The Latest Generation

I really wanted to review this episode and some followups on the Crisis of 2020, because it's far enough out to consider if that really was the start of the peak of this current crisis or, if more is on its way. An hour or so of reviewing what was happening at that time indicated it was not something I could through together quickly on the last day of 2023, so for now I'm going to simply repost them and let people see what was on my mind at the time.

Spoiler alert: 2020 did, in fact, turn out to be significant, but for almost no reason that was previously expected.

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While Generations, the 1991 book by William Strauss & Neil Howe, was really about a model of history based on how different generations work together, or not, it implied that major events recurred on a regular and predictable basis. They specifically called out The Crisis of 2020, their term for what they expected to happen around that year, based on the age of the Boom generation, Generation X, and Millennials. What is this Crisis? What can we expect from it? Has it already started?

Obviously you would want to read Generations again if hadn't realized we were up to the Crisis of 2020, almost.

Some Wikipedia links for the possibly comparable historical events mentioned

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Sevastopol_(1854–55)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_Civil_War

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glorious_Revolution

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_of_the_Four_Emperors

I did not mention the possibility that a focus on global warming or other environmental issues could become the main issue of the Crisis. I am cautious about that, though, because it seems likely to happen regardless of generational constellation - IF the effects become too much. Like other Earth-shattering possibilities - alien invasion, supervolcano eruption, meteor impact - that are likely to lead to a crisis period, generational analysis doesn't tell us anything about them. Still, items such as the Green New Deal do suggest a generational effect.

The Glorious Revolution option still seems the most likely to me - as does a neo-jacobite followup from almost-secessionists who can't quite deal with the changes in the aftermath.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobitism

Not to be confused with Jacobins, who were involved in the French revolution a century later. (No link for them - I don't want it to get confused.)

You can find me on Twitter: @generationalize and occasionally blogging at http://crisis.generationalize.com

I was thinking of this one for Christmas, but it was originally done for Easter. Still, I think it's held up well.

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Whenever someone asks whether the generational model works outside of modern English-speaking country, one fun example is to look at Rome and Judea in the first century A.D., from the assassination of Julius Caesar to the crucifixion of Jesus to Vespasian taking control of Judea and, then, of Rome.

Most of my research here was using Wikipedia. Here are a few of the relevant articles

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augustus

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiberius

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caligula

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claudius

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nero

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Beth_Horon_(66)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_of_the_Four_Emperors

The criteria I give for identifying the different turnings are my interpretation of Strauss & Howe theory. My Second and Third Turning criteria were previously discussed here:

http://crisis.generationalize.com/2014/03/second.html

http://crisis.generationalize.com/2014/03/third.html

My blog "Welcome to the Crisis" is at http://crisis.generationalize.com

Twitter: @generationalize

Prompt the first: The end of instagram fame

My Avastars Fashion Dolls

Big (the movie)

Tom Hanks - he was 31 when the movie was released.

Prompt the second ; Into thin air/ into the Wild

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_McCandless

https://www.looper.com/1170434/everything-into-the-wild-doesnt-tell-you-about-the-true-story/

Into Thin Air: Death on Everest

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118949/

Into the Wild

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0758758/

Green Boots died during the same period but was part of a separate expedition that wasn't included in the movie.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Boots

Prompt the Third On Blblical Views of Morality

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_the_Apostle

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Stephen

https://x.com/ordinarytimemag/status/1732015337007198603?s=46&t=h3SDrddBzjyl2UOHr9Q3xA

Intro

Olivia Rodrigo - Brutal - from Driving Home 2 U

https://youtu.be/zHMpcUojLMU?si=DF7414ecqyM-1XlH

Complete film (currently on Disney Plus)

https://ondisneyplus.disney.com/movie/olivia-rodrigo-driving-home-2-u

Prompt the First

Military Generations in Star Wars - or the Admiral vs Poe Dynamic

AKA Hero is a perjorative in the 2nd turning.

Mark Hammill - born 1951 - looks properly young in return of the Jedi (1983) for a young adult in the military and in a crisis - even if he's still kinda old at 31 or so

A previous look at other WWII folks as shown 30 years later.

https://x.com/generationalize/status/1676480077234847745?s=46&t=h3SDrddBzjyl2UOHr9Q3xA

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars%3A_The_Last_Jedi

The whole "Why aren't you doing exactly as I asked, that's what people did when I was your age" - one we expect to see in a Second Turning - perfectly fits the Admiral v Poe dynamic.

