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Unnerving sitrep

The real. The bad. The scary.

What were once dark conjectures about the future are now facts about the present.

Where American society once had pride in being part of the Western Enlightenment, its younger members have been taught to seek “emancipation” from its influence.

Where truth was once immutable it is now ephemeral.

Where privacy was once sacred, it is now nearly extinct.

Where the Deep State used to lurk in the shadows, it now brazenly justifies its repression in congressional hearings.

Where the two-party system once debated how government should be run, the Uni-party government now agrees on the necessity of making itself ever more powerful.

Where academia once taught, it now indoctrinates; where it once sought to educate the mind it now seeks to radicalize the soul.

Where Big Tech promised to liberate information, it now censors, controls, and manipulates it.

At the center of the Crisis stands a Transnational Progressive elite that denies the will of the majority of the American people and foments racial division and social discord. It has created a systemic economic crisis that threatens to destroy the Middle and Working Classes and pursues a “globalist” foreign policy that has pushed the country into endless, no-win wars where no American interest is at stake.

It is the failure of the elites in all their manifestations in government, big corporations, Big Tech, and Big Media that has brought us to the precipice of an economic and social disaster… and worse, they seek to exploit the crisis they created in order to expand their already fearsome levels of repressive control over society.

The former institutions that we have depended on for years to hold back the tides of oppressive Big Government are reeling under attack from a Transnational Progressive movement that openly admits it desires to fundamentally transform not only our Constitutional Republic but also our culture, our economic system, our national sovereignty, our history, our religious values, our families and our national heritage based on civil rights and liberties.

Lots more to set your timbers a-shiver here, which you should nonetheless should read. The authors imbibe heavily from Strauss & Howe’s “Fourth Turning” flagon—a real high-octane snootful of an idea fully embraced by some highly esteemed blogosphere heavyweights as well, Bill Quick and the Burning Platform krewe among ’em. I haven’t paid much more than cursory attention to it myself for whatever reason, which should by no means be construed as my having rejected it, mind. It’s an intriguing concept, certainly, if not tremendously helpful as a guide to what might be done about the shit sandwich with which we’ve been presented. But what with the mad rush of one damned thing after another that seems to constitute life in Totleigh Towers Amerika v2.0 (ahem), the CF plate has had more on it than I can get around to chewing lately.

24 thoughts on “Unnerving sitrep

  1. Strauss & Howe breaks down where it continues to rely on 20 year genealogical generations while ignoring the fact that socio-political generations are (and have been for some time) 10-12 years. It breaks down further by ignoring the memory holed generations in favor of jumping straight from the Boomers to X while mislabeling Millenials as “Gen Y”, ignoring Gen Jones/Baby Busters – a generation that Strauss himself documented the existence of and memory holing of – to make the archetypes line up.

    Lost Generations

    The Broken Generational Cycle

    I personally maintain that it further breaks down by assigning the “Hero Generation” archetype to the Millennials. Any theory that depends on the Millennials to fill the Hero Generation role formerly filled by the Greatest Generation is doomed to inaccuracy* to begin with.

    * I’ll grant that Millennials might fill the Hero Gen role if you accept the caveat that, as the Millennials have been shown to be the most socialistic and Leftist generation to date, they’re the Hero Generation for the other side.

    *shrug* Leaving that as may be, I agree with Niemeier’s assessment of “the X-ers as the Hero generation whose collective vocation was ruined” and the Generational Cycle being shattered – and Strauss and Howe no longer being accurate.

    I haven’t paid much more than cursory attention to it myself for whatever reason, which should by no means be construed as my having rejected it, mind.

    Your mileage may vary.

    I have rejected it. But, then again, I’m not a blogosphere heavyweight.

    Don’t expect a Hero Generation to pull us through the shit sandwich cycle, and don’t expect the Millennials to be it. We’re on our own. Ain’t no heroes coming in to save us.

    1. Remarkably similar to my own delineations I’ve been pondering since The Fourth Turning first started getting ink on various blogs.
      I think what we will see is the Gen Z is going to be the Hero Generation although I can see it being Gen Y. Gen Y have the unusual experience of being born during an ascendance, having Reagan propaganda and BJ Clinton hero worship shoved into them, only to have much of that promising start stolen by the very people who they were told to LOVE, BJ The Rapist and Her Herness the National Security Risk Grifter.

      I based the following generational categories and timetables on likely formative experience, common cultural touchstones, likely parentage, and the general state of the culture when each cohort came of age.
      The Greatest Generation: 1914-1934
      The Silent Generation: 1935-1945
      The Baby Boomers: 1946-1956
      Generation Jones: 1957-1967
      Generation X: 1968-1978
      Generation Y: 1979-1989
      The Millennials: 1990-2000
      Generation Z: 2001-2011
      By this reckoning, the Boomers are the children of the Greats. The Jonesers are, by and large, the Silents’ offspring, Xers are the children of the Boomers, Generation Jones begat Gen-Y, Gen-X spawned the Millennials, and Gen-Y birthed Gen-Z.

