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June 18, 1997 - Bill Cooper
01:00:31
Ann online with William Strauss
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Light of the world, breathe the power of the dark.
I am the one who will take the world to sea.
I am the one who will take the world to sea.
the you're listening to the power of the time
i'm william cooper the man william jefferson clinton
named in a white house memo of the most dangerous radio host in america
I wonder why he did that.
Well, after today's broadcast, you might find out.
You might find that there are going to be some others on his list, I venture to say.
So make sure you have pen and paper, and listen carefully, ladies and gentlemen.
There's a new book out.
It's called The Fourth Turning, written by William Strauss and Neil Howe.
This book confirms everything that I have been telling you.
And we're going to be talking about this book in the next several days.
I'm not selling this book.
You can't buy it from me.
I don't get any money if you do buy this book.
Neither does the Harvest Trust or the Worldwide Freedom Radio Network or any other entity that I may be associated with, no matter in what capacity.
I'm recommending that you read this book because this book is right on target.
Right on the money.
This is not a commercial.
They're not paying us to do this.
It's not a book review, ladies and gentlemen.
This is news.
What is this book, The Fourth Turning About?
Well, this book offers this bold prophecy.
Listen carefully.
Just after the millennium, America will enter a new era that will culminate with a crisis comparable to the American Revolution, the Civil War, the Great Depression, and World War II.
The survival of the nation will almost certainly be at stake.
Strauss and Howe based this vision on a provocative theory of American history as a series of recurring 80 to 100 year cycles.
Each cycle has four turnings, a high, an awakening, An Unraveling and a Crises.
The authors locate today's America as midway through an unraveling roughly a decade away from the next crises, or fourth turning as they call it, and they recommend ways Americans can prepare for what's ahead as a nation and as individuals.
As Future Shock did in the 1970s and Megatrends did in the 80s, this groundbreaking book will have a profound effect on every reader's perception of America's past, present, and future.
I recommend that you get it and read it.
We're going to be covering a lot of what's in this book over the next few broadcasts.
And tonight, you're going to hear, right now, an interview conducted with, and online, with William Strauss, one of the authors of the fourth Turning and without further ado, here is that interview.
Welcome to Anne on Lime.
Hi, this is Anne Devlin and welcome back to Anne on Lime.
They submit history is prophecy.
Hi, this is Anne Devlin and welcome back to Anne online.
They submit history is prophecy.
The future is the intersection of the influence of each of our generations on a specific turning point in the cycle of
time.
Four turning points in that cycle.
And straight ahead they predict a forced turning that indeed, if history is to be repeated, will bring crisis, demand change.
So what is the crisis ahead?
How might we prepare?
How and why do these cycles work?
The predictions, the theory, and reactions to them are in the book, The Forced Turning, and are free-flowing on the book's website.
William Strout is co-author.
William Stout, thank you so much for taking time.
We do appreciate it.
Thank you, Anne.
It's delightful to be here.
Let us start for the uninitiated with an explanation here of the title of this book, The Fourth Turning.
You contend within this book that the number four provides, I'll say, the typical underpinning for all of recorded history, and certainly offers to us the turn of the seasons, not just of nature, but of life.
You're describing history as a series of seasons that we describe as turnings, and each of them is the span of a generation.
and I think it's useful to think about it a little bit like a human life or as the seasons
are defined every year where the first turning is a time of growth and rediscovery, the second
is a time of maturation or full flowering, the third is a time of harvest and intricacy
and the fourth is the time when there are discontinuities when there is something
colder and tougher that happens but it's also the time of rebirth and we call that the fourth
turning. To bring it to modern times you can think about it as a full cycle representing
the length of a human life approximately 80 to 90 years that would be a long human life so it's
the same length as long human lives have been now for for centuries.
And as you look at human history since the end of the Dark Ages and actually at other times as well in ancient societies like Rome or Greece or some of the Islamic dynasties or China, you can see a real periodicity that every 80 to 100 years there is a change an empire a redefinition of a people some major
civic convulsion that happens and you go back in American history and you can see a
pattern that a number of historians have noted uh how they're think through about 80 or 90 years
became the great turning points in our history Although you, you suggest in the book that, I'll say this is very controversial among historians, there are those who don't wish to find patterns or cycles and, and some exploration of the whole idea.
