Episode 309 - The Next Saeculum
Substack Link
Max and Aaron finished their discussion on "The Fourth Turning is Here" and talk about what may be in store for the rest of the Fourth Turning Crisis and what the next several decades might look like as a result.
Links
YouTube - Trio Fadolín - Millennium Stage (March 22, 2023)
Goodreads - The Fourth Turning Is Here
KnowYourMeme - Hard Times Create Strong Men
YouTube - Civil War - Official Trailer (2024)
New York Times - Big Histories for the Big Future
Related Episodes
Episode 172 - The Fourth Turning Part I - Cycles of History
Episode 173 - The Fourth Turning Part II - Emerging from the Crisis
Episode 214 - War in Ukraine, New York Times Bias
Episode 300 - War in the Middle East, Part I
Episode 272 - Data Science History with Chris Wiggins and Matthew Jones
Episode 295 - Rewriting the Constitution: Did the Founders Screw up the Senate
Transcript
Max: You're listening to the Local Maximum episode 309.
Narration: Time to expand your perspective. Welcome to the Local Maximum. Now here's your host, Max Sklar.
Max: Welcome everyone. Welcome. You have reached another Local Maximum. Here I have an episode for you, a Christmas Day episode as it turns out, as the calendar allows. Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, everyone. Hope you enjoy.
If you remember from last time, I recently finished the book, The Fourth Turning is Here by Neil Howe and I discussed it with Aaron last week on episode 308. In that episode, if you haven't had a chance to listen, we talked about the theory of the fourth turning and why it predicts continuing crisis in the 2020s.
We gave an overview of the theory and talked about some of the cultural implications of generational theory. Why different generations are different, why times change every generation every 20 years or so. And what that has looked like in the past
Now we're gonna get into the future: what does this theory say about what happens in the rest of the crisis, the rest of the fourth turning in the 2020s and early 2030s? And in the future down the line for you know, the several decades ahead. So let's bring it up.
We have just gone into a cultural discussion of the fourth turning. Now we're going to talk about how will this crisis play out, because Neil Howe’s given several different scenarios here. This is game time. If this truly is, look, there's an outside chance that we can get out of the fourth turning without a severe political crisis and violence, but it is unlikely.
Aaron: And what would that even mean to get through the crisis without? I mean, I guess the answer is you'd have a minor crisis or a series of minor crises rather than a single severe crisis. But it seems like definitionally you've got to have something big and dramatic occur.
Max: Things start to break. And like, what if they don't break but they're still held up by a string, then? Okay, then it seems like it just takes a little longer, right?
Aaron: If we keep slapping duct tape on it — we don't get to pass into the high without paying the penalty. It just it just means that we're we're stretching out that that that generation that that period until we get to the real- and you hear that you hear that sometimes in economic discussion that the longer you you put off a recession by whether it's manipulating interest rates or other maneuvers, it just means that you're gonna have a bigger fall when it hits and you can't you can't outrun it forever.
Max: Right, right. So a fourth turning is — it's not a cultural upheaval, it's a political upheaval. And so, institutions are going to be remade. Now, whatever institution, it's not necessarily political institutions, but it could be international agreements and relationships, it could be the way government works.
It's not like the Constitution was created several fourth turnings ago, the US government, and so fourth turnings have seen a reinvention of the US government, but not necessarily an overturning as a whole.
Aaron: We certainly have, there was a period where there was a lot of speculation about the EU completely collapsing, there was Brexit, and there was talk of, of other nations potentially wanting to exit the EU, and that would dramatically reshape the face of Europe and by extension, the global economy.
Max: I guess my point is, like, what are we putting duct tape on? Because fourth turnings, break a lot of things, but they don't break everything. And so that's an interesting thing. There are things you could duct tape through a few different saeculums perhaps and so it's interesting to see what clears the way.
So we could get away with putting some things off for the future. And in fact, that's a big problem because you go into a high and if you want to overturn the consensus of society in a high politically, that's just very difficult to do. You've missed your window. And so that's that — you're going to have to wait. You're probably not keen on waiting till the next generation but you're basically going to have to figure out how to live with the hand you were dealt.
Because you can make changes in the high rather than in the awakening, but it's just they're different. Okay, so, interestingly enough, like the civil rights movement was an awakening, not a fourth turning movement. So, there's that. And if you look at the civil rights movement of the 60s and 70s, a lot of religious themes. So it wasn't, it wasn't just a pure political movement.
