While studying history back in the 1990s, Neil Howe and the late William Strauss noticed a pattern to history that repeated itself again and again. They developed a theory that history moves in 80-100 year cycles, divided into 4 20-25 year turnings: The High, Awakening, Unraveling, and Crisis. Neil Howe argues that we are currently living through a fourth turning, and today, we unpack what that means.
00:05:30.520And this is an event which sort of foreshadows the fourth turning to come.
00:05:34.080It's sort of its indicator of, you know, a sudden mood of public mobilization and urgency about some great danger, right?
00:05:41.800And the country rallies briefly, but only briefly.
00:05:45.080And then it kind of goes back into its third turning mood of sort of, you know, lassitude, individualism, sort of ennui and kind of waiting.
00:05:52.260And for the Great Depression, World War II, this was World War I, which kind of appeared out of nowhere, right?
00:05:59.480And typically, these periods do, these events, these precursors.
00:06:04.000You know, you kind of have in the middle of an unraveling era, which was certainly that era, the very early 20th century was a period of, you know, a lot of individualism, a lot of aimlessness.
00:06:15.080And suddenly, at World War I, kind of come out of nowhere, you know, everyone just thought, well, we had attained this permanent period of peace, kind of came out of nowhere.
00:06:23.480And I think the similar parallel recently was 9-11, you know, which kind of, again, came out of nowhere, I think, shocked everyone.
00:06:31.200Remember the big book that was so influential over that 1990s decade, which was Francis Fukuyama's book, The End of History.
00:06:39.660Government was sort of fading away, markets were taking over, globalization was everywhere, you know, where did this come from, right?
00:06:51.700We've got to talk about earlier ones in history.
00:06:53.920And then, eventually, the generations kind of mature, you get into the correct alignment, and we sort of have a catalyst where we actually enter the fourth turning.
00:07:05.640And for the Great Depression, World War II, that was Black Thursday, 1929.
00:07:12.740And more recently, that was August to September 2007, and then even more, the fall of 2008, where we really entered.
00:07:22.480In fact, the stock market was plunging at the time of the, I don't know if you recall this, but the time of the Obama-McCain debates, you know, during that presidential election, if you recall.
00:07:33.300And major banking houses were beginning to go under and so forth.
00:07:37.400And suddenly, we had to declare a national emergency and run these enormous deficits and, you know, guarantee, bail out, you know, hundreds of, hundreds of businesses.
00:07:51.240And every fourth turning has a catalyst.
00:07:53.500For, you know, the American Revolution, it was the Tea Party, Boston Tea Party.
00:07:57.300And in the American Civil War, it was the election of Lincoln.
00:08:02.900And, you know, going further back, the whole period of the Glorious Revolution and the wars in Virginia and New England, it was probably the massive violence that started Bacon's Rebellion and King Philip's War.
00:08:14.780This was in 1675 and really initiated that quarter century of rebellion and revolution during the American colonial period.
00:08:26.820Now, typically, as you move forward, it sort of awakens everyone, right, that they were in a new mood.
00:08:32.160And typically, as you can go forward, you encounter these periods that we call regeneracies, when the public mood begins to regenerate after a long period of sort of, well, this is worse than anything, right?
00:08:50.220And then, finally, you begin to regenerate a sense of new public direction, a new sense of public mobilization.
00:08:57.240And we begin to rally around certain kinds of communities, you know, around some new agenda.
00:09:04.300And everyone becomes more interested in the public, in the nation, and where things are going.
00:09:09.720And certainly in the Great Depression, that happened with the election of FDR.
00:09:15.040You know, some years into the Great Depression, we finally had FDR and the New Deal, first New Deal, second New Deal, who was reelected in a landslide in 1936.
00:09:25.800And I think you'd have to say that in our current fourth turning, the Regeneracy was really the election of 2016 with Trump versus Hillary Clinton.
00:09:39.440And what that did was it suddenly changed America's involvement in politics.
00:09:44.260One of the greatest things we worried about, you know, throughout the 80s and 90s and going into the to the OOs and so on was the fact that, no, Americans didn't care about politics anymore.