So they consider it a coincidence.
But let's go back and see what these, what these, uh, periodic force endings present.
Uh, the most recent one, of course, was the Great Depression and World War II.
The one before that was the Civil War.
The one before that was the American Revolution.
The one before that was the glorious revolution of the late 17th century in England and the colonies.
The one before that was England's epic triumph over Spain, we remember as the Armada.
And the one before that was the establishment of the English Kingdom under Henry VII at the end of the War of the Roses.
Each of them 80 to 100 years apart.
And what's particularly interesting here, Ann, and our quick answer to the historians who might say, well, this is just a coincidence, is that halfway in between, you have this pattern of awakening.
Times that culture is reborn.
Not empires, but the world of ideas and morals and ethics and culture.
And of course, we had the consciousness revolution of the late 60s and 1970s, most recently.
It's the time when everything that happened before seems a little antique, a little quaint.
Everything's chimps in, more hip.
Well, that's not new.
You go back to what historians call the third great awakening, the 1890s and 1900s, the
time when the culture was reborn, when there was a lot of argument about religion, when
men people were attacking supposedly spirit-fed elders.
That was 80 or 90 years before the 1950s and 70s.
You go back another cycle and you find what historians call the second great awakening,
the time when the first seeds were being laid for the abolitionist movements and the women's
rights movements, the great religion-founding era around the 1820s into the 1830s.
You go back before that and you of course have the great awakening of the 1730s and
the Connecticut Ballot and elsewhere in America, a time that many historians do agree the foundation
was laid for the American Revolution.
It was the young preachers, and they were overwhelmingly young, who established the values regime that the surviving members of their generation, as elders, carried over into the idea and religious understanding for the Revolution.
you go back before that another another cycle and you find the puritan awakening when the
new Jerusalem settlement for a fellow here in the colonies and also when you have the
revolution and in England you go back a cycle before that and you have the Protestant Reformation
all of these are roughly halfway in between the great times of of of secular change and
what when you look at this pattern of awakenings and and crises you can see more than just
a chronological relationship you can start seeing the generation at work.
My co-author Neal Howland and I believe that the generation may be the single most important unit of history.
And by a generation we're referring to a group of people who were born at approximately the same time, and that span of time is approximately the same length that it takes to go from being born to reaching full adulthood.
In modern America, that would be about 20 to 22 years.
That's about the length of a generation.
You can see that in each of these cycles of history, there are four generations.
Now, when you think about history in generational terms, it's especially useful to think about modern times.
And I think what I should do right now, Anne, is explain to you what the four turnings of The first turning is the high.
I know there's the first three because we're only in the third now. That was my next question.
Terrific. Thank you. And how that lines up with the generations today and once you understand that
then you can start looking at the rest of history from a new perspective. Excellent.
The first turning is the high. That is the period from BJ day to the Kennedy assassination,
for first-hand the assessment. Approximately...
Approximately 1946 into 1963-1964.
That was a time when institutionalized felt very strong, but individualism felt weak.
It was a time when America felt like it could do anything, but it really had trouble feeling anything.
And the second coming then, I referred to before as the Consciousness Revolution, the Awakening, that roughly spanned years.
The third turning is an unraveling.
from the student revolt through the rise of the tax revolt passing from the hippie to the yuppie
a marker by which America divided everything that was thought of as self before
from everything that was thought of as self after the third turning is an unraveling
this is a time quite unlike the first turning when institutionalized feels weak
but individualism is triumphant and you can think about Ronald Reagan's mourning in America
as a marker of that era the beginning of it
It was a time when a broad consensus was reached that the Americans had triumphed and whichever
side of the 1960s argument you were on, the arguments over Vietnam and Watergate and environmentalism
and all that, there was a consensus by the 1980s that individualism should reign supreme
over institutionalism and civic life.
And we've seen that again and again through the Reagan, Bush, and Clinton years.
This is one of those times in American history when the person, the right, the entitlement
is what prevails over the community and we're beginning to sense that our society is drifting
far in that direction.
Now history follows this rhythm further in another eight or ten years roughly in the middle of what Neal and I call the oh-oh decade right around the year 2005 but don't touch your watch it could be sooner it could be later.
There will be a mood change there will be A new determined mood that people will feel.
