2 p. Perspectives: Humanity strives for “UNDERSTANDING” to comfortably navigate the world, and our life.

Understanding yields results in science and engineering. Tall buildings don’t fall down, and all the technical marvels that work. Yet limits to understanding cause unending wars and aggression.

ISN’T UNDERSRTANDING, (using our verbal model) THE MAJOR DRIVE IN LIFE?  At least it is always going on in the background.

THIS ESSAY IS FOCUSED ON OUR DUALISTIC FORMULATION OF SOCIAL PROBLEMS. It needs to be re-thought beyond “us&them”.

[I asked Librarian if I could make a guest post to elaborate further on the limits to our verbal models.]  My ground theory is that behavior follows thought, (belief) and societies suffer from errant behavior.  Therefore, it is changes in collective mind-set - that steer civilization up and down.

You could blame it on outside forces or inside divisions, but a fortified collective mind-set handles both outside and inside aberrations.  Even prolonged drought will just cause a strong society to migrate and not to collapse.

THE DRIVING POINT OF THIS ESSAY IS that IF people are different in succeeding generations, how can we analyze with a simple polarity or a class structure?  Our analysis is faulty and can’t give results.

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I have followed the Library4Conciliation for a year and I am reading along with the current upload.  I find it very enlightening.  I also read Ethnogenesis and the Biosphere.  There they talked about the stages of the rise and fall of civilization using the term passionarity.  Passion means the energy and drive to do something to change the circumstances.  No matter what the thoughts are, you need excess energy to act upon them.  When you don’t have that passion, you are in inertia. Extra-energy allows you to change the external.  Just-enough energy will be focused on your own life.  The energy stages are building, until so much energy causes a burnout, and then the fall.  It falls so far and then there is an inertia, with just enough doer-ship to keep your own life in order.  Perhaps that is our energy level in our western society today.  Decline comes when energy is too low to sustain even the self; then society members just rob from each other, rather than create a new lifestyle.

Yes, different energy levels, and they’re produced by different mind-sets. This takes me to my point for today:

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I investigated a book called the Fourth Turning.  (The High; the Awakening; the Unraveling, and the Crisis.) The Four turnings are the stages of rise and fall in another author’s analysis.  Strauss and Howe take a shorter view of the cycle, four human generations, or lifespans.  The American generations have been given names and characteristics.  When the baton of control is passed to each future generation, will America have a different look to it?  That is what they are hinting at.

Actually, it is more than a hint, and they make lots of predictions.  Some are presented as scenarios that likely won’t happen, just to explore the limits.  Some of them are pretty far out.  But in fact, major wars did break out much by surprise. (Or they were in a secret planning process.)  This book is actually a political fiction for your consideration, and it’s proposing that anything can happen. I am not adhering to any of their predictions, and that part of the book I don’t appreciate much.  Although it is eye-opening.  

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With the Fourth Turning, I want to look at what these different generational tendencies, (their typical thoughts) might be.  Can we characterize them?

Here is some background about what I want to say. (5,000 words)

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The perplexity is that each collective perception of a “new understanding”, doesn’t seem to relieve much, or it even has side effects more devastating, (it’s the next series of problems).  I also admit that these perceptions are orchestrated by power sectors, “our controllers”.  We might start to believe that problems are a “divine intervention”, to help us to grow.  But what it really means is that our understanding of how to relieve them WAS FALSE.  Up to a point it may have appeared correct, and it had some merit in it.  But the proof is in the poor result, and our analysis is deficient.  Perhaps we view some things as inalterable, (like the word capitalism), or very difficult, so our understanding turns toward a “work-around”, that leaves the rotten part of the foundation in place. 

Much of social problems and oppression are analyzed as a duality, us and them, allies and enemies, the masters and slaves, the kings and the subjects, the noble landowners and the serfs, the feudal lords and the peasants, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, the owner class and the worker class, employer and employees, the 1% and the 99%. There’s some truth here.  But the limitation of a pure duality is that neither the oppressed nor oppressor are monolithic.  Their attitudes are changing, maybe slowly, but what is that change?

As I wrote above, human life unfolds through a collective attitude, or a weighted average of mind-sets, or through a matrix of power, so we see societies rise and fall.  How can they do that without a change in the stereotype of thinking?  Maybe we should look into the mechanisms for changed thought.  We already know consistent thought is held in place by social pressure.  Your neighbors (and the law) won’t allow you to step out of those bounds. 

