[trespam]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('sampo', 'W')e will see that in the saeculum, very few things rhyme with strife and war. None of them make the rhyme and more pleasant.

[tmazanec1]

trespam, the word is explained in detail in their book The Fourth Turning.

[Ayoob]

I think I'm a nomad. I read the descriptions of the generations and I feel like a nomad. I don't feel neglected at all, though. It's funny. Of all my friends, I only know two that have really strong families. Make that three. The rest kind of fall into situations like mine. Nice people who love each other, but don't get really really involved in each others' lives. They're all pretty independent.

[trespam]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('tmazanec1', 't')respam, the word is explained in detail in their book The Fourth Turning.

[Whitecrab]

***BUMP***

I've just read the Fourth Turning, and I had a rather disturbing thought...oh, but first, I don't believe it was mentioned yet in this thread: read The Fourth Turning Webpage if you want more info on this book.



In any case, here's how the forum as a collective group has been reading the book so far. Many of us have assumed Peak Oil has all the makings of a fourth turning, a "Crisis" era that "will challenge community, bring people together, society's on the edge, leaders will lead and people will follow" - that sort of a thing. There is no guarantee we'll make it, but it's nice to think that people will band together to deal with the problem collectively. If you agree with the proposal in the fourth turning, that would mean we would have archetypal generations favouring a strong, collective, decisive social response right when peak oil hits.

I had these thoughts in mind as I read the book, since I'd read our threads on Peakoil.com before the book. But then I noticed something: after the crisis is a High. A time of continued rebuilding and social togetherness when people continue to build useful institutions (think a post-war boom). However, during the high, social issues that are later regarded as repellant are swep under the rug. One such example was segregation being ignored during a high. That got me thinking.

These problems are only rectified in the Awakening. An awakening is a time of inner conflict and societal change, when the young attack the structures of the old, changing society and creating individualism. Right? The most recent example was the Baby Boomer's college rebellion kind of childhood.


...so, even if you believe the Fourth Turning, maybe we are reading this wrong. Maybe in the crisis, people will band together to scapegoat. To go fight energy wars. Send our children to die in Iraq, crushing other countries, stealing food and resources so we in the West "can survive." We band through the Fourth Turning and get by via war. People then continue to turn a blind eye to our living off the suffering of others during the high, because in a high everyone's comformist and people don't want to rock the boat. (Hell, we do that now). It would then only be in the awakening, about 40-50 years from now, that the children of today's children would finally attack the social structure of totalitarianism and selfishness that we would create to deal with crisis.


It's just an alternate interpretation, and one that would be far worse. Rather than seeing humanity finally "deal with it," we would all be hearded in the wrong direction. During a crisis and a high, social conformity is largely required and people protesting an immoral or ecological response to PO could be shunned/punished far worse than what goes on today. We would end up having to wait two more generations for things to finally come to a head, in the meantime presumably denying oil and food for large swaths of the planet. Meaning some societies would be crushed in oil wars, and the survivors would spend another 40 years immorally living a dwlinding shadow of unsustainability.

Fun.

[Whitecrab]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('trespam', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('sampo', 'W')e will see that in the saeculum, very few things rhyme with strife and war. None of them make the rhyme and more pleasant.

[johnmarkos]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Whitecrab', 'O')ne such example was segregation being ignored during a high. That got me thinking.

[johnmarkos]

I think PO is a civic, as opposed to a spiritual crisis. As such, it is in line with the Fourth Turning as posited by Strauss and Howe. Also, the next awakening is too late (the 2040s-50s) to deal with PO and depletion. The next 4T is right on time.

[johnmarkos]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Ayoob', 'I') think I'm a nomad. I read the descriptions of the generations and I feel like a nomad.

[Whitecrab]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('johnmarkos', 'I') think PO is a civic, as opposed to a spiritual crisis. As such, it is in line with the Fourth Turning as posited by Strauss and Howe. Also, the next awakening is too late (the 2040s-50s) to deal with PO and depletion. The next 4T is right on time.

[TrueKaiser]

so this basicly boils down to the old saying

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'T')hose who forget history are doomed to repeat it

[tmazanec1]

Whitecrab:
The authors realize this...if you can get their book (from the library if necessary) read pages 330-331. They admit this Crisis could result in anything from human extinction (which they doubt) to a New Dark Age (this and the following they find quite credible) to a Dystopia to a reduced America to a Utopia. An ending to the Crisis is guaranteed...but there is no guarantee we will LIKE the ending!

[Guest]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Whitecrab', '[')size=21]

It's just an alternate interpretation, and one that would be far worse. Rather than seeing humanity finally "deal with it," we would all be hearded in the wrong direction. During a crisis and a high, social conformity is largely required and people protesting an immoral or ecological response to PO could be shunned/punished far worse than what goes on today. We would end up having to wait two more generations for things to finally come to a head, in the meantime presumably denying oil and food for large swaths of the planet. Meaning some societies would be crushed in oil wars, and the survivors would spend another 40 years immorally living a dwlinding shadow of unsustainability.

Fun.

[TrueKaiser]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('kochevnik', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('TrueKaiser', 's')o this basicly boils down to the old saying

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'T')hose who forget history are doomed to repeat it

[Whitecrab]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('tmazanec1', 'W')hitecrab:
The authors realize this...if you can get their book (from the library if necessary) read pages 330-331. They admit this Crisis could result in anything from human extinction (which they doubt) to a New Dark Age (this and the following they find quite credible) to a Dystopia to a reduced America to a Utopia. An ending to the Crisis is guaranteed...but there is no guarantee we will LIKE the ending!