A new resolve.
And it will be triggered by circumstances that we can see today, but that we don't really see where the endgame will be.
whether it's a combination of entitlements or nuclear proliferation or terrorism or nativism
colliding with immigration or the spreading of risk and poor or the endgame of the culture wars
or more likely some combination of those in ways that we can't foresee and this will push us into
a new 20 year era in which the outcome is quite uncertain and all we can warn is the lesson of
history that it will be a time when the very survival of the nation may feel and in fact be
at stake when empires will be redrawn and when when the era is done there will be either a sense
of triumph or tragedy or both and at least the possibility this is a good news the possibility
that our civilization will rise to a new point because these are the times the crucibles of
history when great gates are passed and something fundamentally new and modern is achieved.
So, you suggest a number of possible fourth turning point scenarios, ranging from States threatening secession from the Union, terrorist acts that are international in scope, or maybe national in scope, and also the fallout, logically, would be in many different worlds, but among them in the financial world.
You also suggest, independently, that there could be a crisis that starts in the financial world.
Do you see any one of them at this point as more likely and the financial crisis seems perhaps more logical because so many people have expressed a deep concern about how bullish the market is now beyond all expectations and there are certainly projections that not in the short term but in the longest term it will take a fall.
It is impossible to say exactly what the figure will be for the crisis but we do have some real clues.
If you look back at other Cycles and other other eras that are like now in the 1920s were one such era the 1850s were another the 1760s were another.
People in those decades were not predicting what came next.
They didn't realize that a depression or a civil war or a revolution going respectively backwards was what lay ahead.
What could they have reasonably foreseen?
In the 1920s There was a sense, like today, of an overbought market, of a speculative bubble, of a fund that felt like it was splintering the country of cultural arguments that wouldn't end.
There was a sense of exhaustion that was creeping in.
Had someone said that there would be a speculative collapse, that there would be a payback, and that there would be a rise of some new civic authority, People might have accepted that as within the realm of what was possible and indeed even a little probable if they thought about it.
What they could never have imagined was D-Day, Hero Tumor, was the nation ultimately becoming so powerful as a unit and able to do such incredible deeds as a civic community.
That was beyond imagination.
In the 1920s.
You go back to the 1850s.
Could they have imagined a John Brown or an election of a radical abolitionist president and a succession of slurry among the southern states?
Yes.
Could they have ever envisioned that within a few years after that, that series of circumstances would lead to the worst war in the history of the world in terms of casualties up to that point?
That would have been beyond imagining.
The 1750s.
Could the colonists have imagined tax revolts and challenges against colonial governors and new demands for rights and new definitions of self-government?
Yes.
Could they have imagined the colonies banding together to form a nation and defeat England in a war that England fought to win and establish a new kind of government that felt unbelievably modern to
the world at that time, no.
And the lesson is, you can see around you today the pieces that will gather to create
the environment of the first quarter of the next century, but you cannot say exactly what
it will be and you especially cannot say what the climax and resolution of this crisis era
Can you list some of those pieces, though, for individuals?
I mean, do you concur?
Would you put the financial markets at the top of the list?
I absolutely would put that as a key point, I think, right now.
And this gets a little bit into the generational aspect of this, which I'd like to get into as well.
As boomers approach old age, they are now going through a phase of Saving?
Well, this generation, which not just because of its numbers, those are actually what's important in its life cycle dynamics at any one time, but when they reach the phase of life where they are de-saving, or when they are trying to preserve their assets at a time of a freewheeling global marketplace, that could be a very dangerous time for the market.
And there's something unprecedented that is happening too, and that is that The generation behind boomers is less wealthy than them at each stage of life.
The young actors or as we call them the 13th generation.
It will be a very volatile circumstance when the first boomers reach the IRA withdrawal age and by boomers we define people born between the years 1943 and 1960.
So the first group of them will reach 59 and a half in the year 2002.
The first big cohort, the Clinton 1946 cohort, will reach the age at which a majority of people now, and unless the rules have changed then, will be eligible for Social Security at age 62.
And that will happen in the year 2008.
And Neil Howe and I are concerned that sometime between those two years, the financial mood could change specifically for the worse in terms of people's
expectations. This will be combined by combined with a realization that the entitlement
projections for Medicare and Social Security are impossible. That the only way to satisfy the benefits
projections that people have been making for decades is for the government to do essentially
nothing other than pay old debts and pay old boomers over the next five years.