Changed thought is a product of your perception and your interpretation.  Interpretation shifts with your experience.  Formative experiences in childhood depend on the prosperity of your parent’s situation, and of your peers. Did you grow up easy or did you grow up with difficulty?  Maybe this was stable for many generations?  But nowadays it is an accelerating flux.

If people are different in succeeding generations, how can we analyze with a simple polarity or class structure?  At least we must look at what the other ramifications could be.  I would like to talk just about generational tendencies, to emphasize their importance in future analysis.

HERE ARE SOME LISTINGS OF AMERICAN GNERATIONS.  They are tendencies, not rigid boxes.  I am not even trying to say they will lead you to some breakthrough in understanding.  I don’t know, it is new to me also?  But let’s consider them. The dates are their birth, but they become active decades later in their maturity.

After the Civil War the young generation was charged-up to remake society
Then the 'Lost Generation' born before 1900
The 'Greatest Generation' born 1901 - 1924 - 63 million people, Fought WWII, called the G.I. generation, (Also called The Missionary Generation)
First 'Silent Generation' born 1928 - 1945 - civil rights when they grew up
*Boomers* - (baby boom born during WWII) 1946 – 1964 or 43 - 60
13ers, also another missionary generation, probably refers to Gen X
Gen X, 1965 - 1980 – the radical 'middle-child'
Millennials - 1981 - 1996 - shaped by the Internet, or 1982 - 2004
Gen Z - 1997 - 2012 - more diverse and pragmatic  
The “New Silent” is also used in this book for the "Z" Generation

Gen Z’s jargon, “slay” and “tea” are officially vintage terms, giving way to “sigma,” “gyatt” and “fanum tax.”  Everyone’s getting whiplash.

Generation Alpha - born after 2010, unintelligible convos because of ‘brainrot’ language. Gen Alpha’s hyper online manner of speaking has been dubbed “brainrot,” mostly by older Gen Z-er’s who share spaces like TikTok with them.  It’s slang that’s often niche and insular to the Internet — sometimes making its way from Roblox to Twitch to TikTok — which is why some older generations find it uniquely difficult to make sense of.

    “Every day there’s just another set of terms,” said Camille Nisich, 53, parent to a 14- and a 15- year-olds. “They’ll just be talking, and my husband and I are like, ‘We’re not sure what that means.’”  (“It’s meant to create this in-group which alienates older people,” said content creator and linguist Adam Aleksic, who makes videos tracing the origin of Internet slang terms),

‘Skibidi Toilet’, “You don’t really use it in sentences, you kind-of just say it randomly,” said Petersen’s daughter Beryl, 11. You can describe someone as skibidi, she said, but it’s not a good thing nor a bad thing. “It’s just a weird thing.”  (What will it be like when Alphas runs the world?)
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SO, LET’S TALK ABOUT SOME OF THESE GENERATIONS, and see what could be different when they come of age.

Right now, the Boomers are in their 60’s-70’s or later, and are running the country.  Just after the war their parents came into a prosperity spurt, so they were raised privileged and entitled.  They are consumers of the good life.  There is probably a lot to say about it since I am a Boomer, (although I don’t run anything).

Today’s gerontologists and demographers do not yet grasp what’s coming. This kind of forecast leads to the conclusion that in early 21st century, younger generations will be overwhelmed by extravagantly doctored, expansively lobbying, "age-denying" old people, to support their consumptive Sharper-Image lifestyles through old age.

These new “elders of the tribe” see themselves as “wisdom keepers” who feed wisdom back into society and who guide the long-term reclamation project of healing our beleaguered planet. Pain and bodily decline will be accepted, even honored as the necessary burning off of worldly dross, for the purpose of acquiring higher insights.

In the Fourth Turning, Boomers are likely to occupy the vortex of a downward economic spiral. This will happen partly because of their numbers but mainly because of their location in history and collective persona.  “The generation born in a K-Wave advance and inevitably spoiled by the wealth created by their parents’ generation is sure to drive the system over the edge, without the experience of the past decline to provide financial and economic sobriety.” Born to the High’s new cornucopia, coming of age with the Awakening’s fiscal levers at full throttle, the national economy in the Boomers’ old age will provide them with a very different end game.  Despite the Boomers’ larger numbers and longer life spans—and the costly end-of-life technologies that medicine might then offer—the share of Fourth Turning national income that will be spent on federally subsidized elder health care could fall below what it was in the Unraveling era (Third Turning).

