Fourth turning theory is fashy crap written by a play write and a business fund manager (people with no credentials for historical analysis), worshipped by people like Steve Banon.
Accordingly it's totally subjective, a guessing game.
Truth is: No one can predict what's going to happen.
It's predicated on baby boomers not having hard times. There's no basis in reality. Not unless one were to believe baby boomers are all predominantly white upper middle class. Not to mention one must believe history was all sunshine and rainbows until their generation (millennial/zoomer/whatever) came into existence.
Do they really think people just walked right out of high school into wealth from the career factory? This is basically the privileged upper class. Which is the top percentage of their generation. Guess what? Everyone else had it hard!
So much of current day pop culture "boomer bad" stuff is based on these stupid notions. I wonder how people are going to rationalize when baby boomers are all dead and the class war still exists. I think some younger people are in for some serious cognitive dissonance ahead.
Apart from people parroting these things. Those who actually have those well off parents are admitting their own privilege. The parrots are too entranced to realize they're worshiping their own oppressors. The upper class. They don't know they are the cannon fodder in the cycle of hard times, revolution, and renewal.
So you're just gonna pretend the massively documented body of evidence that as a generation boomers have had access to unprecedented privilege in human history regardless of demographic and have also overwhelmingly implemented or voted in systems that have destroyed that framework doesn't exist.
Most people are referring to the fact that boomers were born into the strongest social safety net in American history and then allowed Regan to gut it for short-term gains. The original aphorism may not be true, but I can't think of a generation it applies to more.
I mean there is a thing going all the way back to the silent generation who had a taste of the depression and so had some knowledge of truly bad times. Even younger boomers had a decent chance of getting a job that you could raise a family with just a high school degree and older ones could be pretty successful. Having a pension was the usual. Losers who managed fast food could still afford a place of their own and a fixer upper car. I saw these things go away as an Xer but I know its still better than those after me. college loans for me was like a car loan. A very nice car, like luxury care, but still a car. So college was doable even for those whose parents could not help out. It was not long after I graduated that college loans became like mortgages for the millenials. You can have a car loan with no car and get by and you can't be doing a mortgage with no shelter to show for it. All the while a college degree debased to where its basically the high school minimum needed for any shot. Its that much worse for gen Z and I don't even want to imagine what gen alpha will have. Thats just economic. Then you take the giant fall back we had with environmental regulations with reagan. There was a lot of environmental consciousness in the 70's and it essentailly evaporated in the 80's with yuppies and greed is good. Granted this is mostly a republican effect but who were the reagan democrats? I get that many boomers are great and its not that the generations that follow are individually so great but the way its shaken out it just gets to be a more and more raw deal for each successive generation.
Thanks for this insight, seriously.
Because of course, it sounds really scary, and we all know which side of the fence relies most heavily on fear based rhetoric.
The "common sense" logic feels sound, but you're right that it's deceptive, and trying to use some "system" to both read the future AND use it to scare everyone into thinking it's doomsday every week? When you think about it, gee, that HAD to be a fashy business fund manager idea lmao.
Only thing that isn't okay is to mangle your sentence to conform to the obsolete "never end a sentence with a preposition because some old fogey said so hundreds of years ago" rule 😛
Do we REALLY want zombie Reagan and hundreds of others like that running around again? I dunno about you guys, but I'm so tired of living through Interesting Times ™️ and Unprecedented Events ™️. A zombie apocalypse where they don't eat our brains, but just fuck up the economy even more doesn't sound fun.
Lmao, yeah I can't imagine why someone would think that reviving them would make them suddenly want to correct their mistakes. They just got a chance to further be shit.
To be fair, us genX did nothing about anything and just felt cool wallowing in our fake cynicism of "why do anything when nothing matters" so we're probably half as much to blame as the boomers
There's a certain selection bias to the "Weak Men, Hard Times / Strong Men, Good Times" just so historical analysis. You don't talk about all the folks that die during good times or bad times. You just point to the old people and your brain slips right past the selection bias that allowed them to live and others to die.
Trying to blame this generation or that is a fool's errand. What do you tell a population of Gen Xers who were dragged out to the suburbs and raised in these segregated hermitages for twenty years, then plunged into the capitalist meat grinder at the tail end of the post-war boom years? "Hey, you should have all just psychically linked up and formed a socio-economic Voltron to change a century's old system overnight"? Who can seriously believe that? The deck was stacked against you and yet we still have a litany of Gen Xers who struggled - even died - in their effort to undo the damage of prior generations.
And what do you say to all the children of WW2 refugees who washed up on America's shores and struggled to carve out a life for themselves in the graveyards of the First Nation's people? Or the Cold War refugees - the Korean and Vietnamese and Indonesian and Taiwanese and Venezuelan and Cuban and Spanish and Russian and North Africa and... and... and... - who came into the US as children and were promptly indoctrinated to hate their home countries by the white supremacist majordomos of the American imperial class?
Its easy to blame yourself or your neighbors or your generation. Its hard to see the bigger picture and how each of us fit into it. Its hard to know if we're doing the right thing, or doing enough of the right thing, or who is with us and who is against us given the sheer tsunami of bullshit in our information networks.
We're playing the game on Hard Mode. And I don't think anyone who cares enough to question and inquire about their efforts can really be held to blame. It's the folks who have burned the ability to care out of their souls that hold us back. And that's not a decision unique to a region or time period.
To be fair, you were directly under thier control when they were in their biological primes so fighting back would have been harder. Also, it's you parents and all. So don't sweat it too much
Boomers and Gen X did exactly the same thing that you're doing. Nothing. They just let the super rich elite screw the whole world up and now you're doing the same thing they did. Nothing.
If you want to act high and mighty you're not going to change the world by complaining on the internet. You have to stop the super rich.
If I could, I would use this simple way to stop them: ban all parties that support them, nationalize all their beings and "sweeten up" their coffee if they complain too much.
There's only one problem: I CAN'T DO NOTHING BECAUSE I'M NOT IN FUCKING POWER
Yeah, yeah, 80s and 90s had concentration camps for black people, heard that shit before. Meanwhile no climate crisis, no Trump, no Tiktok, nothing, just some fucking peace.
This is bullshit. Boomers, genXers and now millenials have been fighting against wild capitalism for decades, and a lot of them died fighting or are rotting in jail right now.