Old boomers will reject that and there will be a series of convulsions in those programs.
Exactly when that happens, it's hard to say.
We think that it will happen well before the demographers suggest.
A lot of people are saying it's the 2020s where that will be a problem, but we think the markets will start discounting that.
And the politics of those programs will change.
They're fundamentally a combination of a get real attitude about social security as well as the shifting expectations and demographics of the marketplace could create some real problems in the next decade.
It's not anything that's going to happen any time soon, so enjoy the third turning and especially the bubble and make the money while you can, but the dynamics are going to, in a sense, sour early in the next century.
And could we have a merger here?
The public money problem, Social Security, Medicare, With perhaps a downturn in the market that will adversely affect for the first time broad numbers of the middle class and the lower middle class who have invested their pension money in IRAs for example and other mutual funds.
Oh these are interconnected and I think it could get tangled up with questions of nationhood and certainly global issues as well.
We haven't talked at all about the world but the world is following Much of the world, not all, but much of the world is following the parallel generational rhythm that's here.
You look in Europe, for example, and you see there Gen X and countries like France and Italy have unemployment rates twice as high as ours.
You hear social welfare programs are even more skewed towards older generations.
You look at Russia and China, China particularly, who have had generational rhythms that suggest Similar patterns.
The Chinese peers of boomers went through a cultural revolution back in the late 1960s and early 70s that was a tense age of intense power.
It was convulsive to a degree that very few Americans realize.
And the Chinese themselves are even afraid of that generation.
And at some point they will reach power.
That's their antagony.
Probably won't be for another 10 or 15 years, but they will.
And you combine these different forces going on around the world and we will not have this take place in a society in a vacuum.
It's the kind of time around which national confrontations can occur and empire definitions can change.
But back on the national front, it may also enhance the probability where people will
begin to seriously question and openly challenge then the belief they've held in public institutions,
government, delivering on social security, medicare, they made their payments diligently
throughout their professional lives or work lives.
Yeah, although a lot of Zoomers are not expecting ever to get their money back.
It's a very different expectation from the generation that fought in World War II.
Right, but they're still employed now and it's not as meaningful to them as an academic
debate or exploration.
I don't think there's any question that if there is in fact a collapse of the employment
scheme that that could pose a threat to national definition here.
And in addition, I mean, currently we have people, workers, saying, what does this corporation mean to me?
What will it do for me?
I can no longer count on it.
It has no loyalty to me.
Perhaps that dismay with corporate America, work institutions will also reach Radical dimensions.
And people feel like, I can't trust my government to deliver on a promise.
Corporate America does not deliver for me at all.
And there may be that sense of beyond disenchantment, beyond disillusionment, outright disgust with the belief that institutions failed to hold up their end of the bargain.
Could that not force?
Well there is a risk that people will perceive that the institutions that make sense to them are either local or global and less national.
Isn't that funny though?
Local or one extreme or the other?
One they can control and the other one what?
Well the other they perceive the environment in which they're really working and when you think of a corporate environment today the market tends to be local or global not so much national and when you think about Right now, during the third turning, our major defense issue is how we can keep men and women behaving properly, which is an interesting twist on the old question of preserving the national security.
To some degree, it feels like a luxury of peacetime, but you have to realize that the forces of history may someday look back on this as an almost laughable series of circumstances.
Right now, people do not perceive that there is a national defense field that is of particular importance to them, in the same way that they did before the collapse of the Soviet Union, and certainly not in the same way as during the last World War II.
It's because we don't have an identifiable enemy, and it's not to add here that one of your latest columns on your website is, are we preparing for the long war?
Yes, well, in the sense that we figure that the war would be would be a delicate one.
It would be one in which this population would wince at even a handful of casualties.
One that would be fought in a very high tech way.urgical.
In a sense there would be nearly no casualties and we would show our wizardry with gadgetry and technology and everything would be nice and over.
That is a long pattern not just in the most recent cycle that's There are ways in which it moves on.
the next military confrontation will resemble the last one and it does not. There are ways
in which it moves on. I think if we look around the world whether you are talking about global
terrorism or China or Russia as it may be reconstituted 10 or 20 years from now or something
else it could be an economic battle. It could later have military dimensions in ways that
we can't foresee. The world is not settled into some very tranquil end of history.
of the world.