Okay, so, but there are political changes in the second movement, a second turning, just like there are cultural changes in the fourth turning, and this is something that I have a hard time wrapping my head around.
Because it's like, okay we have big changes twice in the saeculum which are going to fall- I feel like the type you can expect in the awakening is different than the type you can expect in the crisis. But there is some overlap there that I'm not quite comfortable prognosticating yet, if that makes sense. Hopefully that makes sense.
But let's talk about the first possibility, which is civil war, civil conflict. You know, we had one, two turnings ago and in the American Civil War. We had one, three turnings ago in the Revolutionary War, which in many ways was also a civil war, because there were Tories on the American side.
Aaron: Loyalists and separatists.
Max: And interestingly enough, that the next political conflict, which was resolved peacefully between the Federalists and the anti-Federalists, which he also puts in the fourth turning, was also an internal conflict.
And then three crises ago, three saeculums ago, there was a bunch of crazy stuff going on with the Puritans and the British, which I'm not qualified to speak on.
Aaron: Are we looking back at English Civil War? Or further back than that? Oh, no, yeah,
Max: This would be the Glorious Revolution of 1688, which also included a period where the I believe it was the English crown, tried to take direct control over the colonies, and there was kind of a mini revolt.
It wasn't like the American Revolutionary War, whereas we should be independent. It was like, no, we should have this political relationship with you and not that political relationship with you. There's also- when did Connecticut hide those kings that were?
Aaron: The judges?
Max: Oh, yeah. The judges that were beheaded. I think that was also around the same time.
Aaron: Yeah, that would make sense. And that's what would eventually cause — was it New Haven? — to lose their charter.
Max: Yeah, yeah. So we would currently be living in the state of New Haven if this didn't happen. Oh, yes. So this is at the beginning of that fourth turning, where the king was actually beheaded in 1649. And so I guess that went all the way up.
Aaron: Was that one of Charles's?
Max: Yeah, I guess that went all the way up to like 1688. So that was like a 30 year crisis.
Aaron: We are spoiled in our modern era, and maybe not, if we consider the Iraq war leading into war in Afghanistan and the global war on terror as all being part of the same thing. But a 30 Years War, a 100 Years War was not unusual. We've allowed ourselves to define what wars look like.
Max: How long was Afghanistan?
Aaron: Well, it was about 20 years. Right.
Max: Yeah. Although not a war that we had to particularly worry about?
Aaron: Depends on who you are. But yes, it wasn’t. In the same way. I mean, I haven't read much recently on some of those conflicts, but certainly the 100 Years War was not 100 years of constant conflict, right?
Max: Neither was the 30 Years War.
Aaron: It ebbed and flowed. But it didn't resolve itself for four decades. So I think we're perhaps spoiled by World War One and World War Two, which is as ugly as they were, they had clear beginnings, clear endings, and those beginnings and endings were roughly half a decade apart roughly.
I've heard it said that in many ways the 20th century is an anomaly. And that we're we can expect some reversion to the mean of what history is typically, like, in the 21st century. I don't think that necessarily pairs up with what, what, what stress and how laid out but maybe an interesting counterpoint there.
Max: Yeah. So did you see the Civil War trailer that came out for 2024?
Aaron: Yeah, that's been getting a lot of buzz in certain corners of the internet here. And yeah, December,
Max: Is it a warning? Is it just a possibility? What I find interesting about the trailer is that they're like, Texas and California on the same side, which people speculate is just, they don't want to actually get into politics.
Aaron: Yeah, I've heard the theory that perhaps that is to make it so that it is not purely a red tribe versus blue tribe that can make some deeper commentary without getting caught up in that.
Max: Yeah. Someone else also said, and again, I don't know if this is offensive, or like the only possible way to get this to work. Well, yes, those of the drug court where the drug cartels ended up, which I could see that.
Aaron: There's certainly a significant portion of US military equipment and personnel, concentrated in those two states. So, yeah, perhaps that's a piece of it.
Max: Okay. The other possibility is an international war. And by the way, it's not either-or, that case. Could be both.