          1. I’m a Baby Buster myself, born right in the middle of that cohort. I grew up thinking that my slightly older cousins from Generation Woodstock were insane.

            The Gen Jones motto: Born in the Sixties, raised in the 70s – and fucked in the Eighties. 🙂

      1. Even with Niemeier, you have to look at the year/dates bracketing the Generations as a generalization more than a hard/fast stop and start. I’d put the Boom at 44 to 56, for example, and Jones/Busters at 1954 to 1966 etc etc.

        There’s some overlap at the year borders. It’s not a hard and fast division, one year you’re a Boomer, next year you’re a Buster type of thing.

        Also never ever forget that post the Greatest Gen the generational labels are primarily a Madison Avenue creation, as is the memory holing of the Joners and Gen-Y once they didn’t have a use for them or noticed that they didn’t fit the attitudinal brackets.

        Because above all, the socio-political breakdown is an attitudinal and cultural one: Gen Jones are the younger brothers, sisters, and cousins of Gen Boomer just as Gen-Y are the older brothers, sisters, and cousins of the Millennials. We have just about as little in common with the cultural attitudes of our older brothers and sisters of the Woodstock Generation as Gen-Y does with the only slightly later Millennials of Generation Snowflake.

        Might be better to consider them Cultural generation cohorts. More descriptive, and more accurate, IMO.

        I think what we will see is the Gen Z is going to be the Hero Generation although I can see it being Gen Y.

        Won’t be Gen-Y for the reasons that Niemeier identified. Their slot was stolen from them.

        It’ll probably fall on Gen-Z simply by virtue of the fact that the crash is most likely going to fall upon them, and they’ll be stuck with living or dying with the fallout. Rise to the occasion or be run over by it.

        But it might be their kids/grandkids… the crash is a given, but they timeframe of it isn’t.

        Either way, have to let go of Strauss & Howe entirely: a a theory based on a model that is in error on one of its basic premises is useless as either model or theory, and of only minor utility as a descriptive device.

        Strauss & Howe is one of those intellectual concepts that I mentioned quite a while back that captures people because people have a thing for elegant concepts and theories, and then are unable or unwilling to let go of them once their real world utility breaks down.

        An analogy would be the way that Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel captured and captivated the Right blogosphere in the early 2000s… and then suddenly vanished once it started hitting the reality of Human Biodiversity. An elegant theoretical model, but that’s all that it was.

        1. Yes I think the Boomers started perhaps as early as 1940 and most of the Beatles would have been Boomers. They grew up in a largely drug free society and only had good experiences with drugs for the first 5 years. Widespread and destructive use plagued the 70’s, arguably starting with the Boomers like Hendrix, Joplin and Morrison and later with people like Keith Moon and John Bonham (supposedly acute alcohol poisoning, but don’t tell me Bonham wasn’t doing some kinds of drugs for years by then).

          So we can parse dates and frankly the borders have fence crossers in all generations but the basic idea is inline with what I was thinking about.

          1. Yeah. An attitudinal and cultural divide.

            “Tune in, turn on, drop out,” might as well be the generational model there along with “If it feels good, do it,” and “Make love, not war.”

            Jonesers can very nearly be neatly summed up with “Rebel without a cause.”

            But what the hell are you rebelling against? “I dunno. Whattya got?”

            See, we wanted the America our parents and grandparents grew up in, and the American Dream – grow up, go to college, get a degree, get a good job, get married and have a house with 3.2 kids and a dog – but by the time we started to hit seventeen or so, we could all see that that just was never gonna fucking happen. Hence the “fucked in the Eighties” bit: in large part, that pie was out of reach by the time we were able to reach for it.

            And it sucked, because we did our damnedest, most of us, to do all of the things that the formula said we should to get the brass ring.

            Our older siblings and cousins got handed life on Easy Mode, and responded by deciding to rebel against and burn civilization down just because, like, injustice, man.

            We decided that “burn it the fuck down” was the only rational response, because we could see that it was all just a hollow shell by the time we got to it.

            Two cultural generations, separated by a common outlook: burn it down because of a sense of self-righteous outrage vs burn it down because nihilism was the only thing that made sense.

            The Ramones vs the Byrds. 🙂

  2. Interesting stuff, as I first read Generations shortly after it came out and have found it useful. Not for details, but more as a broad brush strokes kind of thing.

    Shorter generations is one possible issue with the cycle concept. I have also been wondering for some years if longer generations are also playing a role in altering events from the cycle S&H described. My understanding of their cycle idea is that the archetypes repeat as a result of each generation responding to the conditions of their childhood/young adult years. The previous generation that represented a given archetype has aged out of societal influence, so the rising generation does not get enough of that influence (idealism and personal liberty, protection, unity of purpose and conformity, pragmatic realism, whatever). The new generation ends up pushing to rectify that lack, and thus becomes the new version of the missing/aged out archetype.

    As more people live longer and retain influence in society for longer (see pretty much all of the USA’s current national leadership in their late 70s or even 80s), the previous cyclic pattern is thrown out of alignment. Whether this just changes the length of the cycle phases or breaks the pattern entirely is not yet clear.