The best proof of that is to look in Europe where there's been all this effort to create a bureaucracy with euro currency and the like and young generations are resisting that wholesale.
Now it's important as I go over these things for people to understand The real root of all of this is the generation.
It's the aging of generations and the connection that they feel with their history.
It has happened five times in a row that the generation born in the immediate aftermath of one great crisis, one force turning, one empire redefining period, has been raised indulgently as youth during the spiritual complacence and institutionally muscular high that follows those crises.
They have come of age as angry young people who have launched spiritual awakenings into the next plane and it has always happened that as elders they have pushed their society into and through the next great age in history.
This is what underlay the long war cycle of Arnold Twain.
He called it generational forgetting, where it is the generation that never knew war,
even as a child, that tends to create marginal environments when they are elders.
But there's more to it than that.
It's partly just the life cycle pattern that they feel they're leading.
And you can imagine the Hillary Clintons and the Newt Gingrichs and William Bennett
reaching old age, feeling their own mortality, and demanding that whatever the major problem is,
whether it's terrorism or global warming or social security,
or a real economic clash with Asia, or whatever it is,
that some hard sacrifices have to be accepted and some real civic risks accepted
in order to create a bright future for posterity.
That's what happens with these generations.
It happened five times in a row and boomers are following exactly that same pattern.
It was the relatively indulged children born in the aftermath of the American Revolution
who were the spiritual zealots who pushed the society into the Civil War for better
or worse.
It is the children born in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War who became what were then
called the great wise men who led America into and through World War II.
This is the way history works and it is not just boomers.
The jet actors behind them, picture them entering midlife as the ones who will take the slogans of their coming-of-age ads and applying those to the politics, or if it comes to that, the military circumstances.
Just do it.
YSY.
No excuses.
Whatever it takes.
It will be a very action-minded group who will not be tangled in legalism Who will not be so concerned about compassion fatigue.
Who will not mind having the world in which sacrifices are imposed if they really make sense.
But the most important generational dynamic is the children today.
The millennial generation.
Kids starting with the high school class of 2000 probably.
The kids of the 1980s and 1990s who are now freshmen in high school.
They are a wave of kids who have a new special aura.
They are being raised as heroes.
They are being praised where the X's were criticized.
You can see how we celebrated babies in the early 1980s.
Well, we now celebrate pre-teens.
and the last election was nothing if it wasn't about how to raise 14 year olds in a moral environment.
We want these kids to be great doers and achievers and they're starting to turn out that way.
And by the time they come of age as adults another 10 years from now the kinds of long-term harms
to the future that have been tolerated while the S's were children will not be tolerated anymore.
Such as?
Such as the collapse of social security down the road.
Such as the festering problems of nuclear proliferation.
Such as global warming.
Such as the spreading gap of rich versus poor, such as the institutional infrastructure that so favors the old and handicaps the young in so many ways in America today.
These things will not be acceptable and when you combine this can-do, special, adult-less, child generation coming of age with the very pragmatic Extra group entering mid-life with the kind of intending mortality and spiritual compulsions that the dormers are likely to feel, the values that folks are likely to feel in old age.
That is a society that is capable of taking big chances, potentially doing great things.
If there is a problem with the global environment, that's how we fix it.
You couldn't imagine ourselves fixing it today.
There is also a time for real danger.
You have to realize that every fourth turning has shown an upward ratchet in the technology of destruction, but most importantly in the willingness of society to use those technologies.
Recall that the Civil War represented that at its time.
And recall, of course, in World War II how America's got its wisest elder ethicists and smartest younger scientists at work to build the worst weapon they could think of, which the society was prepared to use within a few days after it was developed, and to use not once, but twice.
It's beyond imagining to us today how this would be a society.
Like ours, it could do that.
But it's the generational dynamics that are driving us down that same direction.
You do suggest that while the particulars of the forthcoming crisis cannot be evident in advance, we certainly can look at trends that are troubling, suggest that they may be a part of whatever the upcoming crisis will be, and prepare now.
And you have some very specific steps that you offer in the book of suggesting to all of us across generations.
Yes.