Aaron: And if we look back to the American Revolution, as Americans, we view that as very much an American conflict, but that was just one piece in a global war that was going on at that point, largely between the French and the British. We were almost a back alley side brawl that was going on from their perspectiv.,
Max: It really does seem like the international order is breaking across the way. And We've had episodes about I mean, I'm gonna link to the episode about the Ukraine war and about the Israel-Gaza war.
You know, the first one, Ukraine war was episode 214. And the war in Gaza. Well, I guess it was in Israel at the time we were talking about it. now is in Gaza, is episode 300. So I am going to, I'm going to put those in.
So far, those wars seemed contained to just their particular area, but they're all proxies for the major powers around it. And are we just going to have an expanded proxy war? Or could this actually turn into a true great power war?
Aaron: Yeah. Well, and I think it was, I think I've mentioned on previous episodes, some of the writings from Peters a hand that he's, he's talked a lot about America potentially pulling back in their role of enforcing the global order and how that is, is very much a linchpin for the stability of globalization — that you pull out one of those Jenga blocks, and all of a sudden, there's a lot of — I’m mixing metaphors here — but there's a lot of domino effects that dramatically impact nations, which which you would not think of as necessarily being explicitly impacted by American action or inaction.
And I think I saw a news story just recently that — was it Maersk? — one of the large global international sea shipping companies has decided not to bring their cargo through the Red Sea — is the Red Sea, the one that feeds into the Suez Canal? I think it is. And the cited example was, I think the article said, despite the presence of two US aircraft carriers in the region.
Which of course the counter argument is, perhaps it is because of the presence of two US aircraft carriers in the region. Previously, a lot of the talk of international order stability has been focused on piracy. But if you see more regional international conflicts flaring up, that's going to have a dramatic impact there as well. So we might be seeing the first hints of that as we speak.
Max: So we get a new global order. Now these fourth turning wars, these get nasty.
Aaron: When you say new global order, it doesn't necessarily mean that the US will step back and China will step into their role.
Max: It's much messier. Even if that's the story, it's much messier.
Aaron: Well, yeah. It could be moving from a ostensibly unipolar world where the US is the great hegemon, it may be moving to a bipolar world, like we had during the Cold War, could be tri polar, it could be one or two big players, but then a band of smaller players that have a third influence, it could be any number of cases, and nobody, that is not a clean, peaceful transition, it will be a very messy transition to figure out who sits in what seats at that table, whatever that you know, that future table looks like.
Max: Yeah. And so what was the last table? That would be, was it like Yalta? I get those confused. Yalta and Potsdam?
Aaron: Yalta, Potsdam And there was there was one other but yeah.
Max: The Marshall Plan?
Aaron: The three Allied leaders sat down and planned out not just how we were going to finish off the Germans and then the Japanese and end the war, but what the postwar world was going to look like and how it was going to be carved up extensively.
Max: So there are moments in the fourth turning where basically, the next 80 years are decided by like, five people at a table in like 10 minutes. It may be a little bit more than that. But you know, that that kind of thing is known to happen, I mean, maybe a little more than ten minutes, maybe a little more than five people have input, but that's probably not too far off.
Aaron: Yeah, the Strauss-Howe generational theory does not necessarily is not necessarily incompatible with the idea of the great man theory of history, that there can be very, very influential, very important. Individuals who shape history within the shade within the template of generational theory.
Max: You can't be like, well, so and so came around and did this. And that prevented the Nomad generation from appearing, like that's not going to happen. So you can't, you can't stop the can't stop the turnings. Okay, so yeah, like saying these conflicts in the fourth turning, they're not. We're used to having conflicts that don't resolve.
In the last turning before World War Two, we had World War One, which resolved but didn't really resolve. I think that many of the political leaders after World War One thought that they were creating a new stable order, but they really weren't. They were just like, this is what feels good right now. And we're going to do it and end the war, which is what they needed to do, but it was, unfortunately, the wrong turning to, to, to put an end to the conflict once and for all. And so you needed World War Two, to get that way.
By the way, World War Two — most of the inventions that we use today came out of World War Two. And in fact, I'm going to go into another episode, I'm going to link to another episode. And this would be Chris Wiggins on data science. Yes, because they wrote a book about the history of data science, it turns out that most of the important stuff, most of the important changes occurred during World War Two.
