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Guest Post: The 40-Year Cycle of Cultural Change
Submitted by Charles Hugh Smith from Of Two Minds
The 40-Year Cycle of Cultural Change
The U.S. is due for another cultural revolution, led by the younger generations, perhaps including a fifth Great Awakening.
There seems to be a 40-year cycle of cultural change in American society. The classic exploration of generational types and cycles, The Fourth Turning, identified a four-generational, 80-year cycle of profound crisis and transformation:
1781 - end of the Revolution and establishment of the nation
1861 - Civil War
1941 - Global war and end of the Depression
2021 - end of the Savior State and debt-based "prosperity," Peak Everything and geopolitical conflict over resources
In terms of cultural revolutions, these seem to sweep through every 40 years or so, a two-generational cycle within the longer cycle. It's not an exact cycle, but consider these dates and eras:
1740: The First Great Awakening: The Protestant evangelical movement of the 1740s played a key role in the development of democratic concepts in the period of the American Revolution and helped foster a demand for the separation of church and state.
1776-1781: Revolutionary War, cultural shift away from the British Empire and toward an American identity.
1820: Second Great Awakening: sparks the rise of the Abolitionist movement which sets the cultural, social and spiritual stage for the Civil War.
1860: the Civil War
1890s: The Gay 90s, a period of American expansion and new freedoms of expression, clouded by the Panic of 1893 which sent the economy into a 6-year depression.
This era was the culmination of the Gilded Age, the industrialization of the U.S. economy between 1865 and 1900. By the beginning of the 20th century, per capita income and industrial production in the United States led the world, with per capita incomes double that of Germany or France, and 50% higher than Britain. Not coincidentally, the birth of the modern industrial labor union occurred around 1890.
1925-30: The Roaring Twenties, an era "marked by a general feeling of discontinuity associated with modernity and a break with traditions. Everything seemed to be feasible through modern technology. Formal decorative frills were shed in favor of practicality in both daily life and architecture. At the same time, jazz and dancing rose in popularity, and as such the period is also known as the Jazz Age."
1967-1970: The Counterculture, which included the culmination of the Civil Rights Movement and the birth/expansion of the feminist movement, Eastern spirituality in the U.S., back-to-the-land self-sufficiency, rock music as a cultural force, the nonviolent anti-war movement, the anti-nuclear movement, experimentation with communal living and drugs, Futurist concepts, and a widespread expansion of freedom of self-expression and experimentation. Many observers believe this ear also launched a Fourth Awakening as evangelical denominations expanded and "Jesus freaks" found religious inspiration outside mainline churches.
The book What the Dormouse Said: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer makes a strong case that this era set the stage for the ultimate technological medium of experimentation and self-expression, the personal computer, which then led irresistably to the World Wide Web (all the foundational technologies of the Internet were in place by 1969-- The first permanent ARPANET link was established on November 21, 1969, between UCLA and Stanford Research Institute.)
Which changed the world, of course. Those darn hippies!
1970 + 40 = 2010: That takes us to the present. Right now the nation is wallowing self-piteously in a fetid trough of denial and adolescent rage/magical thinking that the nation's bogus, debt-based "prosperity" has crashed and cannot be restored, though Ben Bernanke and the clueless "leaders" the citizenry has fecklessly elected keep trying to glue Humpty Dumpty back back together again.
Unfortunately, all they've accomplished is to glue their own fingers together.
The "too big to fail" banks and Corporate Cartels effectively own the Federal machinery of governance, the Savior State's fiefdoms are expanding their reach and power like uncontrollable cancers, and the "leadership"--mostly self-glorifying. grossly incompetent, self-absorbed, greedy Baby Boomers, but with a few equally clueless 40-somethings present just to prove that age is no protection against self-delusion and supreme greed-- has resolved to surrender to the Financial Power Elites and State fiefdoms, and fiddle around with "extend and pretend" strategies until they can exit the stage with bulging bags of swag.
Their only goal is to not be the one blamed when the whole corrupt contraption finally collapses under its own weight. If there was ever a more pathetic, corrupt, cowardly and incompetent set of "leaders" in the nation's history, they must have done their skimming during periods of relative prosperity. Now we need real leaders, not TV-ready simulacra spouting bloated slogans that contain the magic word "change."
Gen X and Gen Y, this is your "lights, camera, action!" call, if not for political power, then for a cultural revolution. I for one am ready for a Fifth Awakening, a Cultural Revolution, and a restoration of self-rule and the real, non-financialized economy.
