Guest Post: Eve of Destruction

Few people get "average." You get what you get, and it may be far from average.

A relaxed Labor Day weekend look at the very big picture.

A Guest Post about cycles of human history

During my 30-year career as a Financial Advisor one of the most important--and difficult--messages I had to communicate was that people could not count on getting "average" returns. Yes, the averages were observed from real data, and Financial Planning calculators printed assumed values extending averages out for 30 years. But any one person got what they got, based on their own individual luck and the experience of the era and market conditions they were in.

For example, young people entering the job market right now are entering at a time with "Help Wanted" signs everywhere. People who entered it in 2009 entered it amid vast layoffs.   Big difference. People who retired and locked in a benefit based on year 2000 stock prices get big pensions, but people who needed to retire in 2009 got half as much. Luck. A vast generation of men born about 1920 were brought into a world war in their early 20's. They got total war.The generation of men born 20 years later were of military age at a time of cold war "peace."

It was the luck of the draw. I told my clients they couldn't count on some calculated averages.They needed to prepare for what could happen, and there wasn't anything "fair" about it.

Today's blog post posits historical cycles in human history built around the life cycle and experiences of each generation. The events that happen in one generation's childhood or youth shape the next events, and so on through four 20-year eras in an 80-year cycle of responses.

Is this theory of 80-year cycles actual and real?

I don't know. But I know that eras are real. Business cycles are real. There are great forces that creat bull markets and bear markets, and everyone is swept in. There are periods of war and peace, and people don't get average. They get what they get. We observe that different generations--"Silent", "Boomer," "Millenial." etc. each have a zeitgeist, a tone built around attitude and experience and technology. 

Something--or some things--drive those cycles. Wayne Taylor says there is, indeed, rhyme and reason. He is a microbiologist, medical researcher, and university professor who has now, in his late 60s, turned his attention to the bigger picture: human history and climate.

Guest Post by Wayne Taylor

Wayne Taylor

The Fourth Turning in the Cycle

The times are changing, so the time has come for people to get ready. If the coming crisis resolves well, Trump will end up as an embarrassing blip in history. The thing that is really remarkable about this weird time in the life of the nation, is that the zeitgeist (spirit of the times) of this period is so similar to what happened in the 1920s to 1930s before WWII, and also near the end of the previous cycle in the 1850s leading up to the US Civil War.  Those were times just before cataclysmic wars in the Anglo-American economic-political cycles, and these cycles also were entrained with the world cycle, including S. America, Asia, and Europe. See the book on history: "The Fourth Turning" by Strauss and Howe, described in the chart below. 

 These cycles or "saeculi", which last about 80 years, or the lifetime of a human, start out just after a world-changing struggle in an organized and hopeful High season like spring (1950-60s), then it advances as  a baby boom matures in a summer-like Awakening to needed reforms (65 -80s), then comes the backlash to idealistic reforms in an Unraveling season of discontent like autumn (1990 -00s), and finally ends in the selfish gridlock of dysfunctional Crisis like winter (2010 -20s). Each of the four seasons or “turnings” of the saeculum "year" lasts for a generation of about 20 years, and by the end of the 80 +/-5 year cycle in history, the elders who didn't personally learn vital lessons from the last time of crisis (the "great forgetting"), will give in to greedy corruption to drain wealth from the economy, and then lead the nations in another paroxysm of violence to break out of the unworkable gridlock of the Crisis. Only then can a new cycle begin.

 In our current Millennial cycle (1946 -2027?) for instance, I joined as a young “Boomer” in the counter-cultural Hippie Awakening in the 60’s as we struggled against the older “Silent” generation to resolve wave upon wave of old festering problems including civil rights, Vietnam war, women's rights, pollution, LGBTQ+ rights, and regulation of money. We made some imperfect progress in these campaigns, but then had to retrench when the resurgence of elders and Yuppie Boomers in Reagan’s and Clinton’s administrations started Unraveling reforms in the 80’s -90’s. The Boomers also had to work and raise kids: “Gen-Xers” and then “Millennials”.  Old Neoconservatives used the 9/11 attack during the Bush years (2000’s) to launch the failed Iraq war, ending in the present Crisis (2008 -?) and gridlock of the Obama and Trump administrations. It is sad but remarkable to see how closely Trump's fascist and racistmysogeny fits with the zeitgeist of this time of Crisis, with nonfunctional, selfishly ignorant and corrupt governments seizing their moment in power here and abroad, and hatred parading pompously in the Capitol. But life is still good here at home.

These clear patterns in history predict that by the middle 2020s we will experience a serious Crisis initiated by economic collapse, and there will be a world-changing war of national and international proportions.  The nature and reasons for the struggle are not the same in each cycle, and the weapons keep evolving, but this time we can expect cyberwarfare in addition to or superseding the bombs.  The signs of this climax time of Crisis are already evident. Most annalists think that the “4^th turning” period of Crisis was triggered by the Great Recession of 2008 (like the 1929 market crash of the previous cycle). The gridlock and disfunction will intensify for about 10 years to 2018, then peak in a crisis climax of warfare in the mid 2020s, to finally resolve by about 2030 with the moral leadership of a “Grey Champion” (like Gandalf: Lincoln, FDR, or AI?).   

After 10 years of the Obama era economic recovery, most economists expect a collapse of this bull-market within a couple of years (by 2020), exacerbated by the Trump-Republican stock-bubble and trade war. I hope that an emerging leader will be elected as President of the USA in 2020 who will show true moral integrity and courage (as a Grey Champion; not the bully Trump), to lead the fight against corruption, and defend our Democracy against Putin’s cyber-attacks, or the spawned AI (artificial intelligence) cyber-bots. I am not promoting a coming war, but regretfully I am reporting and warning about an existing pattern.  A war seems unthinkable until suddenly it happens, at an unpredictable tipping point into chaos.

This is a timeline of the historic patterns starting in 1700s from “4^th Turning” (it goes back over 1000 years):

Time period:   1690 -1780 ;       1780 -1865 ;      1865 -1945 ;      1946 -2027

Cycle name:    Revolutionary       Civil War            Great Power      Millennial

Crisis war  :   US Revolution       US Civil War       World War II      WW3??

Weapons  :     Blunderbuss        Artillery, rifles     Jets, nukes        Cyberwar, AI psy-bots

Leader(s):      Washington         Lincoln               FDR, Churchill   (Grey Champion)?   

Elder Gen.:     Awakeners        Trancendentals   Missionaries       Boomers

Mature Gen:    Liberty               Gilded                Lost                    Gen-Xers

Young Gen:   Republicans        Progressives      Great G.I.s           Millennials

Baby Gen:     Compromisers     Missionaries       Silent                  Homelanders

Issues:           Liberty from         Freedom from    Survival from       Energy war

Climate:         Oligarchy             Slavery              Genocide, Tyrant  Meltdown,