The Theory of Everything
Since the birth of science, people have been trying to understand where all of the natural world and its interactions stem from. Separate fields of science - biology, physics, chemistry, etc. - all must have their roots in some common natural order. This unknown kernel is commonly referred to as “The Theory of Everything,” or TOE. All corners of science are still searching for their TOE.
Margins authors Ranjan and Can argued that finance’s TOE (or at least the single idea that explains everything in recent financial history) is the Zero Interest Rate Policy supported by the world’s policymakers. It has driven all of the “distortions” we have seen across time in the financial world. From the housing crisis to endless scooter companies and everything in between, ZIRP has explained it all:
While science continues searching for its theory of everything, finance and economics seem to have a pretty good candidate in ZIRP. But, I believe we have found a theory of everything for society. That is the topic of this Opus Letter.
For a few months, there has been an Amazon link saved in my bookmarks for William Strauss’s The Fourth Turning. I do not remember where or why I stumbled across the book, nor do I remember why I even bookmarked it. But, I am glad I began reading it. The book is a fascinating tour of our world.
It not only accurately predicts much of today 25 years before it happened but also diagnoses where we go from here. In short, Strauss argues that all cycles throughout history have been primarily driven by human generational cycles:
At the core of modern history lies this remarkable pattern: Over the past centuries, Anglo-American society has entered a new era—a new turning—every two decades or so. At the start of each turning, people change how they feel about themselves, the culture, the nation, and the future. Turnings come in cycles of four. Each cycle spans the length of a long human life, roughly eighty to one hundred years, a unit of time the ancients called the saeculum.
I believe this circle of time is our modern society’s “theory of everything” and will continue to drive our future cycles. The “Turnings” Strauss describes drive all financial, cultural, and political shifts. We need to understand how they work and when the next shift will happen.
The Four Turnings
The basic thesis behind the book is that every society has “Four Turnings” that align with the generations of the people in that society. Strauss focuses on modern, Anglo-Saxon societies as the main victims of this dynamic, specifically America.
The turnings are roughly the same length as a human generation (20-25 years), and the four turnings make up what Strauss calls a saeculum:
Each cycle spans the length of a long human life, roughly eighty to one hundred years, a unit of time the ancients called the saeculum. Together, the four turnings of the saeculum comprise history's seasonal rhythm of growth, maturation, entropy, and destruction.
Just like our four seasons, we cannot exactly feel and pinpoint when these turnings happen, but they have a profound impact on the world we live in:
The four turnings comprise a quaternal social cycle of growth, maturation, entropy, and death (and rebirth). In a springlike High, a society forties and builds and converges in an era of promise. In a summerlike Awakening, it dreams and plays and exults in an era of euphoria. In an autumnal Unraveling, it harvests and consumes and diverges in an era of anxiety. In a hibernal Crisis, it focuses and struggles and sacrices in an era of survival. When the saeculum is in motion, therefore, no long human lifetime can go by without a society confronting its deepest spiritual and worldly needs.
The First Turning
The First Turning is the High. Societies reach escape velocity coming out of some chaotic event and march forward in unison. Institutional trust reigns over individual freedom and choice. Our most notable First Turning was after the earth-shattering Second World War. The Western World, specifically America, rocketed through the global leaderboards and became a unified force for good. Society banded together and collectively rose.
The post-war renaissance was not the first, and hopefully not the last, First Turning anglo-Saxon society has experienced. Paging through the history books, it becomes clear the High returns every 80-100 years:
Tudor Renaissance (1487-1517)
Reformation Saeculum Merrie England (1594-1621)
New World Saeculum Augustan Age of Empire (1704-1727)
Revolutionary Saeculum Era of Good Feelings (1794-1822)
Civil War Saeculum Reconstruction and Gilded Age (1865-1886)
Great Power Saeculum American High (1946-1964)
First Turnings are defined by economic growth, prosperity, institutional trust, and unity.