Picture the Boomer Overclass of the Unraveling, aged another twenty years. Picture William Bennett’s “Consequence and Confrontation” missives; Al Gore predicting an environmental cataclysm; James Webb’s summoning a “ruthless and overpowering” retaliation against foreign enemies; James Fallows rooting for a “7.0 magnitude diplo-economic shock”; “Apocalypse Darman” and “Default Newt” with their budget train wrecks; Earth First saboteurs, willing to sacrifice other people’s lives to save trees; and an Army of God antiabortionists summoning the terminally ill to “use your final months to torch clinics.” Picture Boomers like these, older and harsher, un-calmed by anyone more senior, feeling their last full measure of strength, sensing their pending mortality, mounting their final crusade—all at a time of maximum public peril.  Their habitual tendency to enunciate unyielding principles will now carry to the duty of enforcement.

The final Boomer leaders—authoritarian, severe, unyielding—will command broad support from younger people who will see in them a wisdom beyond the reckoning of youth. In domestic matters, old Boomers will recast the old arguments of the Culture Wars into a new context of community needs. They will redefine and reauthenticate a civic expansion—crafted from some mix of Unraveling-era cultural conservatism and public-sector liberalism. In foreign matters, they will narrowly define the acceptable behavior of other nations and broadly define the appropriate use of American arms.  They will risk enormous pain and consequence to command youth to fight and die in ways they themselves never would have tolerated in their own youth.

They will believe, as did Cicero, that this moment in history assigns “young men for action, old men for counsel.”

It is easy to envision old Aquarians as pillars of fire leading to the Promised Land—but just as easy to see them as Charonlike monsters abducting doomed souls across the River Styx to Hades. Either is possible.  If they triumph, they will collectively deserve the eulogy Winston Churchill offered to Franklin Roosevelt: to die “an enviable death.” If they fail, their misdeeds will cast a dark shadow over the entire twenty-first century, perhaps beyond. Whatever the outcome, posterity will remember the Boomers’ Gray Champion persona long after the hippie and yuppie images have been forgotten to all but the historian.

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Each generation’s approach to its new phase of life will set off loud economic alarms, reminding people how weakly their Unraveling-era nation prepared for the future. The Boomers’ old age will loom, exposing the thinness in private savings and the unsustainability of public promises. The 13ers (the 13^th generation from the nations beginning), will reach their make-or-break peak earning years, realizing at last that they can’t all be lucky exceptions to their stagnating average income. Millennials will come of age facing debts, tax burdens, and two-tier wage structures that older generations will now declare intolerable. As all these generations enter their Crisis constellation, the Unraveling will have left the government so fiscally overcommitted to sustaining everyone’s expectations that initial official responses to these new concerns will lack credibility. Subliminal fears will now become urgent. The Unraveling era’s wry acceptance that people might never get much back from Social Security will crystallize into a jolting new fear that everything from Treasury bills, to remortgage instruments, to mutual funds. could become just as suspect. Just scrap paper.

Aggressive individualism, institutional decay, and long-term pessimism can proceed only so far, before a society loses the level of dependability needed to sustain the division of labor and long-term promises, on which a market economy must rest.  At some point, America’s short-term Crisis psychology will catch up to the long-term post-Unraveling fundamentals. This might result in a Great Devaluation, a severe drop in the market price of most financial and real assets.

What will propel these events? As the saeculum turns, each of today’s generations will enter a new phase of life, producing a Crisis constellation of ✓ Boomer elders, ✓ midlife 13ers, ✓ young adult Millennials, and ✓ children from the New Silent Generation. Every generational transition will contribute to the shift in mood from Unraveling to Crisis.

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13ERS ENTERING MIDLIFE: the DOOM PLAYERS, (Gen X?, the radical middle child)

The onset of the Fourth Turning will find 13ers retaining their troubled reputation, the only change being that America’s troubled age bracket will then be perceived as more fiftyish than thirtyish. They will carry the reputation for having come of age at a time when good manners and civic habits were NOT emphasized in homes and schools. With their arrival, midlife will lose moral authority and gain toughness. Their culture will be a hodgepodge of non-blending styles and polyethnic currents that will reflect the centrifugal impulse from which many Americans (including 13ers) will now be eager to escape.

In the economy, 13ers will fare significantly worse than Boomers did at like age back in the mid-1980s. They will fan out across an unusually wide range of money and career outcomes. A few will be wildly successful, a larger number will be destitute, while most will be losing ground but doing tolerably. The Crisis era’s image of a middle-aged worker will be a modest-wage job-hopper who retains the flexibility to change life directions at a snap. The prototype midlife success story will be the entrepreneur who excels at cunning, flexibility, and high-tech ingenuity. The prototype failure story will be the ruined gambler, broke but still trying. The high-risk harbors where 13ers will have bet their stray cash during the Unraveling (from lotto to Indian casinos to derivative markets) will, like this generation, be stigmatized and left to rot.