00:09:56.160Well, in in the election of 2016, suddenly American participation in voting hugely shot up.
00:10:03.740And again, in 2018 and 2020, we've seen the highest voter participation rates in a century in these elections.
00:10:11.580And suddenly America becomes completely galvanized around these big political tribes we see today.
00:10:29.440You know, we may feel pretty good about our own lives in a sense and how things are working in our families and so on.
00:10:36.020But we wonder if there's just some tremendous vacuum, complete lack of leadership at the national level, sometimes whether we're leaderless or sometimes whether we're breaking up into two separate national communities.
00:11:04.720Basically, what that leads to is a period of creative destruction of the public sector, often in the midst of organized conflict.
00:11:12.020And that takes us into the last phases of the fourth turning, which is the consolidation and possibly further regeneracies, but ultimately into a consolidation, a climax, and a resolution.
00:11:26.240And very often that could be a large, when I talk about organized conflict, of course,
00:11:30.880we're often talking about war and typically in fourth turnings, these have been, you know, negotiated and carried out during periods of total war.
00:11:40.240Every fourth turning in Anglo-American history going back six, seven centuries has featured at least one episode of total war and every total war has occurred in a fourth turning.
00:11:54.420So the four phases, it's, there's a precursor that happens in the third turning, the unraveling.
00:11:59.920It's an emergency that temporarily galvanizes a society.
00:12:03.420So if you look at the depression era crisis, that was World War I.
00:12:08.480And then today you're saying the 9-11 attack was one that temporarily galvanized us.
00:12:13.660I think everyone remembers after what happened 9-11 and we got, everyone was all for, you know, going back and trying to get back at, at the Taliban.
00:12:20.160Right. I think if people remember that period, if you were alive.
00:12:22.480Yeah. And for a brief period of time, everyone felt patriotic.
00:12:36.560I think it was Robert Kagan who once said that, you know, we all recall after, uh, after the Afghanistan and Iraq war, the whole mantra, you know, Bush lied, people died.
00:12:46.300Right. But, but I think it was, it was Kagan who said that after World War I, the mantra was Wilson lied, people died.
00:12:53.560You know, I mean, it was sort of the same thing.
00:12:59.760And in response to both of them, we became a more isolationist nation and wanted to turn ourselves away from these global obligations that seem to have gone awry.
00:13:09.600Okay. Then after the precursor, there's a catalyst, which kickstarts the actual crisis period or fourth turning for the depression, World War II era.
00:13:17.660That was Black Thursday, the stock market crash.
00:13:20.380And for us, that was the, you're saying about 2008 is when the, the fourth turning started for us.
00:13:25.300Yeah, the fall of, the fall of 2008 was when it really went crazy.
00:13:29.440Right. With the, uh, the great financial crash that we had then.
00:13:32.400And then after the catalyst, people are feeling, everything's kind of run amok.
00:13:36.680So people start trying to reunify community and regenerize civic life with a regeneracy.
00:13:42.560And this regeneracy, you hear regeneracy and you thought that sounds positive.
00:13:46.540It sounds like regeneracy can be, it's going to be a lot of conflicts.
00:13:49.620What's happening is like our culture is trying to figure out how we're going to solve this crisis era that we're in.
00:13:55.600So in the depression, as you said, the regeneracy there was FDR being elected and him implementing all the, the new deal legislation.
00:14:03.620But I think people forget that was very controversial.
00:14:07.500There was a lot of debate in our country that period.
00:14:10.480And in fact, it was the equivalent of red zone, blue zone today.
00:14:14.080Remember that the popular front and the new deal supporters, you know, thought about, uh, the 1930s as, as the fascist decade, you know, so they were already fighting the good fight.
00:14:24.980Against the rise of fascism around the world, you know, whether it was a Spanish civil war or, uh, you know, the Japanese invading, uh, China and the rise of Hitler and so on.
00:14:35.080But to conservatives, it was the red decade, right?