Happy Bastille Day. It's time we tore down the Bank Bastille that's imprisoning us all.
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Bu 2021 these Malthusian eugenicists would have killed 95% of us.
I'm so sick of worthless drivel like this. There are no common attributes that can be attached to any generation. Take the "Greatest Generation" that fought in WWII. Most came back and got factory work in companies like Firestone. Others with opened eyes, saw the hypocracy and boredom of the system, bought motorcycles, and started the first motorcycle gangs. Every generation is the same. I'd reckon a full 85-90% are nothing more than the self induced peasent class and will never get the full affect of life. 10-15% get something out of the life experience. Hell, I have vastly more respect for the people destroying this system, and raping the people, than Joe 6-pack, fretting and fuming over being laid off. I see no respectability in the "lukewarm". Either be hot or cold. Be a builder or a destroyer, but never the mindless drone who dumps 30 yrs. of his life into a mortage, works at the same place forever, pays his taxes, etc.. This guy is emasculated, and turned into a lap dog who will never get shit out of life.
I don't respect the guys who went to Nam and killed for the Rand Corp., but I sure as shit have less than no respect for the fucking hippies, who are really just a bunch of scared, backbiting, little passive-agressive bitches.
Gens X an Y are mostly a buncha passive-agressive bitches too. Fuck all generations!
I sympathize with your cynicism...but you're being myopic. You're conflating the behavior of the proletariat under abundance and privation; they are anything but similar.
No society is any more than six meals from revolution.
Hunger has a way of opening the eyes.
Suburbs have a way of making any food shortage many orders of magnitude worse.
When people in desperate times need common ground, they will manufacture it where appropriate.
You underestimate the ferocious will...many are making the same mistake -- it is a grave one.
Perhaps, but its awfully difficult imagining homo penguinicus, reaching a point of hysterical anger, peeling his fat ass out of his lazyboy, putting down his fritos and mtn. dew, and going out onto the street to demand anything. It would be funny as hell, and would make amazing pay per view, to see a flock of penguinicus'... say 10,000, get gunnned down by national guardsmen and law enforcement. Bet that would clip their flippers.
do you really believe that guardsmen and law enforcement will shoot down, in cold-blood, their native kin? i don't know where you live, but they'd certainly never be able to come home again.
no matter how sorry they are, people (all of them, even the elite who must die) believe their actions beyond reproach (mental disorder notwithstanding)...all men are good in their own eyes. and i cannot see salt-o-the-earth cops slaughtering the flesh of flesh/bone of bone folks from which they were bred. and when these people finally decide that they've had enough (and I believe they are close to it), i feel it will be the easiest of all persuasions to curry the cops to our favor...they are our people; and if they are fed, housed, protected and most of all encouraged, i reckon it'll be easy as pie convincing them who needs to be at the other side of that barrel.
It has nothing to do with generations. We don't know why and how to bring our sworn leaders to Law.
We as a species are ignorant of what 'objective' measure of morality to apply to them and how. Go to
http://www.no1stcostlist.com/index.php to find out how.
Bringing our leaders to heel is an immediate necessity. We have a bigger problem than defaulting.
fuck our 'leaders' and their oaths.
I have no interest in bringing them anywhere but Hell; shortly after they are barricaded in their homes and burnt to death.
I read a web page made 4 years ago or so predicting this would be the war of the people vs. the corporations in the US this time around, and I latched heavily onto that theory at first. It is definitely a part of this, and the banks are technically corporations, so it would still fit. However I think there is also a difference because of the internet. Because of the internet, more truths escape to the people and the corruption becomes obvious. Additionally, the internet has helped the people in all the countries with protests to get together for their revolutions. It is making the people see that they can act in leaderless groups together, and get things done. I still believe it is the people vs. the corporations, but I now believe it is also when representative republics will be replaced with a new form of government that is part representative republic/ part pure democracy. The representative republic form of government will be no match for the corporations. When the few rule the many, the few can too easily be corrupted. It will require some pure democracy to win this war. Additionally, it is ending up being a worldwide movement this time.
Charles:
Is it really going to be necessary to "find someone to blame?" When you ride the demographic bubble like the boomers, can't you simply impose your wishes on the lower distributions?
You attack the leading right side of the curve through health care and 0 interest rates, the left side through curbing entitlements and the future destruction of the currency (i.e. the reset switch). How convenient.
Dave Harrison
www.tradewithdave.com
the medicated and infirmed can impose nothing.
they beg mercy and receive it, or take their insolence to the grave.