but a lot of Gen X, too.
Aaron: What about the NFT space? Is Gen X too old for that?
Max: No. I mean, I feel like they're, they're coming up with it. My friend Dennis Crowley has been on the show. He's a Gen X entrepreneur. But so, another kind of Nomad Generation, the previous one was the Lost Generation. I find this very interesting, because my great-grandfather, I think he died when I was six, and he was born in 1899. So I think, I always thought it was really cool. They talked about this at the end of the book, how, think of the oldest person, he might not, they say the oldest person who had an influence on you. I mean, I don't know how much influence you could have. But definitely the oldest family member who I met is born in the 1800s; that’s pretty cool.
He was a member of this so-called Lost Generation. I think they're called Lost because World War One happened, we Lost some of them. But they were considered to be bad kids, as opposed to what they call the GI Generation, the Greatest Generation that fought in World War Two. No, they were, those guys had it together. But the guys in, who were born in late 1800s, they were, they had it rough, and they had to start their own businesses and do what they can on the streets. Then 1920s came along, and they were the people who were having all the fun in the 1920s. That's sort of what Lost is, and it's sort of modeled on Gen X.
They also give an example in Star Wars as an example, because they give a lot of, every story has some kind of constellation of—
Aaron: —of the four archetypes?
Max: Of the four archetypes, right. Luke Skywalker is a Millennial. Han Solo is Gen X and, almost forgot the other guy.
Aaron: Obi Wan Kenobi.
Max: Obi Wan Kenobi, he's a, he's a Boomer.
Aaron: So when Plano covers him?
Max: Yeah, he's probably also Gen X.
Aaron: Yeah, he's Solo's age group there.
Max: Yeah. Okay, so, that kind of makes sense. Well why would it be in Star Wars? Well, it's because these stories are written, the story is that, Star Wars is based on story structure that has previously existed and a lot of these previously existing story structures is based on the repeating cycles of history. That's why they say a lot of this is in the Bible, a lot of this stuff is in, and also the story—
Aaron: It makes particular sense that a story like that would take place at the crisis.
Max: Right. Right. Exactly.
Aaron: I am not familiar enough with all the prequels to really go through and dissect how Episodes One through Three fit into the cycle here, but it’s interesting work done there. But they also fall apart.
Max: Yeah, because it’s not really an awakening, is it? It's another crisis. But that's, what can you do? I mean, some people say that Episodes One through Three is really more like World War One. But I think, I don't think the Star Wars universe is meant to respect the saeculum. I think it's just, maybe you could find a different, maybe it's another crisis and you find a different, you find the archetypes.
Aaron: We haven't talked in detail about the Hero Generation yet. Yeah. So let's do that in just a second. But I want to circle back to what you said about World War One. Because there's, I think there's an interesting question. But first—
Max: There's so much talk about your Hero Generation. That's us. Okay. The good news is we get to be the heroes. The bad news is that might not be as good as it sounds.
Aaron: It's work.
Max: Yeah. Those are the people who stormed the beaches of Normandy. But yeah, most of us are not going to do that. I don't think we can really live up to that.
Aaron: But everyone showed up to storm Area 51. So yeah, we're not gonna make it to Normandy.
Max: Yeah, I guess, I guess how many millennials were storming the Capitol? Probably quite a few. I think that they also say some things about the Hero Generation that's not too flattering. The Hero Generation just takes orders from the Prophet Generation when the crisis comes, unquestionably. We could just be the foot soldiers, and they're like, well, if Gen X doesn't intervene in time, then it could just be an authoritarian disaster.
Aaron: But that makes sense if we're looking through the lens of World War Two being the last crisis in the previous cycle that, your GIs, the Greatest Generation, they weren't old enough to be in leadership positions. They were doing the grunt work.
Max: Yeah, yeah, exactly. We could have had some level of leadership in, in the war. Like my grandfather on my father's side, who I never met, who died before I was born, I think he was like a lieutenant or something like that. But you probably, you weren't general. You weren't like a 30 year old general.
Aaron: The big shots were being called by people like Eisenhower and Churchill, who were of the previous generation.
Max: Right. Right. They were, yes.
Aaron: Would that make them nomads? Or am I skipping one there?
Max: Yes, yes. They're nomads. Churchill was born in the late 1800s, as was Eisenhower, I think? Yeah. So they were Lost Generation folks. Okay. So fourth turning, so how did those turn out? So we've talked about the last one. Let's actually give some more examples. So the previous 180 years ago, Depression and World War Two, that fourth turning is very unique in American history, because it was an external struggle with what was going on in the rest of the world. We had some issues with rising fascism, and socialism, communism in the US. And FDR, I guess to his credit, kind of held it all together. On one hand, I think some of his policies were absolutely atrocious. On the other hand, they kind of staved off some of these policies. I mean, that I would put it atrocious on these policies, let's put FDR’s policies as just merely bad. In some cases, they were more than bad. I think you know what I'm talking about.