    Massive immigration, both legal and illegal, also changes things. Tens of millions of people in the US did not grow up here and thus did not experience the events and influences that would have formed a native generation into the next archetype of the cycle.

    Put it all together and it is really not surprising that the post Boomer generations do not really fit into the archetypes predicted by S&H.

    1. I’m not really into the S&H generations theory but what you say regarding cyclic patter breaking has lots of merit.

      1. Everyone on Wall Street understands the Credit Cycle, and the shifting from Greed and Fear. The idea of feed them when they’re hungry (sell into greed) and clean up when they barf (buy when everyone is selling) is understood as a very good strategy.

        That being said, everyone also understands that being greedy when everyone is fearful and being fearful when everyone is greedy is very difficult to do. It goes against Human Nature.

        As I see Generations Theory, people follow the herd until Reality smacks them in the face or a Hero comes along and leads them in another direction. Good times beget softness and reality smacks into the dreamworld. When everyone is down and out an optimist like Reagan or Trump can lead by example to a New Morning outlook.

        The Dems knew another 4 years of Trump would set them back a generation. They could not let Trump be another Reagan. What if he sunk their Precious ChiComs?

        The problem there is that they just smacked a generation who had become hopeful, Gen Z, back into doom and gloom. Will it be enough or is it too late now?

        1. *grin* It [the flaw] could really be boiled down to “shit accelerates”.

          1. It also comes down to “once a pattern is discovered” the response alters the pattern.

            So when SHTF it accelerates but then someone might raise or lower the fan speed.

    2. Massive immigration, both legal and illegal, also changes things. Tens of millions of people in the US did not grow up here and thus did not experience the events and influences that would have formed a native generation into the next archetype of the cycle.

      Yeah. The political media driven motto for the ’90s was the now infamous, “It’s the economy, stupid.”

      If our media and politicians were more honest and more reality based, the political motto for the 2020s would be, “It’s the demographics, stupid.”

  3. Generations Theory is laid as a template over past events and is used to pull the events and groundswells into focus, the focus of the framework. “And you see here this event, which was more significant than appreciated at the time…”

    I’m not convinced that it has any predictive value.

    1. Its “predictive value” is comfort – comforting to people who like to believe that there’s overarching patterns to the insanity. Plus, human beings are geared toward pattern recognition, and find it comforting to see/impose patterns even where there really are none, or where the patterns are only circumstantial at best.

        1. Hey, that’s the reason that people get wedded to what they see as an elegant theory/concept that “explains everything”: it’s comforting to them.

          Few people are really comfortable with recognizing the fact that, at certain points, things are out of control and accelerating, and they’re just not coming back into control until the process or cycle runs itself out.*

          * That’s a large part of why I said, “Johnny-come-lately” about S&H: it didn’t take Strauss & Howe to see that we’re headed toward a period of historical crisis and collapse. Others have been seeing and saying just that since the very early 90s and before. S&H just codified it, and wrapped a nifty theory around the why of it, along with a comforting, “But then a Hero [generation] arose.”

          When The Royal Guardsmen did it, the Hero was “a funny looking dog with a big black nose”. 🙂

          1. it didn’t take Strauss & Howe to see that we’re headed toward a period of historical crisis and collapse. Others have been seeing and saying just that since the very early 90s

            OK I see where you’re going with this. Toots true.

            1. We’re not gonna vote our way out of this. There’s no hero – or hero generation – coming in to save us. All politics in this country are now but dress rehearsal for an all out civil war.

              Any of that sound familiar? It should.

              Historically, to the very best of my knowledge*, no civilization in history has ever gone in to the degenerate portion of its declining phase and ever managed to reverse the degeneracy and then the decline and come back to a thriving and vital civilization. None of them.

              * By all means, any of us who are better versed in world history than I am who has examples that disprove me – please do so.

              We’re on our own.

              All of these theories and scenarios are just ways to try to sidestep the understanding that if it’s gonna be done, we’re gonna have to roll up our sleeves, get our hands dirty, and do it ourselves.

              And no one wants to take the responsibility for doing it. No individual can do it.

              So we’re now in the position of a citizen in the late decades or centuries of the Western Roman empire, watching our civilization fade away, and knowing it ain’t coming back.

              It ain’t gonna get done.

              The only thing to be done is prepare as best as possible to ride it out and make sure that you and yours survive the slow but inexorable crash as best as possible.

              Because I don’t think it’s fixable.

              A thriving and vital civilization will come out the other end, sure, just as it did out of the Middle Ages. But we probably won’t be around to see it.

              Civilizational collapses don’t happen overnight. Nor do civilizational rennaissances.

    2. To me, there’s almost certainly little or no value in predictions, however accurate they might be. I consider things like Generations Theory to be interesting enough as far as that goes, but I don’t expect a damned thing to be changed because of them. People gonna do what people gonna do; if the old saw about those who refuse to learn from history being doomed to repeat it has any truth in it, then we’re all gonna be stuck with watching nothing but reruns forever.

      1. And those of us who do learn from history are doomed to watch the other people repeating it. 🙂

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