Strauss recounts the post WW2 era,
As World War II wound down, no one predicted that America would soon become so condent and institutionally muscular, yet so conformist and spiritually complacent. But that's what happened. […] Crime and divorce rates declined, ushering in an era of unlocked front doors, of nicely groomed youths, of President Eisenhower celebrating the well-being of the American family. […] We brimmed over with optimism about Camelot, a bustling future with smart people in which big projects and “impossible dreams” were freshly achievable. The moon could be reached and poverty eradicated, both within a decade. Tomorrow-land was a friendly future with moving skywalks, pastel geometric shapes, soothing Muzak, and well-tended families
Optimism is everywhere in the First Turning. It was tangible across all facets of society after the War:
Upbeat America confounded the pessimists. Veterans mustered out without any hint of riot, cheered by hometown welcomes that didn't stop when the parades were over. As the triumphant mood lingered, Fortune praised Americans for having found “a positive kind of middle-of-the-road,” even if “the road itself is now in a different place.”
The Western world had emerged from the dark. But, this feeling would not last indefinitely. Generations age and they forget where they came from. The soldiers that returned from the War soon started to question why they went in the first place. Their children were oblivious to actual conflict and began looking for outlets to point their innate pessimism and need for conflict.
The Second Turning
Second, we have the Awakening.
Here we begin witnessing the early signs of society’s fracturing. Looking back, there have been numerous examples of the era throughout Western society:
The Protestant Reformation (1530s-1540s)
The Puritan Awakening (1630s-1640s)
The Pietist Awakening (1740s-1750s)
The Evangelical-Utopian Awakening (1830s—1840s)
The New Age Awakening (1960s- 1970s)
Again, looking at the most recent Awakening, and one many of our grandparents can remember, there are a few societal symptoms to look at. First, individual expression begins to explode as the individual’s identity supersedes the racial, national, or other collective, common identities that were important during the preceding High era.
Coordination becomes harder as public opinion begins to fragment. Strauss summarizes:
Wars are awkwardly fought and badly remembered afterward. A euphoric enthusiasm over spiritual needs eclipses concern over secular problems, contributing to a high tolerance for risk-prone lifestyles. People begin feeling guilt about what they earlier did to avoid shame. Public order deteriorates, and crime and substance abuse rise.
As the id overtakes the ego, individuals begin to throw cooperative success to the side. The memory of the Crisis and conflict quickly wash away from society even as the older generations look back nervously and provide caution to those who dismiss history as just that, the past.
The Third Turning
Third, we have the Unraveling.
Strauss outlines the previous periods:
New World Saeculum French and Indian Wars (1746-1773)
Revolutionary Saeculum Mexican War and Sectionalism (1844-1860)
Civil War Saeculum World War I and Prohibition (1908-1929)
Great Power Saeculum Culture Wars (1984-2005?)
The Unraveling is the evolution of the Awakening going from a fringe movement to a core disintegration of societal trust, unity, and shared morality. The individual reigns over all else.
Today, we see this as we continue through some of the most rapid technological changes the world has ever seen. Economically, more people are lifted out of poverty every day than an entire year a century ago. But yet, our society’s default emotion has never been darker.
The Fourth Turning
Finally, we have Crisis.
The 1760s were followed by the American Revolution, the 1850s by Civil War, the 1920s by the Great Depression and World War II. All these Unraveling eras were followed by bone-jarring Crises so monumental that, by their end, American society emerged in a wholly new form.
An external event shocks society much like a defibrillator resurrects a dying heart. The Individual comes to their senses and realizes that society is the only force that can combat the Crisis in its totality.
Government governs, community obstacles are removed, and laws and customs that resisted change for decades are swiftly shunted aside. A grim preoccupation with civic peril causes spiritual curiosity to decline. A sense of public urgency contributes to a clampdown on bad conduct or antisocial lifestyles. People begin feeling shameful about what they earlier did to absolve guilt. Public order tightens, private risk taking abates, and crime and substance abuse decline. Families strengthen.
The Generations: Prophet, Nomad, Hero, & Artist
These turnings are the result of generations replacing one another.
