The Fourth Turning: Generational Cycles and Historical Crises

They gambled with borrowed money

order for people to stay at home.

ISIS was the result

of the vacuum in Syria.

In the fourth turning, norms break,

heck out the crimes of the mob. Knock the crap out of him. Would you?

Seriously

systems fail.

At the end,

everything starts again.

This is the part that

can be hard to look at.

The crisis of monarchy

ended in the Revolutionary War.

The crisis of

slavery ended in the Civil War.

The crisis over labor and America's

role in the world ended in

World War II.

I don't know how our cycle

will end. Neither do these authors.

But even though crisis means

upheaval, a big shift, things

breaking,

it doesn't have to mean war.

But we need to talk about this model.

It's clean.

That's what makes it compelling.

But things don't always fit.

World War I is a full-blown crisis.

At the time, it's the

biggest war in history,

but it happens in 1914, so it's

just slotted into the unraveling.

The Civil

Rights Movement

peaks in what

this theory calls the high.

Things don't always fit.

In fact, they often don't.

History isn't perfectly predictable,

but it's an even

bigger mistake to say that it's random,

that the patterns are meaningless.

I think people often misread

"This is how history

repeats" to mean

something like, "This is what history

repeats," what wars,

what events, what exact crisis comes next.

But I think what this book is saying is something closer to,

"This is why history repeats."

And what this theory really

says is that history

repeats because

generations, children,

are shaped by

the world they grow up in.

Grow up with stability,

you inherit one set of instincts,

assumptions about the

world, things you focus on.

Grow up hearing

about a world of conflict,

you inherit another.

When those children become adults,

they shape the world through those

instincts in

predictable ways, and that world, in turn,

shapes that generation of

children, the children of that turning.

That's the engine of this cycle.