This is a rich seam to mine for better understanding these waves of group emotionality (as I perceive them) so I'm glad to have found you. I have an intuition that there are some 'egregore'-like phenomena that may be kind of emergent properties of complex systems. Erik Hoel's piece on the idea of group consciousness (The egregore passes you by) yesterday sits well with these thoughts.
Also, in passing, your mentioning of 'immunity' in the older population chimes for me personally. My newsletter can be seen in that light as an expression of my 'recovery' from the virus of ideological partisanship. Anticipating more of your thoughts around this with pleasure.
Great piece of writing. One of the best of yours I've read so far. Have you thought about starting many of your essays from the perspective of culture and social science, and then illustrating the economic causative roots? I've noticed that many of the public intellectuals, especially the commercially successful ones, tend to operate across a range of fields to peripheral to their main field, pursuing a multidisciplinary approach.
It's unfortunate that sociopolitical instability coincides with the social progress index- a case of acronymic collision.
We are almost certainly approaching the end of a Fourth Turning. It's time. We are fifteen years past the Crash of 2008; fifteen years after the Crash of 1929 America was close to destroying two 'wrong' responses to the Crash. Fourth Turnings have usually exhausted themselves.
Although a Fourth Turning is often supremely violent, destructive, and even apocalyptic, even it can be transitional. It is in part the replacement of impulsive, individualistic Third Turning with a more communitarian, purposeful First Turning. This reflects Artist/Adaptive elders disappearing from public life, old and wise (one hopes!) Idealist/Prophet types establishing one possible and widely-accepted direction, Reactive/Adaptive figures becoming cautious and losing their alienation, and Civic/Hero young adults performing deeds that others think impossible.
Ideally the Idealists resemble the likes of Lincoln or FDR. This time the most recent top leader of America from an Idealist generation is Donald Trump, who has done more to polarize American life than to unite it. Americans think that he is either the greatest President since at least FDR or even better -- or that he is a complete disaster. There is no middle, and there never will be. As assessments go one way or another we will be defining the values of the post-Crisis Era. Had Trump succeeded to force America into a new and indelible MAGA era, then we might be doing what Trump acolytes do and believing what those acolytes believe (which may be very different from what those people think and do).
Boomers have failed to coalesce as leaders of a shared purpose. But their juniors, Generation X, have already had an above-average President (Obama) who stitched together a potentially-viable norm. He recognizes that America is no cultural monolith. If Trump and his acolytes acted as if they sought to force all Americans to defer to the norms of rich white Christians, Obama recognizes that America has multiple traditions from which all of us can learn indelible lessons. Most of those traditions involve Model Minorities who have succeeded through dedicated effort, loyalty to communities that can include those in economic distress, long-term entrepreneurialism, sexual moderation, respect for formal learning, and rejection of conspicuous consumption. Donald Trump is the antithesis of this. So are the communities who support him politically.
Obama may be Left economically, not trusting those who loudly proclaim "He who makes the gold makes the rules". He is multicultural, which is not the usual expression of conservatism in recent decades...but he respects traditions not his. Remember well that tradition is the usual fallback when the avant-garde fails. He is a stickler for precedent and protocol, hardly a position of a radical. He recognizes crime more as sociopathic choice than a consequence of repression and exploitation, as there are plenty of good people living in dreary places. He prefers rational thought, which has become the Enlightenment norm that is the norm of educated people, to superstition, anger, and madness. Obama has never shown disloyalty to America, and his foreign policy owes more to the elder Bush and Henry Kissinger than to anyone else. His family life is as conventional and un-daring as it could be.
In many respects, Obama is the conservative and Trump is the dangerous radical. All that is conservative about Trump is his endorsement of ethnic and economic hierarchy and his attachment to superstition.
This is a rich seam to mine for better understanding these waves of group emotionality (as I perceive them) so I'm glad to have found you. I have an intuition that there are some 'egregore'-like phenomena that may be kind of emergent properties of complex systems. Erik Hoel's piece on the idea of group consciousness (The egregore passes you by) yesterday sits well with these thoughts.
Also, in passing, your mentioning of 'immunity' in the older population chimes for me personally. My newsletter can be seen in that light as an expression of my 'recovery' from the virus of ideological partisanship. Anticipating more of your thoughts around this with pleasure.
Great piece of writing. One of the best of yours I've read so far. Have you thought about starting many of your essays from the perspective of culture and social science, and then illustrating the economic causative roots? I've noticed that many of the public intellectuals, especially the commercially successful ones, tend to operate across a range of fields to peripheral to their main field, pursuing a multidisciplinary approach.
It's unfortunate that sociopolitical instability coincides with the social progress index- a case of acronymic collision.
Perhaps an obvious question but why 50 years?
Fascinating analysis of what is going on. It is immensely useful to have some kind of framework to make sense of the insensible.
We are almost certainly approaching the end of a Fourth Turning. It's time. We are fifteen years past the Crash of 2008; fifteen years after the Crash of 1929 America was close to destroying two 'wrong' responses to the Crash. Fourth Turnings have usually exhausted themselves.
Although a Fourth Turning is often supremely violent, destructive, and even apocalyptic, even it can be transitional. It is in part the replacement of impulsive, individualistic Third Turning with a more communitarian, purposeful First Turning. This reflects Artist/Adaptive elders disappearing from public life, old and wise (one hopes!) Idealist/Prophet types establishing one possible and widely-accepted direction, Reactive/Adaptive figures becoming cautious and losing their alienation, and Civic/Hero young adults performing deeds that others think impossible.
Ideally the Idealists resemble the likes of Lincoln or FDR. This time the most recent top leader of America from an Idealist generation is Donald Trump, who has done more to polarize American life than to unite it. Americans think that he is either the greatest President since at least FDR or even better -- or that he is a complete disaster. There is no middle, and there never will be. As assessments go one way or another we will be defining the values of the post-Crisis Era. Had Trump succeeded to force America into a new and indelible MAGA era, then we might be doing what Trump acolytes do and believing what those acolytes believe (which may be very different from what those people think and do).
Boomers have failed to coalesce as leaders of a shared purpose. But their juniors, Generation X, have already had an above-average President (Obama) who stitched together a potentially-viable norm. He recognizes that America is no cultural monolith. If Trump and his acolytes acted as if they sought to force all Americans to defer to the norms of rich white Christians, Obama recognizes that America has multiple traditions from which all of us can learn indelible lessons. Most of those traditions involve Model Minorities who have succeeded through dedicated effort, loyalty to communities that can include those in economic distress, long-term entrepreneurialism, sexual moderation, respect for formal learning, and rejection of conspicuous consumption. Donald Trump is the antithesis of this. So are the communities who support him politically.
Obama may be Left economically, not trusting those who loudly proclaim "He who makes the gold makes the rules". He is multicultural, which is not the usual expression of conservatism in recent decades...but he respects traditions not his. Remember well that tradition is the usual fallback when the avant-garde fails. He is a stickler for precedent and protocol, hardly a position of a radical. He recognizes crime more as sociopathic choice than a consequence of repression and exploitation, as there are plenty of good people living in dreary places. He prefers rational thought, which has become the Enlightenment norm that is the norm of educated people, to superstition, anger, and madness. Obama has never shown disloyalty to America, and his foreign policy owes more to the elder Bush and Henry Kissinger than to anyone else. His family life is as conventional and un-daring as it could be.
In many respects, Obama is the conservative and Trump is the dangerous radical. All that is conservative about Trump is his endorsement of ethnic and economic hierarchy and his attachment to superstition.