So yeah, those wars were total, and it completely upends the order. Just like the Civil War completely overturned the system of slavery in the South, even if it ended up in a place where you didn't quite get the society you would want in the south. But you know, by the end of Reconstruction, it really did overturn the agrarian slave society.
Aaron: Yeah, disruption does not always yield the desired results, but it absolutely leads to change.
Max: Yeah, exactly. Okay, so what does that mean for the future? There is an outside chance we escaped this. Either this whole theory is BS, number one.
Or number two, the other chance to escape this is that we're able to somehow because of the technological state we're in or because of the decisions of a few people, we could somehow make these changes without mass violence, but it does not look good.
Aaron: I’m gonna jump the gun and mention something that you dropped a hint about already. But let's assume for the moment that this theory is solid and proven out. Perhaps there are things that could break the theory going forward.
Not that it's BS, but that there could be such a dramatic paradigm shift that it no longer applies. And so I'm thinking that if we see something that actually looks like the AI singularity, that that some forecasters have talked about in the past, that could negate a lot of this going forward.
Max: Okay. But that's not slated to happen during the fourth turning.
Aaron: I wouldn't expect it. We could be surprised. But I certainly wouldn't count on it
Max: Or it would come out at the fourth turning; it would be the resolution of the fourth turning, but in which case, it doesn't break the generational codes.
But how would that break the generational codes? Because it would still be the case that you would grow up in a world that was influenced by a worldview influenced by the previous generations.
Aaron: I think the way that this could well and truly get broken is, if we're looking at advances in longevity, that that, okay, bordering on immortality, where all of a sudden, the human lifespan is no longer bounded by that 80 to 100 year window, and maybe the generational theory would take on a new context with with much longer timelines.
But if we're not seeing that regular pattern occur anymore, then you can't reasonably apply the same theories to that. If there’s a breakthrough and we double the human lifespan, then by 2030, that would throw a lot of things out of whack here,
Max: I think you would still see changes and shifts over time — as he said, it's hard to predict how that would change. But he does address the fact not necessarily changing lifespans.
But maybe this goes into changing lifespans, like people, generations are staying relevant much longer. Interestingly, there's always like, a generation that had lived through the previous crisis.
Aaron: Was it the elders?
Max: Yeah, late elders.
Aaron: Late elders. Thank you.
Max: Yeah, so there's like the silent generation today. Some are still around. And the point he was making — at least this was true for World War Two — is that there were still civil war vets around during World War Two. Well, civil war vets, but there are also people who were children during the Civil War. Okay.
And they were very nervous, because they were children during the Civil War, they saw that thing as like, adults handled that. And now their elders, late elders, and they see this new conflict coming around. And they're like, oh, I don't know, for up for doing what we did back then.
Now, he also pointed out, there were a few guys still alive, who fought in the Civil War. And they were like, 105. And, people would go into them for advice or prognostication? Well, you did it, then, what do you think's going to happen now? And they're like, Oh, we're not going to have a problem with this. We're going to whip them back to you know, using some derogatory terms for the Japanese. You know, we're gonna wipe them clean, you know.
Aaron: So I wonder how much of that is. Survivorship bias is maybe the wrong term, but victor bias.
Max: I'm not saying that for a moment and say, just to pinpoint — I'm not saying that, that well, yes. It was true that America won the war. But I think I'm not saying that the previous hero generation was right. And the previous Silent Generation is always wrong. It's just that they looked at the new conflict very differently.
Aaron: I'm thinking that maybe we have a very shrinking number of people who fought in World War Two who are still alive today. Let's place ourselves in Germany for a moment. And let's stipulate, hypotheticals here that Russia has a major breakthrough in Ukraine and Ukraine topples and falls to an ascendant Russia.
And all of a sudden things are looking a little bit sketchier in Europe, that NATO is a little bit more concerned. I wonder what the viewpoint of the Germans still alive who fought in and lost World War Two would be in the context of what the future holds with the Russian bear at their door.
That's a curious alternate history, alternate future scenario. I don't know if those people would be very willing to go on the record and talk about that.
Max: How they must have reinterpreted their military service for the Nazis to live their long life? I don't know. Yeah, it's a very interesting question actually. I guess you could start by looking at the silent generation at the time, but they're gonna be very different. They're gonna have a very different opinion.
Yeah, I don't know. I'd like to know. What do you think their position would be? Like, it wouldn't be oh, well, right. Because they lost last time. So they might think, well, I'll probably lose this time.