A generation, in turn, is the aggregate of all people born over roughly the span of a phase of life who share a common location in history and, hence, a common collective persona. Like a person (and unlike a race, religion, or sex), a generation is mortal: Its members understand that in time they all must perish. Hence, a generation feels the same historical urgency that individuals feel in their own lives. This dynamic of generational aging and dying enables a society to replenish its memory and evolve over time.
Our turnings follow the generational flow:
A turning is an era with a characteristic social mood, a new twist on how people feel about themselves and their nation. It results from the aging of the generational constellation. A society enters a turning once every twenty years or so, when all living generations begin to enter their next phases of life
Generations learn 99% of their applicable knowledge from their parents and family.
Why can’t we kick this cycle? Why do we continue to succumb to this ~80-100 year cycle? It is simple: just like individuals, generations have finite memory. While stories can be told and passed down through generations, experiences cannot be shared. Our experiences define how we will raise our children, and their experiences will define their children, and so on. Strauss argues that a pattern emerges as generations come full circle and fall into the same trap like the ones before them.
Strauss presents the four generational archetypes:
A Prophet generation is born during a High.
A Nomad generation is born during an Awakening.
A Hero generation is born during an Unraveling.
An Artist generation is born during a Crisis.
Each archetype interprets the world around them differently. The Hero, our grandparents today, fights in war but cannot fight the subsequent Unraveling of society and is dismissed. The Prophet and Nomad do not know what Crisis is and therefore must create it amongst themselves. Our “woke” generations today fit the part perfectly. Soon, when we enter our next Crisis, the Artist will be born and will work with the Hero to push us forward into our society’s next saeclum.
We as a collective generation experience the world differently than those in different generations experiencing the same world.
Versions of Time
Throughout history, our forms of time have evolved. Strauss explains,
Over the millennia, man has developed three ways of thinking about time: chaotic, cyclical, and linear. […] In chaotic time, history has no path. Events follow one another randomly, and any effort to impute meaning to their whirligig succession is hopeless. […] Cyclical time originated when the ancients first linked natural cycles of planetary events (diurnal rotations, lunar months, solar years, zodiacal precessions) with related cycles of human activity (sleeping, waking; gestating, birthing; planting, harvesting; hunting, feasting). Cyclical time conquered chaos by repetition. […] Enter the third option: linear time—time as a unique (and usually progressing) story with an absolute beginning and an absolute end. Thus did mankind first aspire to progress.
For most of mankind, we have paid little attention to time.
With the first documentation of history, we began to mark our timelines. Our focus on progress forced us to adopt linear time as the primary backbone for measurement. We continue to measure time by punctuated events, or Kairos time - something I wrote about in Opus 6 - as time drives forward. Ask any of your parents or grandparents about their life, and they will most likely remember chronological events rather than cycles. Most history books look back at points in time as pivotal, unique forks in the road that continued to push time into unchartered territory. Most historians will draw a straight timeline when they describe the past. We rarely see history described as a circle.
But, time is not a linear vector that continues forever. It repeats and mirrors itself as we have seen. Why have we, as a modern society, come to expect our time to act any different than natural time? Everything from our seasons to our natural human functions are cyclical. We are heading to a place we have already been.
Nearly every primitive or archaic society came to see sacred time as rounded. In ancient India, Hindus and Jainists described it as a yantra (circle) or chakra (disk), the Buddhists as a mandala. To the ancient Chinese, the principle of stability underlying all change, tai chi, was drawn as a circle. Likewise, the ancient Greek word kyklos meant both “cycle” and “circle.” The temple to Athena at Athens was inscribed the epigram “All human things are a circle.”
We incorrectly believed that our use of technology in other matters could transfer to our hedging against the cyclicality of time:
More recently, the West began using technology to atten the very physical evidence of natural cycles. With articial light, we believe we defeat the sleep-wake cycle; with climate control, the seasonal cycle; with refrigeration, the agricultural cycle; and with high-tech medicine, the rest-recovery cycle. Triumphal linearism has shaped the very style of Western and (especially) American civilization.
It repeats itself because our generations cycle after one another. This generational phenomenon drives all cycles: politic, economic, foreign affairs, etc.