00:14:39.200So you have these two completely different interpretations and many Americans not even wanting to talk to each other during that period, a very divisive period in our history.
00:14:49.800And it, it's kind of astounding when you think about that, that given this schism in the way people in sort of the high income world, the West was interpreting the events of the thirties, that ultimately the nation was able to galvanize around a single objective, which was to defeat fascism.
00:15:08.960And this was a point I make throughout the book that the conflict that characterizes the climax could be mainly internal or it could be mainly external, right?
00:15:22.480It could be, you know, the nation against external enemies and it can be anywhere along the spectrum of that, but the nature of that cannot be determined in advance.
00:15:33.060You would have no way of knowing in the mid thirties or even the late thirties that America wouldn't go to civil war before it would ever galvanize together to defend the world against authoritarian aggressors.
00:15:47.500And I think that that's a repeated theme that I come back to.
00:16:03.820So you say our current regeneracy was the 2016, 2018, 2020 elections where people in America are suddenly interested in public life again after.
00:16:20.860The democratic party in many ways went the other way and Trump was elected and the Democrats, you know, kind of an extraordinary move declared that they were in resistance.
00:16:31.120You remember, there's a resistance kind of, again, taking from the 1930s, right?
00:16:35.800There were going to be the resistance party, like an enemy army was occupying Washington.
00:16:40.820So, you know, Trump and all the Republicans were suddenly these occupying invaders.
00:16:46.440And then, of course, you had, you know, multiple impeachment attempts and trials and just unprecedented things in American history.
00:16:55.700And then, finally, Trump losing the election and trying, you know, a putsch to retake the Capitol Hill.
00:17:02.680Well, extraordinary events in the midst of a global pandemic, which, of course, this nation managed very badly.
00:17:15.320We did not manage it very well, right, in terms of deaths.
00:17:18.700And so this combination of galvanizing people to think that politics is extremely important, together with this continued demoralization of the fact that nothing works, right?
00:17:31.240Now, there could be another regeneracy.
00:17:33.720And, in fact, many of our foreturnings have more than one regeneracy.
00:17:38.140The first regeneracy in the 1930s was, obviously, the enthusiasm around FDR and, obviously, the kind of, you know, galvanizing of the Republicans to oppose him.
00:17:49.360But then what happened in the late 1930s was the enthusiasm around FDR sort of declined, particularly after 1936.
00:17:57.100We went into another big recession, you know, the recession of 37, 38, horrible recession.
00:18:03.700And it made most people convinced that by 1939, 1940, we were still in the Great Depression.
00:18:10.620And what happened at that time was the constituency shifted, and mainly the New Deal shifted away from some of its reforms, which would have imposed themselves on the South.
00:18:23.120And the South, in turn, came on board, not on FDR's domestic agenda, but came on board FDR's foreign policy agenda, which tended to be in favor of an active foreign policy abroad to prevent the rise of fascism.
00:18:37.520And it was really around that refashioned constituency, defining the two sides, that we finally went to war and were ready to go to war, really about a year before Pearl Harbor.
00:18:50.680The nation began arming again at a frantic rate, really in the spring or even at the very beginning of 1941.
00:18:58.660We were already, you know, running huge deficits on the way, you know, galvanizing the economy to sort of rearm, and we had already reintroduced the draft and so on.
00:19:10.880And then, of course, came Pearl Harbor, and that just simply galvanized.
00:19:15.520That's when we went into what I call the consolidation, the time when we are aware that the fate of the country is at stake.
00:19:23.320And, you know, extraordinary public mobilization is required.
00:19:29.020And every fourth turning enters that phase.
00:19:32.680Okay, so in a fourth turning, you first have a catalyst.
00:19:36.040And in this fourth turning, you're saying that was the 2008 financial crisis.
00:20:10.680And, you know, I think a lot of people thought the consolidation was going to happen during the pandemic, right?
00:20:16.180At first, it seemed people like we're going to come together, but then it became very politicized.
00:20:20.700And then it just divided people even more.
00:20:23.360And you say that's not surprising because you never know how these things are going to play out.