Aaron: Yeah. This internal-external thing, it gets to what I was thinking about before and why I was saying maybe I'm over generalizing from this specific case, where the awakening in the 60s and 70s, you know, was very much domestic, kind of internal to the US whereas World War Two was, it’s right in the name, World War, it was much global, external facing, how we related to the rest of the world. So not necessarily the case for previous fourth turning crises.
Max: Yeah. So some of the changes that happened within the US over the last fourth turning, I'm not too thrilled about. For example, we had, we basically, a little bit before the fourth turning, but we confirmed it during World War Two, we kind of gave up on hard money. That's something that maybe could be fixed in this fourth turning with Bitcoin, which I'll get in a second or cryptocurrency.
Certain aspects of the state that were kind of put into place like the Teitelman programs and whatnot, that sort of came out of the last fourth turning, and partially the second turning. But, you know, that's just the way it is. That's just who won history. And the great news of last fourth turning is that the Nazis didn't win. So I'll chalk that up as a win any day, despite what else happened. But let's look at… But there's no guarantee that good things will happen in the fourth turning, sometimes very bad things could happen. We've gotten very lucky over the last few, let's look at the one before that. Take World War Two, take now, subtract 80 years World War Two to take World War Two, subtract 80 years, what do you get? That brings us to the 1860s, does it not?
Aaron: Yes.
Max: And that brings us to the Civil War. Societies falling apart, slave states, free states can't coexist. Very bloody war in American history. It ended with a good result that slavery is abolished and the country stays together, but you know, at tremendous cost. And so you got that, you know, we can kind of glorify the Civil War, but who would want to live through it?
Aaron: Certainly. That raises a question, having not read that section in detail, how is reconstruction in the US treated. Because I, some of my recent reading and listening has not painted a rosy picture of that period. So viewing that as the high might seem like a bit of a stretch, in some respects.
Max: I think that's kind of an extension of the fourth turning a little bit. Into the high would be Gilded Age.
Aaron: Gotcha. So the post-1876 when, basically the end of reconstruction? Yeah. Which dark compromises were made, but it allowed the country to then go into a growth mode after that.
Max: Yeah, you could say the high starts in New York City, in 1866, maybe, but then it doesn't start in the south. I don't know if you really have, I don't know history as much. Because yeah. The South backslides, for sure, during that time. But one thing they don't do in the south is they don't restart the Civil War.
Aaron: Indeed.
Max: Because that's not something that you do in a first turning. So, again, first turning doesn't mean things are going well for everybody. In fact, if you're not, if you're on the outside of the majority, things are not so good for you in the first turning. First turning can concern me a little bit, but we'll see what happens. Okay, there are wars in the first turning, by the way, there's like the Korean War is an example, where you get in, you confirm the result from the crisis, and you get out. Basically.
Aaron: Right, and there are a couple of terms that were thrown around, coming from other researchers talking about like probing wars or, you know, kind of smaller regional conflicts, not not the defining conflicts that generally characterize a fourth turning, but it's not necessarily a period of peace. Much in the same way that the Pax Romana or the Pax Americana were not actually periods without war, they were just internal peace, because all the fighting was busy happening out on the borders with the barbarians.
Max: Right. Okay. So, Civil War, subtract 80 years, you get the Revolutionary War, same sort of thing happening, subtract eight years from that. And you get some very interesting things happening as well. A lot of things that happened in colonial times, I didn't realize they all happened around the same time. You have King Philip's War, which is like this peace with the Native Americans was broken, and you have this horrible war between the colonists and Native Americans. Then the British come in and say we're gonna now have direct control over the colonies, colonies rebel against that, and then they revert to more indirect control. They have a revolution in England, the Glorious Revolution, that overthrows the Stuart dynasty, and then some other crazy things happen here. We have like the Salem Witch Trials and people getting killed left and right. I just know that because in high school we did the crucible, which is a play on it for those who don't know. And I was one of those guys who was, you know, making sure people were put to death and—
That's gonna be edited out. That's gonna be, edited out, very bad content. And then yeah, and then that finally came to an end. It probably would have been a relief when all those things came to an end for the colonists. That marked the downslide of the Puritan era in American history, where, after that, I don't know what the high would be, maybe people kept, I'm actually not too familiar with the high after that. But I know in the awakening period after that, you had lots of splinter groups from the Puritans. That's why by the time we get to the American Revolution, they say, well, John Adams was descended from Puritans, and he was part of the church that was the Puritan church, but they never say like he was a Puritan. Because he was like, “Oh, that was like a lifetime ago.”
Aaron: Yeah, the Protestant sects in that part of the country at that time, kind of drifted somewhat from the folks that came over from England originally.