Political:
The Schlesinger cycle lines up with the saeculum as follows: The public energy eras overlap largely with Awakening and Crisis turnings, the private interest eras with Highs and Unravelings. This should not be surprising: Crises and Awakenings both require a dramatic reassertion of public energy—the former to full the need for social survival, the latter to full the need for social expression. No such need appears in Highs or Unravelings.
Economic:
A similar rhythm governs trends in income and class equality. The two most sustained and measurable poverty-rate declines (1946- 1967 and 1865-1890) have roughly coincided with the last two Highs. Yet the historical moments of the greatest estimated income inequality (the late 1990s, late 1920s, late 1850s, and late 1760s) have all occurred near the ends of Un-ravelings. Highs promote income and class equality, and Awakenings change that. Unravelings promote inequality, and Crises change that.
A Temperature Check: Our Fourth Turning
So, where are we?
Our First Turning started on August 14th, 1945 - Armistice Day - as the Western World celebrated and soldiers came home. United as one, the world marched out of the darkness of World War 2 and began fresh. For those still alive today, this time can be remembered by its societal and governmental trust, unified mission, and shared values. Income inequality was low, families were functioning, and the political polarity was low.
Exactly 26 years later, on August 15th, 1971, President Nixon unilaterally withdrew from the Bretton Woods system sending a shockwave around the financial world. Opus 7 showed how pivotal of a moment this was for the US. Economic inequality began to widen, and its second-order effects showed up everywhere.
Our Third Turning, the Unraveling, began on September 11, 2001. As Thiel draws a parallel in his essay, The Straussian Moment:
The twenty-first century started with a bang on September 11, 2001. In those shocking hours, the entire political and military framework of the ninetheeth and twentieth centures, and indeed of the modern age, with its emphasis on deterrent armies, rational nation-states, public debates, and international diplomacy, was called into question.
Our trust in the all-powerful and all-seeing Government collapsed with the buildings on that awful day. The country entered the most unpopular war and fought an enemy we could not identify. The secular decline in governmental trust accelerated:
Nihilism is a late-stage Unraveling symptom. Strauss remembers the last Unraveling during the late 1920s:
Earlier optimism about a progressive future gave way to a jazz-age nihilism.
Today it is clear that nihilism is another virus plaguing our society. Drug usage and overdoses are at all-time highs. Secondary education enrollment is down across the board and is hitting the male population especially hard as they give up and “feel lost.” More people are not starting their independent lives and continue to live with their parents:
There are even growing communities of millions of people dismissing the very idea of work itself. Reddit’s “antiwork” community is one of the more notable:
The default emotion of our population is one of pessimism for change and a lack of drive to fix it. Of course, there are examples of great people doing world-changing work.
The pessimism leads to separatism.
Paralleling these family rhythms are the changing ideals or metaphors that Americans use to express their attitude toward society at large. In a High, people want to belong; in an Awakening, to defy; in an Unraveling, to separate; in a Crisis, to gather
We feel this separatism today as more people define and distance themselves by any defining feature set a person can have.
Today’s individuality is paradoxical. Our societal fragmentation has led to the constant bucketing of every possible classification of oneself - race, gender, culture, class, etc. But, while individual labeling and individual opinion have gripped our society, individual responsibility has all but disappeared. We have assumed that our individual traits must be represented by the highest forms of government and organization. Still, yet we have vanished from our local community involvement and smaller circles where we actually have an impact. I think Strauss summarizes it well:
People can now feel, but collectively can no longer do
Our “feelings” have become the only thing that matters.
But while these feelings are new to most of us alive today, they are but another cycle in our country’s memory. Pre WW2 America was filled with crime, governmental distrust, and pessimism. Before that, the 1820s-1850s were no different as the country found itself split across its literal border.
The most prophetic passages of the book come in the final chapters as Strauss provides predictions on how the fourth turning might catalyze:
Beset by a social crisis, a state lays claim to its residents' federal tax monies. Declaring this an act of secession, the president obtains a federal injunction
A global terrorist group blows up an aircraft and announces it possesses portable nuclear weapons. The United States and its allies launch a preemptive strike. The terrorists threaten to retaliate against an American city. Congress declares war and authorizes unlimited house-to-house searches.