00:20:28.240And when the time is ripe, you know, for one phase of the fourth turning to segue to the next.
00:20:34.540So, you know, we're due an event that brings the consolidation.
00:20:38.420And I think if people think about things that could possibly consolidate this crisis, there's, you know, stuff going on in Ukraine.
00:20:47.040There's things going on in the Pacific with China.
00:20:49.860So wars have typically been parts of the fourth turning.
00:20:55.080Any other things that could be like the consolidation of this crisis besides, you know, these great power wars that we've had in previous turnings?
00:21:03.620Well, again, it's external and internal.
00:21:06.040So the other one is the internal threat, right?
00:21:08.720What if there were kind of a catastrophic impeachment or the absolute refusal of the two parties to cooperate any longer in Congress?
00:21:16.700Or what if certain states simply decided to refuse to go along with something that was legislated at the national level?
00:21:31.200I've advised them on, you know, recruiting millennials and, you know, looking at millennials, both for the Army and the Navy and the Marine Corps.
00:21:39.740And I've had officers, you know, very high-level people ask me, you know, when things have been breaking out in some of the West Coast states, you know, what do we do if California suddenly decides to not follow federal authority?
00:21:54.920We've got huge bases, you know, in Coronado and various other places.
00:21:59.880And as I hear those complaints more than once, you know, it takes me right back to Fort Sumter.
00:22:32.280And looking forward right now, we're trying to do this great disinflation, you know, without going through another recession.
00:22:38.700And I think, you know, Americans have been relieved to the extent that which we've been able to get this far.
00:22:45.820But the economy is still checking ahead.
00:22:48.440But then again, you know, as an economist, when I look at all the long-term indicators of, you know, going into another recession, they're all flashing red.
00:22:57.200Everything from, you know, the money supply to the yield curve to national income sort of exceeding our full employment equilibrium.
00:23:05.560And all of these long-term indicators are indicating we're going back in recession land again.
00:23:11.260And each one of these ratchets up the tension, right?
00:23:15.920I mean, I think about a generation of children, you know, born since the early 00s.
00:23:21.120You just can't even remember a time when America was not either in a recession, going into recession, or worried about going back into recession, right?
00:23:29.780So this is a time of sort of hunkered down, constricted horizons of hope, you know, in terms of living standards, particularly catastrophic for younger generations today.
00:23:43.480And I will say that younger generations are the most negative about democracy, which they see not just in America, but around the world.
00:23:51.340Younger generations see democracy as a way of ensuring stasis, talking about everything, but it was inventing some procedure for making sure that change never happens.
00:24:00.780Okay, so there's the consolidation, and then after the consolidation is the climax.
00:24:03.880What was the climax in World War II depression crisis?
00:24:08.780The climax was really the simultaneous invasion of Europe on D-Day in June of 1944,
00:24:17.420and the invasion of the Mariana Island chain and the Battle of the Japanese Sea at the same time in June of 1944.
00:25:10.940I mean, my God, this is not – I'm predicting tides here.
00:25:16.300We're not predicting when the individual waves are going to break, right?
00:25:19.880So, you know, we're kind of doing bands of dates.
00:25:23.280But I do think if there was any single moment, which was most likely, it would be sometime right around the very end of the decade.
00:25:32.040And after the climax comes the resolution, and this is where you have – you know, you separate the winners from the losers, treaties are drawn up, national boundaries are redrawn, political parties are redefined, and the saculum comes to an end.
00:25:49.620And you think our fourth turning that we're in right now will end in the early to mid-2030s.
00:25:56.420We're going to take a quick break for a word from our sponsors.
00:25:58.460We're going to take a quick break for a word from our sponsors.
00:26:04.080So you also talk about, with these fourth turnings, like the mood and how society starts organizing itself starts changing.
00:26:12.300Are you seeing that right now in the current crisis?
00:26:15.960Well, I think we see the great desire to move back to a community, just a greater sense of community, which is a desire which is embodied really in – I'd say even less the political agenda, but more even just the lifestyle.