Aaron: Yeah, and not only did they lose, but depending on where they ended up, on the east side, or the west side of Germany. Their experience under what I guess was at that point, Soviet dominion, I would expect would dramatically shape there.
Maybe that would make them a little bit black pilled. In the sense of this, this is gonna go very poorly for us, because we've been there, we've lived through that. Or perhaps it might give them an incentive that yeah, it went really badly last time. So we need to absolutely make sure it doesn't happen again. But again, I'm wildly speculating at this point.
Max: Now, one fourth turning political development that Howe goes into that is not about mass violence, and was resolved peacefully, was the Constitutional Convention. And so that is a possible blueprint out of this, although the constitutional convention took place after the Revolutionary War, so there was a lot of violence during that turning, it was part of it, the last part of it, where it ended up at the resolution was not.
Still, it might be a good example of, hey, not everything is guns and deaths and stuff like that. So he places the Constitutional Convention as the ultimate resolution of the fourth turning of the Revolutionary War.
I might have thought of it as kind of a first turning event, but he knows what he's doing I assume. He interpreted at the end of the fourth turning. I'll post the link to what we've said about the Constitutional Convention. But that's another case where okay, it wasn't five people and ten minutes, but it was still, like I don't know how many people were there. Like 30 people over a summer, trying to figure out how the US is going to work for the next 100, several 100 years.
Aaron: Right. And you could certainly couch that as this was a moment where the fledgling nation was poised to tear itself apart over some of these key questions, key disagreements about what form it should take.
And it was only when they came out of that with the Constitution that the crisis had been averted. And they were able to move into the the next period of stability — the period of good feelings as he's labeled it,
Max: Which, again, a little bit misnamed, because in our history books that comes only at the tail end of it after the War of 1812. But yeah, the Articles of Confederation, then the pre-Constitution times, would have been considered fourth turning times, which I, from what I read, they were kind of disastrous, so maybe they were fourth turning times. And so the fourth turning war occurred early, but the political resolution occurred a bit later, which is kind of interesting.
Aaron: Which is a good reminder that you know, winning the war is one thing but winning the peace or achieving the peace after the war is much more complicated. I mean, we've seen that in our last couple of decades and in you know, the Middle East and Southwest Asia.
Max: But those were second and third turning wars.
Aaron: Domestically as well in that it's not enough to win on the battlefield, you then have to find a way to transition to the next phase there.
Max: Yeah, yeah. So what do we have to look forward to, the first and second turning, right? So interestingly enough, Neil Howe places the Salem witch trials, the Witch burnings, McCarthyism and the Alien and Sedition Acts which were, which was a bunch of censorship put forth by the Federalist party in the US after the Constitution went to effect as kind of early first turning moral panics.
So I always thought the witch burning was during the fourth turning — he places it in the first turning again. It's easy to quibble about where it is, but it's either late fourth turning or early first turn. And actually, all of these things are kind of early for, if he's indeed right, early first turning.
So you have these kinds of moral panics during the high, where you continue to have mass censorship, which we've had now, although with Elon Musk buying Twitter, and now the other day with Alex Jones coming back on, it seems like a lot of the censorship.
Aaron: But did I hear that Kanye bought Parler or something?
Max: Oh, that was probably a while ago, that's not as relevant. But you know, first turning can have its own brand of political authoritarianism. And I kind of wonder, I think it's hard to know how that would play out until the resolution kind of plays out. But what ends up happening in the first tourney is.
So the first time you might take a while to get to because these points are differences in generations, a lot of people assume that the boomers are just going to go off to retirement community and have fun, because they're getting old. That's what old people do, right? No, that's what old silent generation people do. The Boomers don't want to do that. They want to stick around and stay involved and make sure that their moral crusade has come through. So they're not going to let go.
Those retirement communities that became so popular over the last couple of generations in Arizona and Florida, he predicts, are not going to be as popular with the boomer generation. So they're gonna stick around for a while. So it might take a while before the boomers are not relevant. They will be relevant for the foreseeable future, particularly since people are living much longer. It's gonna take a lot longer to get into the meat of the first turning than you might like.
But the point I was working towards here, is that once the Nomad generation kind of enters elderhood, and then the silent generation enters, or young adulthood, which are the artists generation, I guess the Homelanders, you get a much more moderate society.
