The Fourth Turning is Here

A Book Report

I finally made it way through “The Fourth Turning is Here”, by Neil Howe.

I skipped most of the first half of the book because it was simply catching people up on what the original book was about. To recap;

• One of the most important concepts is that mankind does not progress linearly, like we believe for the most part. It progresses in seasons just like we have with the weather.
• Each generation is about 20 years, called a “Turning”. That 20 years is the 20 years in power for a given generation as opposed to lifespan.
• Each one of these generations has its own archetype and patterns of thought and behavior.

He goes through all of these concepts, and for the most part he’s pretty accurate with each generations descriptions. He goes a little easy on the boomers for me. I think they’re far worse than he says. But he’s pegged to Gen X perfectly, and I don’t have a problem with his depiction of Millennials either. Most of them I’ve known have been very pragmatic, frugal, and community minded. The new generation he calls the “Zoomers”. That would be my grandchildren. This generation is too young to have any kind of pattern yet.

I have a problem with reverse Gell-Mann effect. To me if I read or hear something that I know to be bullshit, it’s tough to me to believe the rest of what I hear and read. And he has a lot of places in the book where he takes sort of a hard left moronic stance.

For instance:

• What happened on January 6 was not an armed insurrection, or an insurrection of any kind.
• Ruby Ridge and Waco were not insurrections of any kind. They were government caused atrocities.
• America’s red zone, like he says, is indeed more churchgoing, more neighborly, more charitable, more family oriented, more rooted, but it sure as hell is not more violent, as he says. Nearly all the the worst violence can be found in the Blue zone.
• As far as conditions for his Civil War goes, he says we have a heavily armed population that’s polarized into two evenly divided partisan factions. I was unaware that people on the left were heavily armed, unless they were government employees.

There are a lot of observations like this, which made it hard to bulldoze past a lot of the text.

I did notice that quite a bit of content was from various articles that he is written in the past almost word for word. Which is fine, other than that I’ve already read the concept and got it.

Interestingly he did note that the silent generation was still quite in power, which kind of breaks his model. He doesn’t really go into why they would still be around, which we all know is unbelievable avarice and spite. None of these corrupt codgers should be anywhere near the levers of power right now.

You know, I read a Bible study about why the Israelites spent 40 years in the desert. It was so that there were none around, stiffnecked and proud as it were, that questioned God, bitched, grumbled, and doubted. So the new generation was the one that made it to the promised land. It took took two turnings to bleed that out of the system. Same thing is happening here. Nothing’s going to get done until these corrupt codgers die off one way or the other.

Although he says the trigger for the crisis in the fourth turning would be between 2025 and 2030, no mention of the likely trigger, which is clear as the nose on your face. We’re heading into an absolutely implausible election season with a brain addled geriatric at the helm. If he runs absolutely nobody is going to be happy with the outcome either way. I think it’s going to be 2020 on steroids.

Yet he had a lot of rosy visions about how things could work themselves out, as they have in past fourth turnings. In that may be true, but we have never run into a crisis phase like this, like we did with the depression, so deep in debt and with the rest of the world getting pretty damn tired of us bullying them with our dollars. Dollars that are becoming less and less valuable by the day.

The cover the book says how the crisis will end and he really didn’t do that. I found it to be one big hedge. He does give a number of different scenarios just like before.

Some give hope, some are deeply disturbing. I’m betting on more towards the disturbing side. Right now the best of the disturbing is that the country splits. The nightmare one for me is we get our own little Hugo Chavez or Fidel Castro.

I can see that happening actually.

All in all it’s a good book, and it saves you the pain of reading the first one if you haven’t already. The concepts make sense and it’s interesting to look and see how all the different turnings progressed throughout history.

Hopefully we’ll be as lucky.