There are ways in which our society as a whole could prepare, but I frankly don't think that will happen.
It's certainly not happening under the regimes now in place, the Clinton White House, the Republicans in the Congress.
We are having very incremental actions, which from a historical perspective are likely to not have much relevance towards the crisis, other than the time is being wasted.
Bill, is this such new think that you're offering here?
You give a lot of credit to Schlesinger in the book going back into the 60s for identifying these four turnings in the cycle.
But is this such new think that public policy makers are not keenly aware of it and the opportunities it presents?
I think the people are running ahead of the of the leaders here, the people may in fact be the leaders
and I think that through the new technologies of the internet and the like there are
many more ideas being talked about than is out there on the floor of the Congress. I'd like to
encourage everybody to join our website at www.forthturning.com and that's forth turning
spelled out as one word, forth turning. There's been a lot of talk about Clinton's bridge
and about the Republicans in Congress and so on in a sense that at this time in our
history we just are not having But that's characteristic of third turning.
If you look back at the 20s and you had Harding and Coolidge.
And you look back at the 1850s and you had Pierce and Buchanan.
Well we kind of are in the Pierce, Buchanan, Harding, Coolidge era right now with Clinton.
But that is something that will change.
It will change.
People feel that in their bones that character ultimately will count.
It will count not just with leaders but also with individuals.
And one of our major suggestions to people, given the fact that
the government is not really going to break the society for whatever will happen with an entitlement collapse
and is not really working that effectively on the kind of fundamental defenses that we need to be thinking about in
terms of the fourth time.
We're far more concerned with the Veltri than we are with the actual strategic planning in the Pentagon right now.
Although I should say there's a major review going on which is getting absolutely no media attention.
This isn't really the full fault of the government.
This is the people.
What do the people want?
They want Kelly Flensburg.
They don't want to hear about how the military is trying to reconstitute itself for the year 2010.
And you look at this and then you wonder, what can you do individually?
Well, the most important thing we can do individually is what we should be doing as a society, and that is preparing children.
Because the ultimate safety net in these times are families.
And the most important way that a person can prepare for the state of history, if you accept this theory at least as a strong possibility, is make sure that the family life is in repair.
Make sure that Your reputation in the community is fairly good and that you're somebody who can be counted on in a tent and you know of other people who you can count on in a tent that if the national government is less useful in the future than now that there are ways that you can not only solve your fundamental problems but also find meaning in life.
The current serpent and cultural carnival is very enjoyable.
There are a lot of ways in which the 1990s are a wonderful time in entertainment and
travel and the prosperity and so on.
Enjoy that but don't construct your life in a way that that's the only kind of life you
can enjoy.
That's a very very important thing to realize.
One of the most interesting periods in our modern history are the years between 1929
and 1932 as the depression settled in and a lot of people understand the economic outcomes
of that but there were actually some positives.
The culture became clean again.
Sometimes you wonder, how can you possibly go from a rocky culture to a cleaner one?
History does periodically, and it does exactly in these ways.
It was also a time when people became nicer to each other.
All the talk today about aggressive driving and rudeness and lack of manners, they returned In the years between 1929 and 1932.
People re-strengthened the family life.
The styles became more classical.
People connected more with history.
There are a lot of ways in which the mood changes.
And what it does is it prepares people collectively to do great things as a civic entity together.
And here's where Neil Howe and I take real issue with the Alvin Faulkner's and John Nesbitt's and the Bill Gates' who see that the future is just this broad plane of ever more individualism, ever more splintering, ever more cultural mixing.
Afforded in part by technology.
Yes, well the technology will be important, but the mood will determine how the technology is used.
And yes, there probably will continue to be technological advances, but come the fourth
turning it will be used for civic purpose, not for the purpose of ever greater individualism.
And the same technology that Bill Gates used in his house to let a person with an ID card
walk from room to room and have music that he or she particularly likes played as she
passes from one great room to another, that same technology with a turning of a switch
to go the other way and information about that individual to be passed to whoever it
is who wants to know.
We now are more concerned about technology taking us to chaos and anarchy.
Across the cycle, we were concerned about it taking us to Big Brother, and as the move shifts back, the direction of technology is going to go back towards civic and communal purpose again.