00:26:32.040Well, of the millennial generation, being that if you ask people, what should government reinforce the principle of individualism or should reinforce the principle of community in American life today?
00:26:44.580People under 40 today overwhelmingly say community.
00:26:49.040And people over 40 tend to say, well, individualism, right?
00:26:53.880That we've never seen that degree of sort of inversion and difference.
00:26:59.420And again, to come back to sort of archetypal difference, that's sort of the opposite of what you would have seen back in the 1970s, where it probably would have been inverted – had we asked that question – would have been inverted the opposite direction.
00:27:12.880And so that movement to a community, which by the end of the fourth turning will be a sort of culminating event, is accompanied by other changes.
00:27:22.900One is a movement to a greater equality.
00:27:25.280That happens in every fourth turning and subsequent first turning.
00:27:31.320Another is toward the movement from defiance toward authority, institutions which govern life with greater authority than before the crisis.
00:27:43.860I think another we talk about is the movement toward deferring long-term decisions, toward instituting powerful long-term institutions, which actually invest in the future rather than borrow from the future.
00:27:59.540So a movement toward deferring long-term decisions to making long-term decisions and actually moving resources from the present toward the future.
00:28:10.560And one of the great ironies about fourth turnings in American history is that even at the time when the country feels endangered and in urgent peril of its existence is exactly the time when we construct these amazing long-term institutions.
00:28:28.300I mean, it was when the country felt like it was baking to pieces in the 1780s that we wrote this very powerful American constitution, right, which we've sort of venerated ever since as this, you know, building blocks of sort of the American form of government.
00:28:43.860It was during the civil war when we instituted, you know, for the first time, a national income tax, a national monetary system.
00:28:53.480We legislated the Intercontinental Railway, you know, state colleges and a state educational system, nationalized weights and measures.
00:29:02.140I mean, we just did all this stuff, right, at a time when even Washington was under fear of attack.
00:29:07.600And think of all the things we did during the New Deal, long-term decisions, the Social Security Act of 1935, which most of the legislation's planning was done in 1934, which is the cornerstone of the modern social welfare system in America today.
00:29:23.480Not just pension programs, but also, you know, all of the state federal programs like, you know, TANF and SSI and all those programs that are sort of the bedrock of sort of social insurance in America today, unemployment insurance and all the rest.
00:29:41.040We legislated them, Brad, at a time when GDP was in free fall.
00:30:48.660And it's fascinating to me that usually when times are great, we don't do anything for the future.
00:30:54.640When times are down, at times of crisis, is when we think about the future.
00:30:58.400And finally, I talk about a transformation of our culture, from a culture of irony to a culture of convention.
00:31:06.600And I think there is a sense of exhaustion in the culture today.
00:31:11.680And I do think there's a sense of people looking for something new.
00:31:14.800But it's out of the, again, out of the stress and urgency of crisis, that culture moves back to a certain kind of simplicity, almost necessarily toward that, and simply clarifies basic fundamentals.
00:31:37.940You also talk about how just our culture will change because of how the generations are lining up in this crisis cycle.
00:31:45.060And one thing you've noticed throughout all your books is that in a crisis period, gender roles become more distinct and separate, particularly in a fourth turning.
00:31:56.320But I was curious, today you're seeing a lot of this gender fluidity in our culture today.
00:32:02.160How do you square the gender fluidity that we're seeing with this idea that you've seen in other fourth turnings where gender roles become more distinct and separate?
00:32:11.340I think we're seeing gender fluidity, but we're also seeing a certain kind of gender role exhaustion, right?
00:32:17.080In that, you know, when gender can mean anything, then people began to insist, well, it must mean something, right?
00:32:24.040I don't see a lot of, a tremendous amount of passion about the limitations of gender roles as there was, you know, 40 years ago.
00:32:35.280And in fact, I see a lot of young people just wondering how they could make their lives work more simply again through roles that just make everyone's life easier, right?
00:32:48.560I see a lot of that, not really having to do with my wanting to express myself more fully because I want sort of a different kind of gender role that's suited for me personally, but rather, how can we make basic roles work so that we can all just get stuff done again, right?