[TrueKaiser]

so basicly what this book claims is the same old saying i post earlyer. those who forget history are doomed to repeat it in a long winded way useing a ton of cultureal buzz words?

[gg3]

TrueKaiser: And those who discredit nuance as nonsense are doomed to be re-elected on a platform of platitudes?

Back a ways to "scapegoats."

Definition of scapegoat is, roughly, someone who is used as a symbolic target for undeserved blame, and is then punished or killed. Deeper structure: scapegoating allows societies to ritually cleanse themselves of unpleasant feelings arising from their own internal contradictions.

Scapegoating combines denial (of the real societal problem) with projection (blaming it on a symbolic target). In the end it provides a feeling of relief that is wholly un-earned, as the original contradiction remains unsolved and continues to have detrimental effects. By analogy, think of someone who burns incense in their house to cover up a nasty smell that is really due to lack of proper house cleaning. Burning the incense makes them feel better, but the accumulating dirt continues to grow over time until it becomes an overt health hazard.

There are two very obvious scapegoats afoot right now.

The foreign one is Saddam Hussein and the Insurgents (remnants of his regime; not the same as terrorists per-se). While he was a brutal despot in his own right, the accusations re. WMDs were (as far as anyone can determine) baseless: undeserved blame. The killing presently continues. The internal societal contradictions being projected onto Saddam et. al. are the obvious ones we've been discussing, related to oil and empire.

The domestic scapegoat is The Homosexual. The undeserved blame is for "destroying The Family," and the punishment is a host of segregationist marriage laws to deny gay people legal recognition of their own monogamy. The internal societal contradictions being projected onto gay folks are those arising from the tidal wave of adultery and divorce among the Boomer generation, i.e. the failure of their own monogamous heterosexual relationships due to their own personal flaws.


Re. Nomads:

I'm an early GenXer but I don't like the term "nomad." Strictly speaking a nomad is such by choice or by being raised in a nomadic culture. What happened to GenX is that we were born into a culture that valued stability (home, family, career), but we were DENIED ACCESS because there were so damn many Boomers that it was impossible for us to find room in the system. So rather than Nomads, I would call us the Displaced. We were denied the sense of place, not only in the geographic sense, but in the sense of home, family, and career.

Here's a typical example. When I got out of college (1983), all of the "interesting" jobs were occupied by Boomers who refused to budge. Virtually all of the job listings we could find went something like this:

"Entry-level gruntwork job available. Mind-numbing, detail-oriented tasks that the Boomers-in-charge won't do; 48 hours per week. Does not lead to anything that involves the use of creativity or initiative. To arrange an interview, call or write..."

The key phrase in that listing was DOES NOT LEAD TO. I saw that phrase hundreds of times; so often that it became a cliche; and it didn't take long to figure out that the only way to have a tolerable chance of using my smarts was to get into business with a bunch of friends. Something that the liberal wing of the Boomers also discouraged, by way of the remnants of the 1960s-era mentality that held that anything involving business and profits was somehow evil.

What happened to a lot of GenX (I would say probably a majority) is that they eventually burned out on that feeling of pounding on the door but not being let in. And so you see the pragmatic attitude, the tendency for everything to be tentative or indeterminate. It is not the nomadicism of the hippies with their colorful buses and endless low-budget adventure travel. It is the nomadicism of people who are told, day after day, year after relentless year, that there is no room at the inn, no room for them anywhere. (I guess to that extent we could identify with Jesus!)

But if you scratch the surface, what you find is that GenXers have a fanatical nest-building streak in them, the burning desire for stable relationships, stable homes, stable careers. Most won't admit it readily because it brings up serious feelings of personal vulnerability, along with the usual hindsight-regrets of "if I had known then what I know now," along with a fairly serious amount of anger. Better, we figure, to look forward and build whatever we can with whatever we have.

Both the anger and the idealism, and the burning desire for love and community, were expressed most vividly in the punk rock movement of the 80s and early 90s. And one thing you can say about that is, unlike the music of the 1960s, you will not find punk rock being turned into elevator-music or advertising soundtracks for banal consumer goods.

[Madpaddy]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'R')evolutionary War 1780
Civil War 1860
WWII 1940
next Crisis - should be around 2020.

[tmazanec1]

Basically, the authors argue that those wars were not FOUGHT as TOTAL wars. They have written a sizeable book (The Fourth Turning) as well as a preceeding huge tome (Generations) laying out the basis of their theories. They also wrote a couple books focusing on Generations X and Y (which they call 13ers and Millenials...the Forum calls Generation Z "Homelanders" but the authors have not "anointed" this term yet). I cannot summarize an excess of 1000 pages of work on this board. If you are interested, please borrow the books from your library.

[TrueKaiser]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('tmazanec1', 'B')asically, the authors argue that those wars were not FOUGHT as TOTAL wars. They have written a sizeable book (The Fourth Turning) as well as a preceeding huge tome (Generations) laying out the basis of their theories. They also wrote a couple books focusing on Generations X and Y (which they call 13ers and Millenials...the Forum calls Generation Z "Homelanders" but the authors have not "anointed" this term yet). I cannot summarize an excess of 1000 pages of work on this board. If you are interested, please borrow the books from your library.