The Fourth Turning

[osoab]

Who's read this?

I just downloaded a pdf of it.

Listened to a bit of coast to coast this morning, the guest was talking about it.

Here's the pdf I downloaded. Looks like it my be allowable. I found multiple places to download.

http://www.yhvh.co.uk/media/user_data/drop/W.%20Strauss%20and%20N.%20Howe%20-%20The%20Fourth%20Turning%20(1997).pdf

I couldn't find a specific thread for the subject. Found a few mentions by Sparky is different threads.

[chad]

i've read it. basically, we are due for ww2 again.

[Silver Rocket Bitches!]

I bought the book a couple years ago. It's a must read IMO.

Really breaks it down about how human behavior is cyclical and as older generations die off the lessons they learned have to be relearned by the later generations. The whole cycle repeats after 4 generations similar to the four seasons. The book gives fascinating examples of past cycles and how the generations influenced them.

[Sparky]

One of the most important books I have ever read. It provides fascinating context for life, history, people, and events. I now view much of what we talk about here and what we expect to be ahead of us in terms of the Fourth Turning. Written in 1997, the clarity the authors had in anticipating what is going on right now is truly amazing.

[ArgenteumTelum]

I join the posters above in recommending this title as a great read. They have presented a nice overview without giving it all away. When one considers so many aspects of nature, investing/trading, etc., there's a good basis for explaining human behavior in cyclic terms as the authors have done. We all know what a shame it is that so many aspects of history are so repeatable, as mankind does not readily learn the lessons of the past.
AT

[ArgenteumTelum]

By the way, I forgot to add that there is a forum here: http://www.fourthturning.com

[Hitch]

Osoab, I downloaded this and am reading it now. It is an amazing read so far, and I'm gripped by it. Enjoying a couple of fingers of single malt soaking this knowledge slowly, so I don't miss anything.

Thanks for the link, and thanks to all for this recommendation.

edit: This book calls it, to the exact year. (from 1997) "The next Fourth Turning—America's next rendezvous with destiny—^will begin in roughly ten years and end in roughly thirty."

[Cebu_4_2]

Enjoying a couple of fingers of single malt soaking this knowledge slowly, so I don't miss anything.


And in the morning you will remember 'nothing' been there done that lol. I try to absorb during the day and digest what I learn before party time. Learning while partying just don't do it for me... at all.

[chud]

If you want the tl;dr

Basically the baby boomers created the big mess we're in now, and it will be up to the younger generations to save us.

[Twisted Titan]

I must be in the twilight zone because i know this isnt the same Harry S Dent that wrote the book

THE Roaring 2000s

If you followed the advice in that book you got your ass burned alive

I know because he was pumping stocks and raw land and i was swearing i was going to be the next dot com millionare.

Yep i was "all in "the markets right at the top of 2000.

And i slowly watched my winings get chewed up by mr.market.


Harry put one hell of a "Dent" in my cash position

[MNeagle]

TT: The Fourth Turning authors are William Strauss & Neil Howe. https://ixquick.com/do/search

[Twisted Titan]

Guess i was in the Twilight Zone after all.

Thanks for pulling me out MN ;)

[Large Sarge]

Doug Casey has a high opinion of the book and authors...

I enjoyed the book personally,

[Horn]

The entire story & notional premise is put forth as validation and support for vapid piggery and hierarchical private control of fiat currencies.

Feed the Zion and Bable on wheel in the sky.

There is no generational spoon.

In fact I'm completely ashamed to be posting on the same farm with this family of Austrian sheepherders. :)

[osoab]

By the way, I forgot to add that there is a forum here: http://www.fourthturning.com

I thumbed through the board a bit. It seems "off" imho.

[Horn]

I thumbed through the board a bit. It seems "off" imho.

A boomer would use his thumb, join the Y generation and try your index finger on the mousewheel...

[Cebu_4_2]

I had this http://www.fourthturning.com/ And then went to top left. I might check this out... Never know.

[Sparky]

“The risk of catastrophe will be very high. The nation could erupt into insurrection or civil violence, crack up geographically, or succumb to authoritarian rule. Thus might the next Fourth Turning end in apocalypse – or glory. The nation could be ruined, its democracy destroyed, and millions of people scattered or killed. Or America could enter a new golden age, triumphantly applying shared values to improve the human condition. The rhythms of history do not reveal the outcome of the coming Crisis; all they suggest is the timing and dimension." -Strauss and Howe

[Horn]

“The risk of catastrophe will be very high. The nation could erupt into insurrection or civil violence, crack up geographically, or succumb to authoritarian rule. Thus might the next Fourth Turning end in apocalypse – or glory. The nation could be ruined, its democracy destroyed, and millions of people scattered or killed. Or America could enter a new golden age, triumphantly applying shared values to improve the human condition. The rhythms of history do not reveal the outcome of the coming Crisis; all they suggest is the timing and dimension." -Strauss and Howe

Now alls we need is someone to line it up on a cyclical generational wave chart along with royally controlled fiat currency seasonal cycles.