An impasse over the federal budget reaches a stalemate. The president and Congress both refuse to back down, triggering a near-total government shutdown.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announce the spread of a new communicable virus. The disease reaches densely populated areas, killing some. Congress enacts mandatory quarantine measures.
Growing anarchy throughout the former Soviet republics prompts Russia to conduct training exercises around its borders.
Again, let me remind you that Strauss wrote this book in 1997. It is scary how accurate Strauss was in predicting the financial crisis, the 9/11 attack, the US budget default(s), and the Covid-19 pandemic.
So, where is our Crisis?
Much like many of our past Crises, an external force will likely cause our next. Covid would have been the obvious answer. Unfortunately, the pandemic was more political than pathogenic. A glimmer of hope was seen during the vaccine development but this coordination has disappeared with the recent division regarding the long-term strategy of dealing with endemic Covid. Maybe we do still use this era as a launchpad but every day it seems more unlikely.
Assuredly, in the next 2-3 years, we will enter a Crisis much like the one our grandparents and great grandparents were forced to take on. The two obvious answers are either China or Russia returning to their imperialistic pasts. Both of which are heating up and Strauss predicted 25 years ago. The Ukrainian border crisis builds pressure while the recent Kazakhstani conflict surfaced more risk.
But why are conflict and war a reason for societal change in the first place?
I often reflect on Francis Fukuyama’s End of History and I think it is important here. Fukuyama incorrectly interpreted the end of the Cold War as the End of All History but the second-order meaning of his thesis is spot on. If defined by conflict and events, history seemingly had ended as Western society no longer had an enemy to unite against.
Crises are pivotal moments that allow societies to unite. Throughout our Awakening and Unraveling we lose societal unity because, in my opinion, we lose a common enemy. In his 1905 essay, The Moral Equivalent of War, William James presents an interesting argument. If we begin to have fewer wars and conflict, we must find a replacement to replicate the moral unification that wars allow for:
We should get toughness without callousness, authority with as little criminal cruelty as possible, and painful work done cheerily because the duty is temporary, and threatens not, as now, to degrade the whole remainder of one's life. I spoke of the "moral equivalent" of war. So far, war has been the only force that can discipline a whole community, and until and equivalent discipline is organized, I believe that war must have its way.
This is certainly a bleak outlook. But, it is no coincidence that James argued the above during the last Awakening / Unraveling cycle as society quickly approached the Wars. Again, generations begin to forget what true struggle feels like. I believe this is often why our grandparents today have a level of cynicism and fear around foreign affairs. They are the only ones who can really understand what true conflict looks like while the younger generations feel most threatened by the people around them.
There is empirical evidence backing this up as well. The 2021 CBS poll regarding America’s biggest threat paints a clear picture:
As a financial nerd, I immediately look at the above and think that one of these answers is incredibly over answered / overvalued. Only 8% of the US population believes that foreign conflict is our country’s biggest threat, even though history has proven time and time again that these external forces are the catalyst for most internal change. The most likely time for something to happen is when no one expects it to happen.
If the above is true, it is a dark forecast for the near future. I had originally started this post with a question around general optimism vs. general pessimism. It is hard to be optimistic about our immediate future, but we again think about the future as some linear vector from where we are today. Clearly, that is not the case. Our future is not something new and unknown but rather a return to the old and familiar. We must first turn back to the past.
Opus 18: Our Fourth Turning
Thanks for this summary of Strauss's and Howe's generational theory and The Fourth Turning in particular. However, you have not correctly identified the 3rd and 4th turnings of the present cycle.
The third turning started at the beginning of the 80's with Good Morning in America of the Reagan era.
The fourth turning started with the financial crisis of 2008. The current crisis phase will probably end by 2028-30 (or sooner) depending on what happens as we have not reach a regeneracy of our society yet.
I'm also familiar with this historical framework and I invite you to read my own Substack page.
Best regards.
https://thenomadhistorian.substack.com/p/the-coming-obsolescence-of-north?r=pgobs&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
this is really good