21 Jan America’s 250th Birthday: Emerging from a Fourth Turning with Optimism
The “Fourth Turning” is a label assigned by authors Neil Howe and William Strauss to describe what appears to them to be recurring cycles of the collective human experience over four periods of approximately 20 years each, for a total period of approximately 80 years.
Their book is a fascinating read for those who with an interest in history; you can buy it here. There’s much more to it than can be summarized in this post. But the reason to give it some thought is that it indirectly provides hope today for a new and imminent Golden Age…if and when we are able to get through the ominous convulsions of the current Fourth Turning.
In the authors’ words:
A final, perilous era arrives once each lifetime. It is marked by civic upheaval and national mobilization, both traumatic and transformative. That era, reshaping the social and political landscape, is unfolding now.
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One common sense interpretation of an 80-year human cycle is that it roughly corresponds to the time necessary for a complete transition of ‘living’ human consciousness; in other words, virtually every individual who is part of the collective of what human society thinks and knows in year 1 will be gone (passed away) by year 80. Which means humanity’s collective wisdom, lived experience and understanding (or consciousness) completely turns over about every 80 years.
That doesn’t mean the wisdom of the past 80 years (or of millennia, for that matter) is forgotten, but that its ‘punch’ or impact becomes substantially and markedly tempered from what it was just 80 years earlier. (Which seems to make humanity compelled to relearn at great cost whatever valuable lessons there were from the prior 80 years).
An easy illustration of this common-sense perspective: arguably no single day of WWII was more consequential and civilization-defining than the D-Day invasion of Normandy, France in 1944. The staggeringly high levels of courage, sacrifice and bravery of the Allied soldiers drove home lessons of patriotism and devotion and of the price of preserving freedom and western civilization that will never be forgotten.
Yet by 2024 (80 years later), surviving veterans of D-Day had dwindled to a very few, and all will have passed in just a few more years. Which means the impact of those dramatic 1944 lessons of patriotism, devotion and preservation of freedom has dropped substantially among the living adults of today. Stated another way, the youngest generation of today simply does not grasp those lessons with the same depth as did the boomer generation that emerged after World War II.
And there is an obvious concurrent example from World War II: the evils of the Holocaust are but a few years away from no living memory among the ≈8 billion human beings currently on the planet. The varied lessons of that horrendous stain on humanity—many of which crystallized in the collective understanding during and immediately after the Nuremberg Trials—are very clearly losing their hold on the collective consciousness.
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For purposes of this post, at the onset of America’s 250th yearlong birthday celebration, the nation appears to be chronologically in the middle of a fourth “Fourth Turning”; that is, if the founding of America in 1776 is thought of as the end of the first 80 year cycle; approximately 80 years later was the Civil War; approximately 80 years after the Civil War was World War II; and approximately 80 years after WWII is the 2020’s…where we are right now.
Where we are right now is unquestionably a time of breathtaking upheaval in American society. The list of civilization-changing convulsions is mind-blowing:
- Conflict between Islam and Judeo-Christian teaching in regard to the purpose and meaning of human life and its relation (if a relation is even conceded to exist) to Allah v. the God of the Bible is reaching confrontational levels throughout the world, and now especially in western Europe and the United States—and within the United States in, of all places, Texas.
At this writing, the nearly 93 million people of Iran are rising in protest of the brutality and injustice of life under strident Islamic rule—will they prevail on their own? Will the USA under Trump deliver a decisive military blow to aid the protesting Iranians? Or will the Iranian mullahs stall, slaughter thousands of opponents away from the cameras, and hold on to power? The near-term outcome in Iran will have a lot to do with resolution of the Islam v. Judeo-Christian conflict—and how violent or non-violent it will be—in this era. But again, at this writing, no serious, informed observer of this conflict would claim to know with any degree of certainty how this conflict will be resolved.
Trump’s Board of Peace is grandiose in ambition and could accomplish a long-overdue ‘disestablishment’ of the anti-American, anti-Christian United Nations, but is based on an assumed ability to bypass or skip over or simply bulldoze via commercialism the core religious conflict in Gaza and elsewhere. That’s a YUGE assumption with no successful historical precedent to bolster it.
- American federal government spending is so out of control as to be into funny money levels (rendering the fiat currency of dollar-denominated paper completely worthless), but even more importantly, has been demonstrated as monumentally corrupted by fraud. The breadth and scale of the fraud point inevitably to criminally culpable senior elected government officials, but more importantly and despairingly, they point to a society-wide collapse of integrity and decency. There is simply no way for such fraud to have occurred without thousands and maybe millions of people who in some way enabled, facilitated, benefited or deliberately looked away as it was happening. Which means an historical, American, Ten Commandments-inspired cultural ethos of ‘don’t lie, cheat or steal, or tolerate those who do’ has eroded almost beyond recognition, at least among the so-called ruling class.
Arrests, prosecution and jail time for officials at the top will do some good, but this level of fraud reflects a sick society that will not recover without generational relearning and re-embracing of standards for morality and character.
- Evidence is accumulating to overwhelming levels that elements of the American federal government have criminally taken away the fundamental building block of a self-governing people: the ability of the people to elect the government they desire.
The 2020 US election was unquestionably rigged, and the fingerprints of American intelligence agencies are all over the crime scene, and all over the staged J6 fed-surrection. It was an attempt to overthrow the constitutional Republic. Yet to this day, American legacy media/leftists continue to harp on a false ‘insurrection’ narrative, which insists on teaching all Americans and especially American children that J6 was a precarious moment for the survival of American democracy, and the villainous Trump who caused it is just like Hitler.
