Unlike previous Fourth Turning, this one has an overlay of technototalitarianism. From Gold and Geopolitics Substack at zerohedge.com:
Foreword
I first thought to write this as a multi-part series, but I finally decided to group everything together as it wouldn’t do justice to this article. There’s a lot to unpack when discussing the ongoing societal changes, and I feel I barely touched on anything but the essence of that. Even then, standing at more than 6000 words, and spending nearly 10 full waking days refining it, the scope of what we’re witnessing feels almost too vast to capture in any single piece.
The Fourth Turning doesn’t reveal itself gradually—it crashes over you all at once when you finally start to see the pattern. Writing this piece felt like trying to grab sand in my hands; every attempt to contain one aspect of the transformation led to three more slipping through my fingers.
What you’ll read here is my best effort to trace the contours of something far larger than any individual could possibly comprehend.
The same boiling water that softens the potato hardens the egg.
— Roald Dahl
We’re all in the same boiling water now—the Fourth Turning’s Crisis that began with Lehman Brothers’ collapse in 2008—but whether we emerge hardened or dissolved depends entirely on what we’re made of. We’re now deep in the Fourth Turning, the winter of this historical cycle, and if you think the past few years have been chaotic?
You ain’t seen nothing yet!
History doesn’t move in straight lines. It breathes, it pulses, it turns through seasons as predictable as winter following autumn. William Strauss and Neil Howe discovered this pattern in 1997. Like clockwork, every 80 years or so – a human lifetime, America faces an existential crisis that threatens to tear apart everything we thought permanent. We’ve been through this three times before, and we’re going through it again right now.
Strauss and Howe predicted in 1997 that around 2005, some spark would ignite a Crisis mood. They suggested it might be “as ominous as a financial crash, as ordinary as a national election, or as trivial as a Tea Party”. They nailed it. The 2008 financial crisis wasn’t just another recession—it was the moment the post-World War II global order began its death spiral. Lehman Brothers’ September 15, 2008 collapse marked more than a bank failure; it marked the beginning of the end of trust in the system itself.
NO consequences for 2008.
This is why we can’t have nice things?
Lord Acton was right.