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** Extra stuff:
In the year and a half that I've been studying this stuff, this has been an extremely fruitful and interesting area of research. It's like solving a kind of jigsaw puzzle where all the countries of the earth are the pieces, and the pieces change shape over time.
In the 15,000 or so years of recorded history, there have been thousands, or tens of thousands, of individual tribes or societies formed by primitive men and women moving from place to place. Today, there are about 250 nations, comprising about 9 major civilizations (Western, Latin American, African, Islamic, Sinic, Hindu, Orthodox, Buddhist, Japanese).
** Original text:
Understanding Generational Dynamics requires understanding "crisis wars."
Wars go on all the time. America had several wars during the 1990s alone. But those wars are easily forgotten.
But every society goes through wars that are remembered for centuries. These are the wars that are so bad that they put the entire nation or society through a shredder, so that the traumatized people who survived have to struggle just to put their lives back together.
Crisis wars occur roughly every 80 years ago. They occur when the people in the generation that grew up during the last crisis war all retire or die, and the new leaders are people with no personal memory of the last crisis war.
The three crisis wars in American history were the Revolutionary (1775-83), the Civil War (1861-65), and World War II (1941-45). America today has not yet begun a new crisis war, but the 9/11 attacks, the Afghan war and the Iraqi war are preliminary skirmishes leading up to that war.
The following sections illustrate the concept of a crisis war and war cycle by means of an imagine island.
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Imagine an island with two tribes, the Reds and Blues, living at opposite ends of the island. The island is in a remote part of the word, so that the tribes live there for many centuries before they're discovered by other peoples.
As time goes on, both tribes grow larger. In fact, it's a part of human nature that couples want to have children, and it's also human nature that population grows faster than the food supply. In time, there won't be enough food for everyone. What happens then?
At first there'll be boundary disputes between the Reds and Blues. They'll try to divide up the available productive farmland so that both sides can survive. If fighting breaks out, at first they'll try to resolve things peacefully.
But there's no peaceful solution to this kind of problem. As time goes on, as population continues to grow, there will have to a war.
It's true, they may agree to some form of population control, but something like that rarely ever happens. It's usually the opposite -- that one or both sides will have a culture that encourages as many births as possible, in preparation for a distant war. (This is what has happened in Muslim communities around the world during the last few decades.)
So there's no alternative to a war. Rationing won't work for long. Food distribution isn't the issue. Income distribution isn't the issue (though that may be blamed). The real problem is that there's not enough food to go around.
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A shortage of food doesn't necessarily cause immediate famine, or even immediate hunger. What it means, by the economic law of supply and demand, that the price of food goes up, and so poverty increases. Today you see places around the world where poverty is high; homes are shabby and rundown, and often you garbage piled up in the street because there's no money for garbage collection.
People who are in poverty soon are unable to feed themselves or their families, and they feel that they have little to lose by fighting or even going to war. More important than that, they aren't just fighting for some political purpose; they're literally fighting for their lives. In fact, the entire tribe is fighting for its continued existence.
That's what we call a crisis war. It's a war of genocidal fury, based on visceral hatred of the enemy, usually because of some perceived economic issue that causes one side or the other to fear for its existence. (In some cases, the visceral hatred is caused by other than economic issues.)
I first noticed this genocidal fury, this visceral fury, in the fall of 2000, after the Enron Corp. scandal. I was shocked and surprised at the level of hatred and venom expressed by so many people at corporate CEOs in general, after so many people lost their savings. It was clear that a lot of people would be happy only if every corporate CEO in the country were put in jail. It reminded of stories of the French Revolution and the following Reign of Terror, when every aristocrat and every person related to an aristocrat was sent to the guillotine by the vengeful people. People didn't want to send corporate CEOs to the guillotine, but it was shocking how many people wanted every corporate CEO to go to jail.
I saw it again in the visceral fury and hatred that many people expressed toward all Arabs and Muslims following 9/11, and as we pursued the war in Afghanistan.
It's what's called "hate" in other contexts - you shouldn't hate someone because he's black or Jewish, and you shouldn't hate someone because he's Muslim or a CEO. But that's what happened.
I thought the attitude towards CEOs was especially bizarre. There were probably fewer than a dozen or so CEOs who had actually committed crimes, but there was this huge public hatred of all CEOs.
This isn't the first time that Americans have felt this way. The last time was during World War II, when Americans felt the same kind of hatred towards the Germans and Japanese. This hatred caused the genocidal fury that led to the firebombing of Dresden and Tokyo, destroying thos cities and killing millions of people, and the dropping of two nuclear weapons on Japan.
Of course, Americans are slow to feel this way. The Japanese felt the same way about Americans first, when they bombed Pearl Harbor. And the same hatred led to Islamist bombings throughout the 1990s, and to the 9/11 attacks. You can hear the Islamist hatred of America (and Israel) in many Muslim publications today. It's this kind of vengeful hatred that characterizes crisis wars, as opposed to "mid-cycle" wars that occur between crisis wars.
Getting back to the Reds and the Blues, they will have their first crisis war. Since there is not enough food on the island to feed both tribes, the war will be genocidal. Each tribe will attempt to completely destroy the other tribe. There will be acts of mass murder, mass rape, and mass torture.