People are not interested in adopting slogans and stuff that are just there to get a rise out of people, which seems like half the stuff you see on Twitter. You might have a similar movement to Black Lives Matter. I don't think that the slogan of the first turning for that same movement would be Black Lives Matter, they would try to choose something that's a little bit more unifying.
Aaron: Well, your comment about the boomers and how they're not shuffling off anytime soon reminded me of — I'm not an economist — but I've heard it suggested that the passing of the boomers is going to be the greatest transfer of wealth that our nation has ever seen, in that the boomer generation has accumulated lots of resources.
And perhaps this is part of why the millennial generation and the homelander generation feel that they're unable to get ahead in the world, that they don't have the ability to accumulate in the same way that that the boomers have, but the boomers can't take it with them.
And so when when they do pass on those, those, those resources are going to come back onto the market essentially, and be freed up and whether that gets transferred to their children or you know, pushed out into the the the open market, it's going to have a significant impact on on both hard and soft assets. And that could be triggering a crisis is in its own right.
Max: Yeah, I feel like at this rate, that's not going to start happening for another like 20 years. But well, maybe maybe.
Aaron: Yeah. Because I think we're, we're probably past the peak point where boomers have boomers retiring. More of them are probably out of the workforce than in it now. But they've set themselves up for a comfortable and from their perspective, hopefully long retirement. And so it'll be interesting to see how that plays out.
Max: Yeah, well, I guess if your retirement is drawing down wealth, so that's an opportunity for others, alright. And then, of course, after, when, when we're the elders, it'll be the second turning, and our whole cultural worlds will be overturned, kind of looking forward to that.
But don't hold your breath, because it's gonna be a while. But Howe predicts that millennials and homelanders will wonder why their kids aren't as close to them as they are to their parents culturally, because we'd be in awakening. Okay, he didn't talk that much about AI and cryptocurrency and general AI and the singularity and all that. I think that's a very important part of the story.
What he does mention is technology fits the time. So for example, in the 1920s, the automobile is seen as an expression of individualism, individual freedom. In the 1950s, the automobile is a symbol of conformity. Likewise, I think the internet in the 1990s was seen as a symbol off individual freedom.
Aaron: It was the digital Wild West.
Max: Yeah, yeah. And it was a symbol of liberation. Today, in the 2020s, and the fourth turning, it's kind of become the symbol of oppression.
Aaron: Whether you call it web 2.0, or 3.0, yeah, it's become a corporate garden, or the corporate playground and not the realm of eccentric individuals.
Max: Right. And so that will remain into the first turning, but perhaps it'll be more a symbol of conformity and won't be like everyone's shouting at each other mainly because they’ll probably sanitize it further, which I don't know how I think I feel about that.
But at least it won't be used for the kind of radical bomb throwing that it is today. Which again, if you feel that society needs radical bomb throwing, that's not good for you, either.
Aaron: I think that fits in with what you were talking about before with the witch burnings, McCarthyism, that the first turning could very well have with it an authoritarian streak, or authoritarian elements. That may be in the form of digital censorship or digital control.
Max: I should point out all of those examples were somewhat temporary. All those examples lasted for two years at most, until things reverted back to the mean. I mean, I guess the witch burning kind of went overboard.
If you started with the witch burnings, uh, wow, this is really bad. You predict five years, we'd be in like an authoritarian kind of Orwellian Society of which burners, that's not what happened. It kind of burned itself out, so to speak. Same with McCarthyism. Same with the Alien and Sedition accurately, they lost the election, you know.
At least there's that, but different kinds of things will be censored on the internet that are censored today. And different kinds of things will be promoted on the internet then than they are today. There could almost be like an inversion.
Aaron: If you'd asked us 10 years ago, or absolutely 20 years ago what kind of things would be censored on the internet today? I don't think we would have been able to make very, very accurate guesses.
I mean, there's probably some stuff that if we're talking about child pornography and stuff. Well, that's a gimme. That was already stuff that was certainly being tried to eliminate back then. But, but the stuff that is getting people wound up today is I don't think we would have been able to predict that very, very easily ten, twenty years ago. So what are we missing looking at another 10 or 20 years ahead of us here?
