From CGI member, oldcurmudgeon.

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A fourth turning that ended badly – could this be our future too?

In their very powerful book “The Fourth Turning” William Strauss and Neil Howe mention that there are other societies that also undergo this “cycle of the Saeculum” but don’t discuss it much. They were primarily interested in the cycle as it pertains to Anglo-American history over the last few hundred years. And it is important to note that for us – for Anglo-Americans – fourth turnings have generally speaking had “good” endings; endings that lead to powerful new and better 1st turnings. But they also make it VERY clear that this is NOT guaranteed. The very nature of a 4th turning is one of “crisis” – a time of testing, proving, and adjusting the viability of the underlying society. Things can, and sometimes do, go horribly wrong. What I want to do in this essay is give a very real world – and easily verified – example of a 4th turning that went horribly wrong – that ended “badly”.

To do this we need to go back to the last saeculum, back to the year 1936, back to the Berlin Olympics. A quick internet search will show hundreds of pictures of that quite famous event, but we are not really interested in the details of the event, the controversy over Jessie Owens, the morality of the 3rd Reich (or lack thereof), but rather we want to just look at the pictures of Berlin itself. What we see, and see very clearly, is a beautiful city, a magnificent city, well ordered, clean, and most important of all, a city that was 100 PERCENT IN THE CONTROL OF THE GERMAN PEOPLE! It was their capital, it was their pride and joy, and it was prosperous and very cosmopolitan.

Now we need to do another internet search, and this time we want to look at pictures of Berlin in the year 1945 – just 9 years after the Berlin Olympics! What do we see now? We see a city in near total destruction, rubble everywhere, bombed out and destroyed buildings, people in rags seemingly dazed and more dead than alive; and, more to the point, a city 100 PERCENT UNDER THE CONTROL OF FOREIGN OCCUPYING ARMIES. A city where no German citizen had any say at all in what was happening.

And how did this come about? We all know the “official” reasons, but what I think is missed is the most basic reason – simply put, a 4th turning ended badly.

It is interesting to observe that their “saeculum” had begun some 80 years early with the advent of Otto Von Bismarck and the reunification of Germany. That he ruled over a rather glorious 1st turning, and that WWI was a 2nd turning war for them. It was devastating, much worse than our 2nd turning war in Viet Nam, but not one which ended their social order. That came at the end of their 4th turning.

What is the lesson here? Simply that 4th turnings don’t always end in glorious new 1st turnings – sometimes they go horribly wrong, and the society pays a terrible price for bad decisions, bad choices, and foolish ideas. It is worth noting that Germany did not surrender at the end of WWII – they were, instead, TOTALLY CONQUERED.

Could something like that happen to the United States? Most people would say no way – we are the “good guys” – besides, we are powerful, rich, and have a long history of social cohesion. But I bet that if you could travel back to Berlin in 1936 and chat with the proverbial “man in the street” he would say much the same thing.

oldcurmudgeon