As they confront their money problems amid a mood of deepening Crisis, 13ers will take pride in their ability to “have a life” and wall off their families from financial woes. Their divorce rate will be well below that of midlife Silent or the Boomers. They will clamp down on children. In exchange for financial help, many may invite their better-off parents to live with them.

The 13er mind-set will be hardboiled and avuncular, (the kind uncle), the risk taking, now mellowed by a Crisis-era need for security. Middle-aged people will mentor youth movements, lend stylishness to hard times, and add nuts-and-bolts workmanship to the resolute new mood. They will be begrudgingly respected for their proficiency in multimedia and various untutored skills to which old Boomers will be blind and young Millennials dismissive. Throughout the economy, 13ers will be associated with risk and dirty jobs. They will seek workable outcomes more than inner truths. “We won’t have a bad backlash against our lost idealism,’ predicts Slacker filmmaker Richard Linklater, since his generation “never had any idealism to begin with.”

As the Crisis deepens, 13ers will feel little stake in the old order, little sense that their names and signatures are on the social contract. They will have reached full adult maturity without ever having believed in either the American Dream or American exceptionalism. They will never have known a time when America felt good about itself, when its civic and cultural life didn’t seem to be decaying. From childhood into midlife, they will have always sensed that the nation’s core institutions mainly served the interests of people other than themselves. Not many of their classmates and friends will have built public-sector careers, apart from teaching and police work.

As the Crisis rages on, the era’s stark new communitarianism will require 13ers to rivet new grids in place. New-breed mayors and governors will abandon old labels and alliances, patch together people and technology, and rekindle public support for community purpose. Having grown up in a time when walls were being dismantled, families dissolved, and loyalties discarded, 13er power brokers will reconstruct the social barriers that produce civic order. They will connive first to get the people behind them, next to bribe (or threaten) people into doing what’s needed, and then to solidify those arrangements into something functional. They won’t worry about the obviously insoluble and won’t fuss over the merely annoying. Their politicians won’t brim with compassion or nuance, and won’t care if they have to win ugly. To them, the outcome will matter more than democracy’s ritual aesthetics. Their hand strengthened by the demands of Crisis, 13ers will sweep aside procedural legalisms and promises legislated by old regimes, much to the anguish of the octogenarian Silent. They won’t mind uttering— and listening to—the sound bite that seems to sum up a situation with eloquent efficiency. To critics, the new style of 13er urban leadership will appear unlearned, poorly rooted in values, even corrupt, but it will work.

This generation’s institutional rootlessness will make its leaders and electorates highly volatile, capable of extreme crosscurrents. Lacking much stake in the old order, many 13ers might impulsively welcome the notion of watching it break into pieces. They won’t regard the traditional safety nets as important to their lives. The real-life experience of their own circles will reinforce their view that when people lose jobs or money, they can find a way to cope, deal with it, and move on. Looking back on their own lives, they will conclude that many of the Awakening - and Unraveling-era trends that may have felt good to older generations didn’t work so well for them— or for the nation. Come the Crisis, many 13ers will feel that emergency action is necessary to re-create the kind of secure world they will feel was denied them in childhood.

In this environment, 13ers could emerge as the leaders of a Crisis-era populism based on the notion of taking raw action now and justifying it later. A charismatic anti-intellectual demagogue could convert the ad slogans of the Third Turning into the political slogans of the Fourth Turning: “No excuses.” “Why ask why?” “Just do it.” Start with a winner-take-all ethos that believes in action for action’s sake, exalts strength, elevates impulse, and holds weakness and compassion in contempt. Add class desperation, anti-rationalism, and perceptions of national decline. The product, at its most extreme, could be a new American fascism.  Many of the traits that were criticized for decades—their survivalism, realism, lack of affect—will now be recognized as vital national resources

Middle-aged 13ers will be the only ones capable of deflecting the more dangerous Boomer tendencies. The Boomers won’t check themselves, nor will Millennials, so the task will fall to 13ers to force the Boomer priest/warriors to give it a rest when their fervor gets too deep, to get real when the sacrifices outweigh the future reward. A 13er may indeed be the intrepid statesman, general, or presidential adviser who prevents some righteous old Aquarian from losing the fateful lightning, and turning the world’s lights out.