Max: Right? I mean, I want to kind of come to a prediction with this because it almost seems like they'll be like guardrails on tone and the proper way to have a conversation online.
Aaron: You don't think that's an aspect that's going to flame out, that that may be something that's well with us to stay.
Max: Yeah, but if there's kind of a moral panic around, it's similar to the ones in the past, it’ll go overboard for a couple of years, and then they’ll…
Aaron: I don't know how well how much this applies to the world at large or kind of even the internet at large. But it certainly seems like there's been a moral panic about biases in AI, or specifically in LLMs, which literally involve them putting up literally metaphorically, actually putting up metaphorical guardrails on things that the LLM can and can't do, can and can't say.
Do we think that that's a long term approach? Or is that a very temporary phase here, and we're going to come out the other side, and there'll be kind of a break on the hold of who can train and control LLMs and set those weights and train those guardrails into it? And it'll become impossible to control that? Or is that going to be a baked-in feature of these large language models for decades to come?
Max: Well, if we go by this theory, we're not going back to the 90s. That's for sure. So yeah, I think for the time being, we've had some control. But it's hard to, it's hard to imagine what the story is going to actually be on that one.
So I don't know if there's anything else I could say about this other than: I think we should do some more shows on AI and crypto and talk about the fourth turning as we have in the past. Because I think that's what we're really good at here Local Maximum. So well.
Aaron: The easy question to ask is: what should I do to better prepare to survive the crisis? And make my way into the high?
Max: Yeah, is this all useless information? I hope not. I don’t think it is.
Aaron: I don't have a good answer to that. But the other questions that I'm thinking of, as a father, what do I have to be doing to best mold my children, who, I assume are members of that homelander generation, so that they can effectively meet the challenges when their generation is ascendant? How do we fulfill our mentor role, not just our, our leadership role?
Max: So you can't go against the grain of the generations, but I think one of the things that are really helpful about studying this stuff, is that it kind of gets you out of your, of your generational mindset.
So for example, Silent Generation folks, and more generally, artists generations, which the Homelanders are, they tend to, and we'll see if it plays out, but whereas Gen Xers like to start new companies and consultant on an individual basis, artists, generations tend to like to join larger organizations, and just kind of be working in groups like that.
And so I guess there's sort of a realization that you might think this is the right way to do it, because this is how I grew up. But like the next few generations are gonna be very different. And the relationship between the next generation and you is not exactly an interpolation of the relationship between you and your parents generation.
Aaron: It’s a reaction to it, if anything.
Max: Right, but it's not the same direction, you might be thinking, well, my parents are like this. And I'm like that. So the next generation is going to be like that squared. That's not exactly, it’s a circle, see.
Aaron: Can’t square the circle.
Max: Yeah, it's gonna be a little interesting. And also, like I think we grew up in a time that was very individualistic, and I still strongly believe in individual freedom, individual liberties and all that, and you could have that at any turning in any social attitudes, but you also have to be more open to the fact that at different times, groups of people alive at that time are going to want to use these freedoms in a different way, whether it's to join, go it alone or join large organizations or whether you want to kind of fight the prevailing attitudes or conform to them.
Aaron: So would you say that we can look forward to in our old age seeing an unstoppable wave towards more centralization and more kind of collectivism? Or is that over reading the tea leaves here?
Max: Well, that's, that's gonna fall apart at the second turning. So in the foreseeable future, yes, but it doesn't necessarily have to be economic. So it doesn't mean it's going to be kind of, like socialism in the sense that the government is going to take over, but it might be the sense of well, like the return of the career in a large organization or something like that.
So, yeah, and then I think that free markets can survive. A first turning can survive the saeculum. I don't know if communism or fascism for that matter can survive the saeculum because it always seems to fall apart during an awakening.
When people want more individual choices, which under a free society, you could have that —you could have more choices, you could have less choices, let the people decide. Under a communist society, for example, you have to really change the system in order to do that. And that could either be the fall of the Soviet Union with Russia, or it could be like the reforms in China, with Deng Xiaoping, which occurred in the second and third turning in China.
Now China's become more dictatorial, but that's because we're in the wrong turning for that. So that's my theory that I'm working on in my head where those economic systems don't last the saeculum. Anyway, reaction to that Aaron, before.
Aaron: Yeah, so I guess I had something and it escaped me here. I'm drawing a blank right now.