My previous thoughts on The Force Awakens - I should do one for The Last Jedi.

http://stories.generationalize.com/2015/12/the-force-awakens-initial.html

Slightly off on that quote from Serenity.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0379786/quotes/?item=qt0433147

A random follow-up on that: Forrest Gump is told by Jenny not to be a hero, he only becomes one because he tries to run away,

Prompt the Second

Would excel being available five years earlier have kept the ussr from falling?

A record of the last 30ish years in Russia. https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2023/11/russian-journalists-ukraine-war-wagner-group/676064/

Here's where I got what I found about spreadsheets: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spreadsheet

https://x.com/13millionplus/status/1728195677883351107?s=46&t=h3SDrddBzjyl2UOHr9Q3xA

The Wikipedia page references what Moore considered the point of departure.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_All_Mankind_%28TV_series%29

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergei_Korolev - the Chief Designer

Prompt the Third

Why is communication - the ability to communicate- fundamental to the generational model

Irish politics are becoming incomprehensible….2nd Turning?

https://twitter.com/search?q=ireland%20free%20speech&src=typed_query&f=top

It involves views of free speech as elated to the murder of a young teacher, Ashling Murphy.

A Thanksgiving episode, in its way.

I thought I had written about this elsewhere, but this appears to be the closest I had done: https://crisis.generationalize.com/2014/06/plague.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osarseph - A possible second view of Exodus involving a priest who became the leader of a band of lepers, who managed to ally with the Hyksos to take over Egypt for a short time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akhenaten - Pharaoh of Egypt who temporarily replaced the polytheistic Egyptian religion with a monotheism based around Aten, the "sun disc." Father of Tutankhamen, whom you may have heard of.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Hymn_to_the_Aten -Written by Akhenaten, it bears some resemblance to Psalm 104, indicating at least some cross pollination between Jewish and Egyptian holy writ.

https://thefounding.net/pilgrims-identified-israelites/ - a short essay built around Bradford

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/24950/24950-h/24950-h.htm Project Gutenberg version of the History of Plymouth Colony

They called Dutch a strange and uncouth language, which raises the possibility that their attitudes towards "savage" natives might have been similar in Holland…

For no obvious reason, perhaps worth noting that this is contemporaneous with Hamlet, first performed around 1602. (Yes I know he's a Dane, not Dutch.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mayflower

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plymouth_Colony

http://mayflowerhistory.com/clothing/

https://www.plimoth.org/learn/just-kids/homework-help/what-wear

You can find me on Twitter: @generationalize and occasionally blogging at http://crisis.generationalize.com

On the occassion of President Joseph Biden's 81st birthday, re-upping some observations on the first and last Silent Generation POTUS.

(Even if he only made the Silent cutoff by about 6 weeks.)

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President Joseph Biden is the first President from the Silent Generation, and presumably the last. Is that going to be a problem, here in the Fourth Turning? Perhaps not, considering how little we understand about how leaders change in the later Elder period of life. His governing style might not be the standard for how the Artist archetype is expected to manifest.

Here's the excerpt again:

"As the forces of history amass under Boom leadership, the Silent can remind Boomers of kindness, 13ers of conscience, Millenials of caution. The danger will lie in any attempt by aging Silent leaders to get too much in the way of the thickening forces of history - for example, if an eightyish President (or Supreme Court) insists on scrupulous process at a moment when younger generations begin to coalesce around the need for decisive action. The last time this happened, during the Presidency of old Compromiser James Buchanan, the foot dragging of elder Adaptives helped foment the most destructive crisis in American History. The same could occur if antiquarian Silent leadership helps usher in the Crisis of 2020."

Neil Howe & William Strauss, Generations, published 1991, page 395 the Silent generation section of "Completing the Millennial Cycle"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_presidents_of_the_United_States_by_age

Reagan's meetings with Gorbachev in the last 18 months of office.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Summit_(1987)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscow_Summit_(1988)

Mitch McConnell was born 2/20/1942, is a more definite silent, if only by a few months.

Nanci Pelosi was born March 26 1940 a solid Silent

Chuck Schumer was born November 23 1950 and is a very solid Boomer…but even he is 70

The generational attributes come from Chapter 12 of Generations, the last two rows of Figure 12-7, Peer Personalities, by Generational Type

Prompt the First: Did The Marvels do poorly because it's a Hero movie?

My Stories model can be found at http://stories.generationalize.com/

Prompt the Second: Clothing of the 2nd turning

Here's something where I was previously considering the role Clothing in the Second Turning.