J6 was and still is a precarious moment for survival of the Republic, because institutional voices of the American government and Operation Mockingbird media will not acknowledge the truth, or even acknowledge the need to investigate the evidence of 2020 election rigging. A million or more legitimate, peaceful protesters in their nation’s capitol who instinctively knew that the senile Joe Biden could not possibly have received 81 million votes—the most by far in the history of presidential elections—were treated without regard to actual evidence as traitorous thugs (read John Strand’s new book: Patriot Plea), denied any semblance of American due process, and were personally and financially destroyed by enraged prosecutors, indignant juries, and tyrant judges, all of whom bought and enforced the lie of Biden’s election.
Trump Derangement Syndrome in its most severe form is almost always traceable to the affected individual having swallowed hook, line and sinker the fabricated results of the 2020 election and bogus insurrection narrative of J6. It drives otherwise sentient human beings—from Main Street to the federal judiciary to the US Senate—to oppose everything Trump does…because Trump is doing it and Trump is evil because he questioned the results of an election.
- Controversy over the deportation of 20+ million people who entered the country during the term of the Biden coup is obviously being fanned by professional agitators in Minneapolis and elsewhere. Chaos, destruction and true insurrection against the federal government enforcing the duly enacted laws of the United States of America is the agenda and mission. When a leftist mob descends on Minneapolis-based Christian church-goers in a coordinated stunt with a former CNN host, there is no longer any excuse for not knowing what all this is about: bringing down America as a self-governing Republic under the Constitution.
- Evidence is also accumulating to overwhelming levels that the covid creation, leak and pandemic, and the rollout of vaccines and the related ‘mandate’ hysteria, were a government/Big Pharma/Big Tech coordinated scam intended to disable and kill innocent human beings all over the globe as part of an unspeakably evil depopulation agenda, and a concurrent enable-mail-in-ballot-fraud agenda to cement the 2020 election steal. Alex Berenson, Del Bigtree, Steve Kirsch, David Martin, Tom Renz, Mikki Willis, and Naomi Wolf—among many others—have documented this evidence. But to this day, government/Big Pharma and Big Tech continue the charade: covid sprang from nature; the vaccines helped people (and do not cause autism); and don’t worry, you can always ‘trust the science’ and ‘the experts’ on life-and-death matters of health. Forget ‘my body, my choice’; the model is ‘your body, the government/Big Pharma’s choice’.
The Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Bobby Kennedy knows all of this, but even he treads ever so cautiously as he rolls out his MAHA agenda. His opponents have trillions of dollars at stake, and they are opposing him at every step.
Informed Americans are deeply rattled by the near total dismantling of trust in the medical profession/healthcare industry that has followed in the wake of the ‘plandemic’. Some have even called for a new set of Nuremberg trials to achieve accountability.
- The out-of-control LGBT+ movement is rotting the soul of the nation. What started as an avowedly harmless appeal to America’s gentle live-and-let-live tolerance to allow gay ‘civil unions’ has morphed into an orgy of month-long, government-mandated ‘pride’ celebrations; same-sex ‘marriage’ and ‘parents’ insufferably celebrated by Hollywood; legitimized drag queen shows for children; gender mutilation of children barely old enough to know how to read; and the list goes on and on. Most Americans still prefer to ‘live-and-let-live’ and ‘mind their own business’, but the LGBT+ movement has become gross hyper-sensualism and moral degeneracy run amok. It’s gone off the rails.
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Any single one of these six categories of conflict and convulsion (and there are others–e.g., the assassination of Charlie Kirk) is unnerving to a civil society; collectively, they seem to threaten to collapse society in its entirety into utter lawlessness and moral incoherence. Millions of Americans are literally on their knees daily in prayer to find a way out of the comprehensive confusion and chaos that seems to have engulfed the country so suddenly.
A true Fourth Turning if ever there was one.
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So how can there be optimism in the middle of such a wild Fourth Turning?
First, because the idea of recurring 80-year humanity life-cycles takes away some of the apocalyptic fear that might otherwise seem all-pervading and inescapable. In short, a Fourth Turning is NOT something new; convulsions are actually predictable and in an unfortunate sense, ‘normal’. Humanity has been there, done that—and lived to start another cycle with a refreshed grasp and appreciation for enduring values and principles.
Second, and more importantly, it’s possible to see a righteous ‘arc of history’ in the emergence from prior Fourth Turnings in America. The immediate aftermath of the American founding in 1776 was energizing to the noble worldwide cause of human freedom; the resolution of the Civil War revealed in the American people a very real and virtuous determination to live by the Declaration’s divine ideal that ‘all men are created equal’; and the end of the horrendously violent and destructive World War II was followed by the relative wholesomeness and rebuilding of the 50’s and 60’s.
That arc of history remains discernible and intact. Righteousness still exists; it is knowable and understandable to a society devoted to seeking it. (“Don’t lie, cheat or steal, or tolerate those who do” is a pretty good start on relearning righteousness.) And it is the massive upheaval of a Fourth Turning that forces a society to seek it anew.
Jesus said ‘Seek and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you’. Let’s hope and expect all mankind will gain new appreciation and confidence in Jesus’ words and teachings as America and the world pass through and eventually emerge from this extraordinarily consequential Fourth Turning.
Eric Georgatos