Max: All right. All right. Well, we'll head out. Any more questions for me before we head out for the day? I know, we've done two shows so far.
Aaron: I'm really trying to pull up what was at the tip of my tongue before.
Max: Do you remember what it had to do with?
Aaron: Yeah it had to do with what we were talking about with the kind of millennials and homelanders and parents. Oh I know where I was going with this. Okay. So what, if anything, does Howe have to say about the multigenerational family? Because I’ve been an example of, I leave home, I move away.
It’s not that I never see my parents, but my parents are not a day to day influence on my children, so they’re not getting that direct knowledge transfer. And I think that's pretty common for at least here in America, because of the way we've migrated internally that it’s rare to have a household or community where you have those three generations or even four generations under the same roof, which, maybe 50 years ago, was significantly more likely to occur.
Is that something that he potentially sees pendulum swinging back? Or is that a one way ratchet?
Max: Yeah, yeah, actually, I don't know what he says about today. I think he claims it’s already swinging back.
Aaron: He's talked in the past because it would have been well after the first book, but yeah, I think I think we discussed perhaps the idea of Millennials or some of what he's now referring to as the homelander generation having to move back in with their parents after college and the effect that that's had.
Max: Yeah, no, I think he does point to the fact again, with the boomers, that , in relation to the people who came before them, they are more likely to want to hang out with people not their own age. So boomers might be a part of this return to multigenerational family. Now that might not be true in every case; I don't know what the full data says. But that's what he has said in the book.
Aaron: Interesting.
Max: Yeah, yeah, I think a lot of people are feeling the pull of, of kind of family life, where it's like, you kind of go out in the world, and you work. And you sort of realize that, oh, a lot of these connections are not as strong. There's a lot of problems that come up. In the fourth turning, you realize you can’t really rely on people.
Aaron: Well, you already rely on a resurgence on career.
Max: Well, not just a career, but staying at a company or big corporation. Or maybe it’s just the system.
Aaron: But part of that may also be we've we've taken a very kind of a mercenary approach in the last couple of decades with, it's, it's much more acceptable for people to hop from company to company, there's no loyalty there. So, that leads to a very career first or job first approach to how you're living your life.
Because you're chasing the bigger, better opportunity all the time. And then perhaps a move back into a more traditional, long, long serving career with a stable, with a single company, may lead to the ability to have less of a focus on working career to the exclusion of other things to a stronger kind of family life balance. Now, maybe that’s wishful thinking, but I can kind of picture that.
Max: I could picture that as a backlash as well. And then of course, you can picture the backlash to the backlash, few generations hence, where they're like this is really restricting.
Aaron: And there could absolutely be an aspect of that that involves fewer two income households, where one parent decides to, to stay home and, and raise the children or, or, or be more involved in that aspect of that. And that may or may not have kind of pendulum swings in terms of conservative values versus more progressive ones. But there's certainly ways you could go in that direction without it being all about gender roles and traditional conservatism.
Max: Yeah, although gender roles do make a comeback at the end of the fourth turning. So that's, according to Howe. Look, I don't know if any of this will happen
Aaron: That’s certainly in the zeitgeist. Now. What what making a comeback means, ostensibly, is up to debate.
Max: It's gonna be very different than what it meant in 1946.
Aaron: It's very much a topic of tension.
Max: That is for sure. But maybe it would just be stronger family roles where we're just like people are more focused, because we don't. Growing up, we never heard like, here's how a good family works. We basically heard the message of, yeah just whatever works, just do it.
There was just no, we were not provided with any guide. And I think the reason we were not provided with any guide is because the previous generations thought the guides they were given, were kind of too restricting and too sexist, maybe, or to like too one size fits all. So they're like, Okay, we're not even going to try, and maybe that's caused problems that need to be revisited.
Aaron: It raises some interesting questions. Not ones that we're going to solve tonight, though.
Max: Well, so we’ll stop it there. There is a lot to think about. And I think our audience is going to come at us with some interesting points and questions that we can answer later. localmaxradio@gmail.com or join our locals maximum.locals.com If you want to weigh in. Aaron. Thanks for coming on today. I think I want to do a year end show for the New Year?
Aaron: Yeah, we'll have to figure out what to focus that on. But let's plan to do that. All right.
Max: Awesome. Have a great week, everyone.
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