You write in the book and on your website as well about how you arrived at this history is prophecy message to all the rest of us and you write that this is the most personal of books for you in that you believe that the import of the message here will impact not just those leaders but your own families, yourselves, your parents, your children.
Right, it's a way of thinking about your grandparents, yourselves, You have to envision your own children's lives as being part of a much longer drama of generations.
We encourage people to think about the long sweep of history this way and you have to
envision your own children's lives as being part of a much longer drama of generations.
None of us wishes to be part of the last generation and think of your own connection with history
this way.
Reflect on the oldest person you knew when you were a child.
Someone who had a real shaping role in your early life.
Probably a grandson.
Think of when that person was born.
And then think about when the youngest person you will probably have a chance to shape will die.
Assume that you'll reach your middle 80s and In my own case, my youngest daughter, I have four children, and my youngest was born when I was 37.
My personal memory span, going back to the birth of my grandmother, whom I knew well, to the death of what I expect will be my youngest grandchild, I don't know well, that reaches from 1881 into the 22nd century.
A longer period than the United States of America has been in existence.
And when you do this, all the talk of that three year budget cycle just fades into oblivion.
History is a very personal thing and we find that those who invest their time and trouble
to read what we write and to try to think about history in seasonal terms, we find that
it does connect a number of elements of recent history that somehow just seem chaotic to
them and now that we can see it fitting a pattern it broadly makes sense.
There's one wonderful comment that somebody made on our website, a fellow from California
who occasionally takes issue with it, he says, you know you can poke a lot of holes in this
theory but the darn thing still floats.
I want to ask you in a moment about, as a final question, the individual's reactions,
the individual you heard from, their reactions to your book.
But first, amplify, if you will, on how you arrived at this theory.
Neil Howell and I began collaborating nearly a dozen years ago.
I had written a couple of books about the Vietnam War from a generational perspective.
My first book was called Chance and Circumstance back in the late 70s.
It was about how boomers were affected by the war and what they did to avoid it or serve in it.
And when I was working in the Congress in the early 1980s, I was really starting to get bothered by the accumulation of debt and the entitlement collapse and the real way that we were tipping everything towards older people in our society.
of the generation gap in effect. It ended up in an unstated but very energetic settlement
in which the boomers took the culture and the GI generation, the peers of Brayton, Dole
and Reagan took the money. And how this was not sustainable at the time.
And I wanted to write a book about this.
And I met, you know, he and I together decided to write a history of America told from a generational perspective.
And we published it.
It was called Generations.
And it was published and it's still available on Copa Vaccine.
We published it in 1991.
And then we wrote a book about skin Xers.
It was called 13th Skin.
This was the first book about that group.
And that came out in 1993.
In Generations, we made predictions about what the 1990s would be like as a generational dynamic followed a historical pattern.
We suggested culture wars and a new emphasis on kids and cleaning up the world for kids and adolescents and how the elder lobby would just begin to splinter and how there would be directionlessness and a further decline in civic culture and the like.
As the 90's have progressed we think that's happened and so in the fourth turning they decided to be very explicit about these rhythms of history and where they were leading and it's led some people to be kind of startled by the book because here we are at a time when the stock markets are surging and people feel pretty good about their personal life At the same time, surveys show that Americans have never been more pessimistic about the long-term future of their country.
There's the sense that we're driving this automobile that doesn't have any oil in it, and sooner or later that engine is going to break.
And what we find in the response to this book is that the mainstream media doesn't really know what to think of it, that political figures who Found some generations interested and sort of accepted it broadly, are not so sure that they want to take it to the bottom line.
But where there's a very positive response, I would say two important things.
Boomers and especially X's do something really positive in this book.
X's have trouble making a broad connection with history. Where do they stand
on what is it that their generation will be called upon to do and I don't think there's any
other generation who flip through this book and more often will say yes yes that's
right that's it that's how it feels that's where we're going that's us that's them and we we're
very encouraged by that because that's that's an over criticized generation whose survival skills
may end up being what the nation really needs and the other thing that's very
encouraging is the response that we have on the web.
There has been a real outpouring of interest, and I think your program is one example of that, that this is a new way of spreading new ideas, and you're far more likely to see new ideas openly discussed on the web than you will be in the New York Times.
You also have another avenue to advance your ideas and that is the Capitol Steps which
is a pretty cool cabaret that was set to rock in Washington for a long time.