[Silver Rocket Bitches!]

This book, along with Martin Armstrong's work plus what I've read about K Waves is what sold me on market and political cycles.


In the current saeculum, the First Turning was the American High of the Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy presidencies. As World War II wound down, no one predicted that America would soon become so confident and institutionally muscular, yet so conformist and spiritually complacent. But that?s what happened.

The Second Turning was the Consciousness Revolution, stretching from the campus revolts of the mid-1960s to the tax revolts of the early 1980s. Before John Kennedy was assassinated, no one predicted that America was about to enter an era of personal liberation and cross a cultural divide that would separate anything thought or said after from anything thought or said before. But that?s what happened.
The Third Turning has been the Culture Wars, an era that began with Reagan?s mid-?80s ?Morning in America? and is due to expire around the middle of the Oh-Oh decade, eight or ten years from now. Amidst the glitz of the early Reagan years, no one predicted that the nation was entering an era of national drift and institutional decay. But that?s where we are.


Have major national mood shifts like this ever before happened? Yes-many times. Have Americans ever before experienced anything like the current attitude of Unraveling? Yes-many times, over the centuries.


Elders in their eighties can remember an earlier mood that was much like today?s. They can recall the years between Armistice Day (1918) and the Great Crash of 1929. Euphoria over a global military triumph was painfully short-lived. Earlier optimism about a progressive future gave way to a jazz age nihilism and a pervasive cynicism about high ideals. Bosses swaggered in immigrant ghettos, the KKK in the South, the mafia in the industrial heartland, and defenders of Americanism in a myriad Middletowns. Unions atrophied, government weakened, third-parties were the rage, and a dynamic marketplace ushered in new consumer technologies (autos, radios, phones, juke boxes, vending machines) that made life feel newly complicated and frenetic. The risky pleasures of a ?lost? young generation shocked middle-aged decency crusaders-many of them ?tired radicals? who were then moralizing against the detritus of the ?mauve? decade of their youth (the 1890s). Opinions polarized around no-compromise cultural issues like drugs, family, and ?decency.? Meanwhile, parents strove to protect a scoutlike new generation of children (who, in time, aged into today?s senior citizens).


Back then, the details were different, but the underlying mood resembled what Americans feel today. Listen to Walter Lippmann, writing during World War I:

?We are unsettled to the very roots of our being. There isn?t a human relation, whether of parent or child, husband and wife, worker and employer, that doesn?t move in a strange situation. We are not used to a complicated civilization, we don?t know how to behave when personal contact and eternal authority have disappeared. There are no precedents to guide us, no wisdom that was not meant for a simpler age.?Move backward again to an era recalled by the oldest Americans still alive when today?s seniors were little children. In the late 1840s and early 1850s, America drifted into a foul new mood. The hugely popular Mexican War had just ended in a stirring triumph, but the huzzahs over territorial gain didn?t last long. Cities grew mean and politics hateful. Immigration surged, financial speculation boomed, and railroads and cotton exports released powerful new market forces that destabilized communities. Having run out of answers, the two major parties (Whigs and Democrats) were slowly disintegrating. A righteous debate over slavery?s westward expansion erupted between so-called Southrons and abolitionists-many of them middle-aged spiritualists who in the more euphoric 1830s and ?40s had dabbled in Transcendentalism, utopian communes, and other assorted youth-fired crusades. Colleges went begging for students as a brazen young generation hustled west to pan for gold in towns fabled for their violence. Meanwhile, a child generation grew up with a new regimentation that startled European visitors who, a decade earlier, had bemoaned the wildness of American kids. Sound familiar?


Run the clock back the length of yet another long life, to the 1760s. The recent favorable conclusion to the French and Indian War had brought eighty years of conflict to a close and secured the colonial frontier. Yet when England tried to recoup the expense of the war through taxation, the colonies seethed with a directionless discontent. Immigration from the Old World, emigration across the Appalachians, and colonial trade arguments all rose sharply. As debtors? prisons bulged, middle-aged people complained of what Benjamin Franklin called the ?white savagery? of youth. Middle-aged orators (peers of the fiery young preachers of the circa-1740 Great Awakening) awakened civic consciousness and organized popular crusades of economic austerity. The youth elite became the first to attend disciplined church schools in the colonies rather than academies in corrupt Albion. Gradually, colonists began separating into mutually-loathing camps, one defending and the other attacking the Crown. Sound familiar again?


During each of these periods, Americans celebrated an ethos of frenetic and laissez-faire ?individualism? (a word first popularized in the 1840s), yet also fretted over social fragmentation, epidemic violence, and economic and technological change that seemed to be accelerating beyond society?s ability to absorb it.


Thanks for starting this thread. I started reading this book again. It's one of those books you pick up and learn something new each time as you witness the changing political and social environment.

[singular_me]

I read it 10 years or so ago, a little bit after 911... it was on my suggested must read list when I used to running the money files and un-debt... today I think that while it is filled with social references, it also corroborates astrological cycles from various cultures.