00:33:09.860I think there's a tremendous sense of exhaustion when it comes to having to think about gender roles all the time.
00:33:17.060So I think the last time we had you on, we talked about the male-female dynamic, your hunch was that you were noticing with women, millennial women in particular, was that they were looking for more of a traditional kind of guy, I think as you were saying.
00:33:30.980They were looking for a guy who was stepped up to the plate, who was, you know, wanted to do well with his life.
00:33:37.600And you thought that was sort of an indicator that we're transitioning to this more, you know, fourth turning type gender relation.
00:34:00.480And it's interesting, if you look at the National Values Survey, where they actually ask questions about, you know, what do you think is wrong with people?
00:34:08.020And one of the questions they used to ask is, you know, I wish men were more likely to be less workaholic and talk more about their feelings, you know, loosen up and sort of mellow out, right?
00:34:20.520You found a very positive response in questions taken when boomers were young adults and moving into midlife, you know, back in the 1970s and 80s and 90s, right?
00:34:33.020Those questions are now getting much more negative responses, particularly by women who don't particularly want that, right?
00:34:40.300What they want is, because you can imagine with the silent generation, with boomers, you had all these, you know, workaholics and so on.
00:34:48.540And everyone said, why don't you lighten up?
00:34:50.380You don't need to work so hard, you know, just to just be a real person, right?
00:34:54.060But I think now with millennials, it's more, and you knew this, you know this from so many surveys, women want guys who will be there for them, who will provide them with security, who are in control of their lives, and who actually want to do something with their lives and in the community and actually be something so they'll provide them with some security.
00:35:16.880And that is one of the reasons why marriage rates are down and fertility is down so much.
00:35:38.320And it's the bigger complaint as you go down this socioeconomic scale, right?
00:35:42.700And so for the first time now, this actually kind of switched over about 10 or 15 years ago.
00:35:49.140But for a long time, back in the late 20th century, it was, you know, non-college Americans were getting married before college-educated Americans and getting married more frequently.
00:36:01.480And now it's completely moved the other direction.
00:36:03.860It's people with degrees and with income now are getting married and other people aren't.
00:36:08.400And I think that is where women aren't finding men that they can count on.
00:37:14.960So right now, you know, you make the case that because of the affluence that we've experienced for the past, you know, since the post-war, World War II period, 70 years, you're able to have men who just like opted out and not do anything.
00:37:26.440Could the crisis kind of be like, well, no, you can't do this anymore because this lifestyle.
00:37:32.160And it also provides huge opportunity for guys to suddenly, you know, serve and, you know, get public respect, you know, actually serving the country because the country actually needs them.
00:37:43.020I think one thing that we find today with our definitions of citizenship is that we tend to think of it as it comes with all these rights that we have, but what are the real obligations, right?
00:37:54.760And of course, there's a time of crisis when people discover the obligations, but these things are often energizing to young men.
00:38:02.740I mean, if there's any, if anything we've discovered during a crisis, it's when we're reshaping public institutions in a way that designing them for the future and designing it for the future automatically means more for young people, right?
00:38:15.660Because we're investing in their future.
00:38:17.360We're reshaping institutions for them and young people get to get in on the ground floor of that.
00:38:23.720And inevitably, when you're talking about extraordinary efforts, you know, to redesign big public institutions, you're often talking about mobilizing young men to do something.
00:38:36.600And that does become a slingshot for them, you know, over the rest of their lives.
00:38:41.120It certainly was for the GI generation, particularly the last wave GIs that were born in the 1910s and the early 1920s.
00:38:48.840And I do think that late wave millennials, you know, people that are today in their 20s, early 30s, it will serve the same purpose.
00:38:57.800Any other things you're seeing in our current fourth turning crisis and sort of the cultures changing and kind of lining up with what you would expect?
00:39:05.040Well, there was a recent survey and it was done by the Southern Poverty Legal Center, you may know, which often does surveys on various kinds of, you know, violent prone groups.