That's true.
Very long.
Another aspect of my life is the movement of the two very separate interests of mine,
humor and history and I want to emphasize that the fourth turning record is the history
side and not the humor side.
Well I understand.
And to that point, perhaps those people who resist, from the media to specific generations that would resist the content of this book as prophecy, perhaps see this as a very finely woven wet blanket on the headiness of entering a new millennium.
But, I would also ask, in contrast to that, picking up on the comic side of your nature, What would the capitalists best have to say to advance these ideas?
Any comedy sometimes?
Well, right now in the third turning, it's an excellent time for comedy.
It's a time when the culture feels like a parody on a parody on a parody.
And one of the interesting questions, as you referred to the fourth turning, is how does the culture replenish?
How is there ever a time for something that can feel fundamentally new again?
How do you go back to the 60s?
There are a lot of demos that say, how do you go back to the 60s?
And one of the things, of course, that we do in the Fabulous Fest is we take a lot of the demo classic songs and we give a political stand to them.
Or a social fantasy.
For example?
Well, with Bill Clinton's Secret Agent nonsense.
Or for Paula Johnston in Don't Cry For Me, Judge Scalia.
I have a brilliant colleague named Elena Newport in one of the fun aspects of my life is how When I collaborate with Neil Howe, I produce this kind of stuff, and when I collaborate with Elena Newport, I do the other kind.
And I do think that within humor and history, in both cases, you have patterns, you have irons, you have prisms to our personal and collective souls that are important.
But right now, a lot of people wonder, how could we ever How could we have another 60s?
They were so culturally exciting.
How could you have another 60s?
And the bottom line is, you can't have another 60s without having a 50s before them.
And how do you have a 50s before them?
Hello?
Mary, thank you.
Okay, sure.
It's okay.
Let me back up.
Yeah, it's fine.
Go ahead.
Now do you have?
Okay, hold on.
Let me give you another thought.
A lot of people wonder, how could you possibly Have another 1950s because it felt so culturally engaging and fun and exciting and everything felt so new.
Can we just go back to something like that?
But the bottom line is, and the real lesson of history is, no you cannot.
You have to go through a 1950s like era, a first turning, before you can have a second turning.
And how can you have a 1950s?
You can't go directly there either because that requires that the nation has passed through a great period of history or a fourth turning.
History is kind of like the water that rushes to the sea and it goes through rapids and then down waterfalls and then reaches tranquil zones.
In fact, it cannot go backwards.
You cannot take the seasons of nature and go from autumn back to summer.
You have to go through winter.
And for those people who disregard that, disregard your theory and present things like President Clinton put forward an active health care plan, harkening back to the Johnson era.
Yeah, it was wrong.
If we had tried to do that in the early part of the second term, it would have passed.
But now it's wrong because we don't trust institutional solutions and we have all these individual constituencies.
How do you ever break away from that?
How do you keep those niches from just getting stronger and more numerous and strangling with civic life?
The way you do it is suddenly the mood changes because the generational forces push us there and we enter a fourth turn in which the era now will feel as quaint to Americans from the year 2010 as A roaring 20 felt by the year 1940.
Dope.
Thank you so much for your time.
I'll look forward to continuing this conversation and there's a hotlink in place for people to jump in right over to your site to continue.
Yeah, we have a fabulous discussion over there.
Some people call it a university on the air and the talk about the future is nothing like you'll see in all this idle chatter about business in the 21st century.
I assure you that.
Pretty cool.
Thanks.
All the best.
Bye.
Now, there you have it, ladies and gentlemen, and I hope that you were listening carefully and closely, because there were a lot of things discussed in this interview that are applicable to all of us in this time.
And as you know, I've discussed many of these things for many years now, and wrote about some of them in my book.
And I have talked about a coming conflict, the likes of which the world has never seen, in this country.
And the result will either be an uplifting of all humanity, the greatest improvement in civilization that you can imagine, Or we'll sink back into the depths and depravity of enslavement that has been the lot of the human race throughout its history until the creation of this great nation.
You can go to the website, if you wish, because we're going to be talking about this for the next several broadcasts.
www.fourthturning.com Fourth as in the number.
Fourth, not F-O-R-T-H, but F-O-U-R-T-H.
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