Prompt the Third: On the significance of the Paradise Theater

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradise_Theatre_(Chicago)
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradise_Theatre_(album)
  • "I've got faith in my generation" was from "Rockin' the Paradise," conceptually during the early life of the theater.
  • A couple of singles, including "The Best of TImes"
  • ...not clear how seriously that was meant in 1981
  • "Our memories of yesterday will last a lifetime"
  • Yes it's about being with someone, but also about right then being good and important
• The follow up album, "Kilroy Was Here" is also a concept album, with scenes set in the Paradiese Theater (or at least in A Paradise Theater, in some universe.)

A consolidated version of the Mapping History episodes for the Second Turning

• Having completed mapping the Fourth Turning, Looking Back to see how Mapping History ties them all together
• 1534 - Returning to the early 16th century, where the Protestant Reformation has begun. Henry VIII began as a "Defender of the Faith" against Martin Luther, but within a few years is opposing the Church because he's unable to get an annullment of his marriage. It's a good landmark on our map, showing up almost exactly halfway between the Reconquista and the Spanish Armada, while being well-alligned with the spirtual concerns often seen during a Second Turning.

• 1629 - Between Puritans, creeping authoritarianism, breaking of norms of governing and an overall concern about how religion is making itself known in political affairs, the monarchy of Charles I should be a very effective landmark for this history map.

  But like some of the others we will come to view in the Awakening periods, the complexity of the political map can make it difficult.

  It's still useful for understanding what else is happening in the 17th Century, and seeing some of the connections that join different points in time.

• It was July 8 1841, in the middle of a revival, Jonathan Edwards would quietly give a sermon. It's our landmark for the Second Turning that's also known as the Great American Awakening.

  That Deuteronomy quote:

  https://biblehub.com/deuteronomy/32-35.htm

  https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Sinners_in_the_Hands_of_an_Angry_God

• Twenty-five-year-old William Lloyd Garrison published the anti-slavery weekly newspaper, The Liberator, starting on the first day of 1831.

  The Letters of William Lloyd Garrison: I will be heard, 1822-1835 includes in its annotations on page 92 an objective summary of the circumstances of the Todd libel case.

• In 1896, at the Democratic National Convention, Williams Jennings Bryan rises to speak about the question of coinage, of money, but also about who was to be represented in the halls of power. Barely old enough even to be President of the United States, he makes a speech, full of religious symbolism, that wins him the party's nomination for that office.

• On April 3, 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke in support of a strike of sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee. The speech he gave, with biblical imagery and references, especially to the Israelites, their escape from slavery, and what their leader, Moses, was allowed to glimpse before his death, has since become known as the Mountaintop speech.

  Video of the speech can be found on Youtube. The brief audio clips used here came from the internet archive.

  https://archive.org/details/IHaveBeenToTheMountaintopFullSpeech

  In the podcast audio, it might not be quite as clear as intended that "John Brown's Body" being referenced was a marching song of the Union army during the American Civil War. John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry, which led to John Brown's trial and execution, occurred just a year before the election of Abraham Lincoln as president.

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Brown%27s_Body

Prompt the First - Is the Fourth Turning driving everyone crazy?

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_City_disaster - 1947, so not technically, but
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Port_Chicago_disaster
• Cleveland East Ohio Gas explosion
• USS Mount Hood
• RAF Fauld explosion
• Futamata Tunnel Explosion
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halifax_Explosion
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sultana_(steamboat) - 1965, right around Lincoln's assassination
• "The official cause of the Sultana disaster was determined to be the mismanagement of water levels in the boilers, exacerbated by the fact that the vessel was severely overloaded and top-heavy. "
• A lot of other major explosions as a part of the war, and some incidental to it -

Prompt the Second - Is The Fourth Turning a bad time to be a white collar criminal?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Bankman-Fried

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernie_Madoff

Prompt the Third - How crazy is this current presidential election, really?

Lincoln had a "unity ticket"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unity_ticket

The only unity ticket to win the [United States] presidency was the National Union Party in the 1864 presidential election, which ran a unity ticket between Abraham Lincoln of the Republican Party and Andrew Johnson of the Democratic Party.

FDR changed his VP a couple of times - Garner, Wallace, Truman (last election, was VP for only a few months before FDRs death)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1940_Democratic_National_Convention

It was mid-July 1940, which also means it was just after the fall of France (June 22) which may have been why FDR changed his mind on running.

A consolidated version of the Mapping History section for The Fourth Turning