00:39:15.480Certainly a progressive organization, if there ever was one.
00:39:18.700They did a very large survey and they found, interestingly, that when it comes to the issue of what feminism has done to the country.
00:39:27.120And I pointed it out because it seems so counterintuitive to me.
00:39:31.340It pointed out that younger people, people under age 40, were significantly more likely.
00:39:37.120And this is true both among Democrats and Republicans, men and in women, were much more likely than older people to say feminism has done more harm than good.
00:40:05.720And so, Brad, if you're talking about what are we seeing today that is a precursor to this, to what I think will be more of a reality as we move into the rest of this fourth turning, I would point to those signs.
00:40:35.460It'd take a lot of hubris for me to be able to see that that would actually change things.
00:40:39.640I do think that at some very basic level, people are aware, right?
00:40:46.700You know, I'm hardly the only person who has drawn attention to the parallels today, who we see today to the parallels of what we saw during the 1930s.
00:40:55.600I mean, many others have done that, too.
00:40:57.980And certainly, these simply arise naturally.
00:41:01.320When the North and the South finally parted ways in 1861 and the war got underway, both the Southern Confederacy and then the Union both likened their struggle to America's, you know, they both called it America's second revolution, America's second declaration of independence.
00:41:20.720Since we were going through it again, they were aware of the parallel, that the battles that they were going to fight were exactly on par with the original fight to part with Britain and actually define the nation.
00:41:32.460And the same thing occurred again in the 1930s.
00:41:40.060Was it a war to rid the world of slavery?
00:41:44.160That's how FDR announced it in his inaugural address.
00:41:48.060And after his reelection in 1944, he said that we're engaged once again in a world to rid the world of slavery, just like we did in the Civil War.
00:41:57.340I guess what I'm saying is these things come back naturally.
00:42:00.220In these fourth turning events, the parallels, once you move toward the crisis, arise naturally.
00:42:08.140And as we move toward the climax of this crisis, the parallels to World War II and the Great Depression, to the Civil War, to the American Revolution, will arise naturally.
00:42:20.500And I guarantee you that political leaders and civic leaders of all kinds will instinctively reach toward them, whether or not they knew about what I wrote about or not.
00:43:01.320You know, so the previous things we've been talking about, you know, World War II, the Revolutionary War, it was terrible, but then things turned out great.
00:43:09.480You know, we had this high period afterwards.
00:43:11.020But, you know, what happens when there's a crisis, there's no resolution, and it just sort of ends in disaster?
00:43:19.780Well, I mean, it could well be a resolution, and the resolution could be terrible.
00:43:33.940It was Appomattox, and it was abject defeat.
00:43:37.020And it was poverty for the area of the country for the next many, many decades.
00:43:42.440In fact, even by the mid-1960s, I mean, the South was barely above, you know, two-thirds of the average income level of the rest of the United States.
00:43:51.580So there you have what you'd have to say was a pretty disastrous outcome, you know, for a region anyway.
00:43:58.340And if you look at other countries, you can see that fourth turnings don't necessarily have good outcomes.
00:44:05.160And so it's not, you know, I like to say that a fourth turning with a good outcome, what follows is a first turning, which many people will liken to another golden age.
00:44:23.420And a lot of people today might not like that aspect of it, but certainly everyone who lives the crisis is going to see a good outcome as the beginning of another golden age.
00:44:33.680When everything will work again, everyone can build big new institutions again.
00:44:37.220We can make huge new advances again in technology, world peace, discoveries, you know, not only in this world, but, of course, today maybe in other worlds as well.
00:44:49.240And I talk about that a lot, right, in that chapter, sort of the good aspect of a fourth turning that ends well.
00:44:55.920But then there's the possibility of ending badly.
00:44:58.880And I think it's worth pointing out that we tend to use devastating technologies of mass destruction, what's ever available.
00:45:09.260I mean, look, if you have a bad night, Brett, you could imagine a lot of horrible scenarios, right, about how this thing would end.
00:45:16.940So I don't mean to say that this is necessarily automatically positive.