Max: Right. Okay. So there's interesting things about a generation, first of all, your generation isn't static. So it's not like you could say, well, this generation is very liberal, and that generation is very conservative. Sometimes that's true, but also they can change over time. And an interesting thing to think about when it comes to your generation, is that not only does the general attitude of the individuals change as they get older, which makes sense, you're gonna have a different perspective on life when you're 50 years old, and you've lived through a bunch of stuff you haven't lived through yet when you're 20. But also, different individuals get emphasized at different portions of their life. I think of the Gen X and Millennial people that they mentioned in this book, I've never heard of them, because that was from 1997. And now there are different people who you would talk, but the only Gen X people who are Millennial people that I recognize are Olsen twins.
Aaron: To torture a metaphor perhaps, the people who are the cool kids in high school are not necessarily going to be movers and shakers come the 10th reunion. So we see some of that shifting within the groups that all the same people are there but prominent roles are shifting sands.
Max: Right, right. So I feel like back in the 90s. What do you see Gen X as? You said, Friends. You might think Nirvana. I think comedians like Pauly Shore, who's heard of Pauly Shore now? Yeah.
Aaron: Where does Seinfeld fit in there?
Max: I think he's Gen X. Yeah. So he still could be relevant if he wanted to, I think. Anyway, actually Pauly Shore is so stupid that obviously was not gonna last. Maybe Adam Sandler, too. But this is different style of comedy than you have today, because it's like it’s funny, because they're so stupid. Even though they're not stupid. You know who else did that? Ashton Kutcher. He’s apparently a very smart guy, and he's even an investor in Foursquare.
Aaron: Playing dumb for comedy genius is certainly not a thing they invented. Yeah, going back to the vaudeville days, and then before that.
Max: Right, but look, that is, that went out of fashion. Therefore the people who were doing that went out of fashion.
Aaron: Or they evolved.
Max: Yeah, or they evolved. Exactly. So that's an interesting thing to think about. Okay, so we just got through a basic description. We’re already 50 minutes in, I don't know if you want to divide this up into two shows. But do you have any questions?
Aaron: Yeah. I want to talk to you about the World War One thing?
Max: Yeah.
Aaron: So we have labeled World War Two as the crisis of the fourth turning.
Max: Exactly.
Aaron: And I can see why for the United States. World War One is kind of just a blip. We basically showed up at the end, token force. Yes, there were casualties, but it didn't affect us in nearly the way that it affected Europe. Why was World War One, not a fourth turning for Europe?
Max: So this book primarily focuses on the United States. And they do have a section of Europe where they're like, my takeaway is like Europe's tainted, because every country has, is in a different phase right now, is in a different phase at different times, and they kind of clash with each other and affects—
Aaron: As you say, I could almost see why—
Max: But because the United States is so isolated, and even England to an extent, not isolated as much from Europe, but still kind of self-contained, that it kind of works for these societies. But now since World War Two was so global, everybody's going through the same cycle at the same time. Now, we might also be under fourth turning at the same time, which could be pretty crazy.
Aaron: Yeah, I don't know if I buy that Europe within itself is so disjointed there, I could easily buy the case that Europe and America were out of sync with each other, and that the development of faster international travel and global communications forced those to come into alignment with each other, and that probably happened right around World War Two-ish.
Max: Yeah, no, I actually think that, and then this is not from this book, this is my thinking, obviously Russia is one behind because, clearly the communist revolution was a fourth turning event, not a third turning event. Probably all of World War One in central Eastern Europe. And then the fall of communism, also a fourth turning event.
Aaron: Also for the fall of the Berlin Wall. I guess that is, where does that fit in our cycle?
Max: So in our cycles, so a lot of thirds, interestingly enough, a lot of third turnings have wars, that, where you kind of win, but it doesn't solve your internal issues as much. So a good example of that would—
Aaron: So that would have been during our unraveling.
Max: Yeah. So another example of that kind of war would be World War One, or the Mexican-American war. I think they gave us an example where Lincoln was a congressman during that as opposed to the war. Yeah, the United States won the war. We beat Mexico.
Aaron: I'm thinking of the expeditions in New Mexico in like 1905 with Black Jack Pershing. You're talking about the war that preceded Texas's independence.
Max: Yes. Yeah. And, and, yes, America won the war, but it kind of exacerbated the internal issues that led to the Civil War. So same with French and Indian War leading to the Revolutionary War. So it's kind of like those third turning wars, we don't really study them as much in history as other than like, there'd be like a chapter on the main fourth turning and the beginning would be like, well, there was this third turning war that happened.
Aaron: So with our Global War on Terror, Iraq and Afghanistan, is that a third turning war? Or is that the front end of the fourth turning? Or is it too soon to tell?
Max: I think I would say too soon to tell.
Aaron: Well, that's depressing.
Max: Yeah.
Aaron: Especially if it means that we've got something more dramatic in our immediate horizon.
Max: It's possible. It's possible. All right. So I think we should wrap up this section, and then go on to the next section. You can record it now. But I think we're gonna wrap this up for today. This is like the basic description of the fourth turning. And when we come back next time, we're going to talk about our evaluation of the theory all the way down to, what do we think is going to happen in this fourth turning? Next time on The Local Maximum, have a great week everyone.
Aaron: Stay tuned for that.
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