MILLENNIALS ENTERING YOUNG ADULTHOOD: AS THE POWER RANGERS

Power Rangers are wholesome kid-soldiers in bright, primary-color uniforms. No relation to the junk-fed mutant turtles of the 13er child era, Power Rangers have provided the Unraveling’s leading toy role models for children. When summoned, these ordinary youths transform themselves into “thunderbolting” evil fighters. Cheerful, confident, and energetic, Power Rangers are nurtured to succeed in the face of great odds. Whatever they do—from displaying martial arts to piloting high-tech weaponry—they do as a choreographed group. Their very motto, The Power of Teamwork Overcomes All, speaks of strength in cooperation, energy in conformity, virtue in duty. Their missions are not chosen by themselves, but by an incorporeal elder in whose vision and wisdom they have total trust. (The authors of those cartoons?) Come the Fourth Turning, coming-of-age Millennials will have a lot in common with these action toys.

On the job, Millennials will be seekers of order and harmony. They will delight employers with their skills, work habits, and institutional loyalties. They will have a knack for organization and hierarchy more than creative entrepreneurship. Young workers will revitalize trade unions and treat coworkers as partners more than rivals. The Millennials’ entry into the workforce, combined with the Boomers’ exit, will produce a sudden surge in productivity—quite the opposite of the stagnation that arose from the Awakening’s Boomer entry and GI. exit.

Wherever their politics lead, Millennials will become identified with a new American mainstream, a fledgling middle class just waiting to assert itself. They will vex Hollywood’s Unraveling-era elite with their cool rationalism. They will vex feminists by accepting a new mystique between the sexes. They will vex free marketeers with their demands for trade barriers, government regulation, labor standards, and public works.

Near the climax of Crisis, the full power of this rising generation will assert itself, providing their society with a highly effective instrument for imposing order on an unruly world. They will appear capable of glorious collective deeds, of conquering distant lands, of potently executing any command that may be issued. Quite the opposite of the Boomers’ Awakening-era casualties in Vietnam, which weakened the public will to fight, the Millennials’ heroic sacrifices will only add to the national resolve. As a Crisis-era president commits the society to clear a path for a bright future, the political juggernaut of Millennial youth will stand squarely with their beloved commander-in-chief. This generation of young heroes will follow wherever the Gray Champion leads, whether to triumph or to disaster. ???

NEW SILENT ENTERING CHILDHOOD: SWEET INNOCENTS

In an America locked in Crisis, no one will be particularly interested in the teen culture, except to chastise anything that offends. As nativism runs its course, the New Silent will be the least immigrant, most English-speaking generation in living memory. Growing up in a time of adult sacrifice and narrowing cultural horizons, the New Silent will develop an earnest and affective temperament, yet feel stuck in a stiflingly parochial social environment.

The New Silent will be treated this way because that will be how middle-aged 13ers will prefer it—and they (13ers) will be America’s dominant Crisis-era nurturers of children. As parents, teachers, and community leaders, 13ers will look back on their Awakening-era childhoods as chaotic, hurried, insecure, and under-protected. While 13ers take pride in the firmer, more reliable family life they will establish, New Silent kids will eventually look back on it as a smothering overcorrection. Later in life, they will recall their Crisis era child’s world as having been oversimplified, over-slowed, overprotected, too grounded in moral cement—and, like the Silent, they will loosen parental authority accordingly.

Like history’s other inheritor or post-heroic generations, the New Silent will endure constant reminders of what great sacrifices are being made on their behalf. As the Crisis rolls toward its resolution, they will cope with anxiety, fear, and powerlessness. For the rest of their lives, they will never forget these feelings.

What will America be like as it exits the Fourth Turning?

History offers no guarantees. Obviously, things could go horribly wrong.  Losing in the next Fourth Turning, however, could mean something incomparably worse. It could mean a lasting defeat from which our national innocence—and perhaps even our nation—might never recover. As many Americans know from their own ancestral backgrounds, history provides numerous examples of societies that have been wiped off the map, ground into submission, or beaten so badly they revert to barbarism.

If America plunges into an era of depression or violence which by then has not lifted, we will likely look back on the 1990s as the decade when we valued all the wrong things and made all the wrong choices. If the Fourth Turning goes well, however, memories of the Unraveling will be laced with nostalgic fun. More important, a good ending will probably mean that America has taken individual freedoms that now seem socially corrosive and embedded them constructively in a new social order.