00:45:22.340And that's why it's important what we do.
00:45:24.720I don't believe in determinant history at all.
00:45:27.320It's important how people play their roles and how we find our way out of this thing.
00:45:40.180You still have some of the same archetypal reconstructions.
00:45:42.940And I think that's actually why the saculum is such a powerful, complex system.
00:45:49.660It's always pushed back toward equilibrium, so to speak.
00:45:52.840I mean, imagine what the American high would have been if we weren't that prosperous and that successful.
00:45:58.260Imagine if we were just simply reconstructing from damage done during World War II.
00:46:03.340We would have had the same basic outline without the optimism, without the confidence, perhaps.
00:46:08.300But it still would have been a period of strong institutions and solidarity and with a tremendous amount of investment in the future.
00:46:15.400Maybe just, you know, getting back to where we were before.
00:46:19.660And typically, too, these societies have 20, 25 years later an awakening.
00:46:24.780The defeated nations in World War II had awakenings in the late 60s and 70s.
00:46:30.460They were every bit as acrimonious and explosive, even more so than the victorious nations.
00:46:37.720Okay, so there's still a high period, even when a fourth turning ends badly, right?
00:46:41.680So, like, you know, using Germany as an example, you know, they lost the war during World War II.
00:46:45.940But then they still entered that first turning.
00:46:48.100It's just that their first turning looked different than the one in the U.S.
00:46:51.900You know, they still had rationing after the war.
00:46:53.840They had, you know, they still had some suffering to go through.
00:46:56.260So, it wasn't as hopeful and prosperous as the first turning in the U.S.
00:47:01.420But they did rebuild and they did experience that first turning pattern.
00:47:06.200And I guess, too, I mean, in some cases, you know, the damage could be permanent, right?
00:47:11.100Like, it's permanent destruction that happens during the fourth turning that, you know, a country is never able to recover from, even though the cycle continues.
00:47:18.980So, as you said, you know, what we do matters during the fourth turning, right?
00:47:27.300So, if people are feeling some unease during this fourth turning, what advice do you have for navigating this period, you know, like, personally?
00:47:35.720One thing that becomes very important in fourth turning is that as public institutions begin to have to allocate all their resources toward the national survival, that many of the benefits or many of the safety nets become less generous, right?
00:47:54.300So, it becomes very important, I think, in these times to make sure that people solidify their network of friends and community and, above all, family.
00:48:07.400When the chips are down, particularly in a fourth turning, when no other kind of safety nets may be available.
00:48:14.780Finding a way to be close to your family and knowing who you can count on and fortifying and reinforcing all of your kin networks and friendship networks is probably the most important thing you can do.
00:48:28.500And if you read accounts or just diaries of people in these crisis periods, you know, read the accounts of people having lived through the 30s and 40s, for example, or lived through the Civil War, and so much of it is close friends and family that helped them through and that were there for them when the chips are down and they cared for them.
00:48:50.840So, and that's part of the cultural shift, of course, it occurs when family, perhaps not being as important during the unraveling, you know, during the 1990s or the 1920s, suddenly becomes a lot more important by the 1930s and 40s, and by extension, you know, by the late 2020s.
00:49:10.920Well, Neil, this has been a great conversation.
00:49:12.460Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?
00:49:16.220The book is, the fourth turning is here.
00:49:18.700It's available on, you know, any bookstore, you know, Amazon, or I don't know, wherever you want to look.
00:49:24.380It's available in hardcover or Kindle or, or audio.
00:49:36.060He's the author of the book, The Fourth Turning is Here.
00:49:38.240It's available on Amazon.com and bookstores everywhere.
00:49:40.820Check out our show notes at aom.is slash fourth turning, where you can find links to resources where we delve deeper into this topic.
00:49:48.700Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM Podcast.
00:49:55.800Make sure to check out our website at artofmanless.com, where you can find our podcast archives, as well as thousands of articles that we've written over the years about pretty much anything you can think of.
00:50:03.420And if you haven't done so already, I'd appreciate it if you take one minute to give us a view on the podcast or Spotify.