In every saeculum, (lifespan) the Awakening gives birth to a variety of individual and social ideals that are mutually incompatible within the framework of the old institutional order. In the Unraveling, the tension between wants and should’s widens, sours, and polarizes. In the Crisis, a new social contract reconciles these competing principles on a new and potentially higher level of civilization. In the following High, this contract provides the secure platform on which a new social infrastructure can be hoisted. In the parlance of its time, each of the past three Crises resolved aggravating value struggles that had been building up over the prior saeculum. ✓The American Revolution resolved the eighteenth-century struggle between commerce and citizenship. ✓The Civil War resolved the early-nineteenth-century struggle between liberty and equality. ✓The New Deal resolved the industrial-era struggle between capitalism and socialism.

In today’s Unraveling, with its mood of pessimism, a reconciliation between these opposing principles seems (and probably is) impossible. But come the Fourth Turning, in the white heat of society’s ekpyrosis, (periodic destruction and rebirth), a grand solution may suddenly snap into place. Once a new social contract is written and a new civic order established, it could eradicate (or, at least, narrow) many of the today’s seemingly insoluble contradictions—for example, between ✓no-fault divorce and dependable families, ✓poverty assistance and the work ethic, or ✓gun control and personal defense. If the next Fourth Turning concludes successfully, some great leader may be credited with saving individual empowerment by making it compatible with higher ideals of social responsibility—much as FDR was credited with saving capitalism while forging the New Deal and Lincoln with extending liberty while redefining America’s nationhood.

By the 2030s, the generational archetypes will be ready for something new. The Fourth Turning will be ready to expire when old Prophets weaken, Nomads tire of public urgency, and Heroes feel hubris, (pride and arrogance). This occurs around the time each archetype stands on the brink of a new life phase:

✓The elder Prophets, still leading the culture while vacating institutions, now worry about a society whose new materialism they find alien.

✓The midlife Nomads, sensing that the old crusades have run their course, now plan to fortify community discipline and narrow the scope of personal choice.

✓The young-adult Heroes, energized by the success of collective action, now want to change society from the outside in.

✓The child Artists, credulous youths in a world of powerful adults, learn to trust conventions and prepare for ways to help others.

By the middle 2030s, the archetypal constellation will change, as each generation begins entering a new phase of life.

Come the next High, at long last freed of the weight of Boomers, 13ers will be America’s new old fogeys, widely perceived as old-fashioned, the only generation still rooted in the mostly forgotten pre-Crisis past. If the Crisis ends badly, they might provide the demagogues, authoritarians, even the tribal warlords who try to pick up the pieces. If the Crisis goes well, its 13er generals may well become the U.S. presidents of the next high. Crusty conservatives, they will warn younger generations of the danger of rushing too swiftly in a world rigged with pitfalls. They will force the nation to produce more than it consumes, perhaps through stiff taxes and budget surpluses— exactly the opposite choices from the ones elders made in their own Unraveling-era youth. Under 13er leadership, America will concentrate on building infrastructure and institutions, not on cultural depth or spiritual fervor. In the High, a stingier public treatment of old people will be taken for granted. Despite a rough and neglected elderhood, 13ers will find solace in seeing their children shoot past them in affluence and education.

Of all today’s generations, the Millennials probably have the most at stake in the coming Crisis. If it ends badly, they would bear the full burden of its consequence throughout their adult lives. If they come of age traumatized, like the Progressive youths of the Civil War, Millennials will thereafter attend to the details of suffering and healing as heirs to the Artist archetype. Yet if the Crisis ends well, Millennials will gain a triumphant reputation for virtue, valor, and competence. People of all ages will steer them vast fiscal rewards and build them grand monuments. Like the world-conquering G.I.s in midlife, Millennials will feel intensely modern in science and taste. They will construct large new things, establish a powerful social regimen, and indulge their children. When a new Awakening later erupts, the Millennials will for the first time discover a generation that refuses to celebrate them: their own kids, freshly come of age.

History is seasonal, but its outcomes are not foreordained. Much will depend on how tall we stand in the trials to come. But there is more to do than just wait for that time to come. The course of our national and personal destinies will depend in large measure on what we do now, as a society and as individuals, to prepare.

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WOW, THEY WEAVE SOME DETAILED SCENARIOS IN THIS BOOK?

What do you think about it?  Do you know people in these various age groups? Are they anything like what is described here? Again, my point is that there is more to it than “us and them”.  I don’t point to any future predictions, accept maybe further decline.  But I do suggest that you can investigate different tendencies-of-the-ages, as you think about problems and solutions.

Here; You can read it if you want.

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