As we said, these wars are a part of human nature. They have an evolutionary purpose, to thin out the population so that the survivors will have enough food, and therefore to guarantee that the only the strongest and fittest tribes continue to survive. Mass rape in crisis wars also has an evolutionary purpose, to provide for genetic cross-breeding, so that the best attributes of warring tribes will survive. Human beings would not exist today if it were for the tens or hundreds of thousands of mass murders, mass rapes, and violent genocidal crisis wars that have occurred throughout human history.
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In this example, let's suppose that the war went on for years, and eventually both populations were thinned out substantially, so that there was enough food for all the survivors. At time = 80 years, there are a lot fewer people than there were at time = 60 years.
The period immediately following a crisis war is a time for recovery.
It's a remarkable time in many ways, because of necessity it's a time for both bitterness and healing.
Usually there's been an explosion of genocidal fury and vengeance on all sides, but the war has ended. What now?
It's like any individual who goes through a long, traumatic experience - you're willing to do almost anything to prevent it from happening again. If your home is robbed, you install an alarm system. If you're hospitalized for lung cancer, you stop smoking. If you're mugged and beaten on the street, you avoid any more long walks. Anyone would act that way.
That's what happens to an entire generation after a crisis war. The people are willing to do almost anything to keep it from happening again.
One more thing: Although the vast majority of the people are usually happy and relieved that the war is over (this is true of both sides, even the losing side), there are always small groups of people who are dissatisfied and want to keep on fighting. These people might become terrorists, or they might become leaders who launch smaller "mid-cycle wars" on the enemy in the years to come. Whatever else happens, these groups will probably form the nucleus of anger that leads to the next crisis war, decades later.
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In European wars, the historical solution at the end of a crisis war has usually been to call a conference, such as the "Peace at Westphalia" in 1648 after the Thirty Years War, or the "Treaty at Utrecht" in 1714 after the War of the Spanish Succession, or the "Congress of Vienna" in 1815 after the Napoleonic wars.
So in our example, let's suppose that the leaders of the Reds and the Blues decide to call a conference. They never want such a war to happen again (since they don't understand that there's no way of preventing it from happening again).
At the peace conference, they note that the Blues have always had more land than the Reds, and that this has caused arguments and distress that led to the First Crisis War. So they decide on a compromise to prevent another such war: Some of the land to the north of the river separating the two sides will be given to the Reds, and an artificial partition will separate the two sides. Perhaps a fence will be built along the line of partition. This leads to the map shown above to the left.
During this period of austerity, everybody is still traumatized from the war, and anxious to put their lives back together without any further war. For that reason, the two sides may well agree to other things to guarantee that another war won't occur. Some of these are:
In addition, the Reds and the Blues themselves may each institute additional rules on their own populations. Some possible rules are:
Remember, this is just an example. Not all of these things happen in every case in a real awakening. But some set of rules, whether social or political or physical, are always set up, so that a new war can be prevented.
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Generational Dynamics is about what happens as generations change, and now we're going to examine what happens one generation after a crisis war.
Between two crisis wars there's a 60 year mid-cycle period. (The actual length is typically 50-70 years; it rarely runs longer than 70 years, and appears to be shorter than 50 years.)
Generational Dynamics breaks this 60-year period up into three 20-year periods. This division is based on work by William Strauss and Neil Howe in their books, Generations and The Fourth Turning.
The Unraveling period ends, and a new Crisis period begins, when the people who remember the previous crisis war are all gone -- either dead or retired. At that point, a series of surprises and mutual brinkmanship events begin, leading finally to a new crisis war.
Let's now return to our example.
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About 15-20 years after the end of any crisis war, things start to change, as the kids who were born after the end of the crisis war begin to reach ages 15-20. At that point, the kids start to "rebel" against their parents, forming what's popularly called a "generation gap."
America's last awakening period was the 1960s, when young people held race riots, antiwar riots, and advocated the sexual revolution, much to the horror of their parents. This kind of "generation gap" is typical of any awakening period.
In our island example, the protests might take many forms:
It's important to understand that the there is an enormous distance between those who fought in the last war and those born after the last war. It's hard to overstate how big that difference is. The heroes who fought in the war are truly traumatized by the constant experience of death and destruction around them. For the kids born after the war, there's none of that trauma. They're just sick and tired of listening to their parents lecture them about things that seem like nonsense.
In America's 1960s awakening period, Communism was a big factor. The generation that fought in World War II wanted to stop Communism early, so that there wouldn't be a World War III. The younger generation (the Baby Boomers) not only objected, but adopted Communism as a kind of religious belief, even to the extent of carrying around "Chairman Mao Zedong's Little Red Book," containing his favorite Communist sayings.
Incidentally, the word "awakening" was chosen because of a particular historic event. Historians call it the Great Awakening. Starting in the 1730s, something brand new came about -- something we recognize today in the form of "televangelists." Various preachers went from city to city, telling thousands of rapt listeners that they would be punished for their sinfulness, but could be saved by the mercy of an all-powerful God. To take one example, John Wesley, born in 1703, created the Methodist religion, and traveled on horseback throughout the country for years, stopping along the way to preach three or four sermons each day.
The Great Awakening of the 1730s and 1740s was not just a religious revival; it was also an act of rebellion against the older generation that favored control by the British in return for protection. By rejecting the Anglican Church, the colonists were symbolically rejecting British control.
So awakenings take many forms, but they all have one thing in common: It's the kids rebelling against their parents, rebelling against their rules and compromises, rebelling against conformity to the old ways in favor of adopting the new ways.
So in our island example, there are any number of forms that the protests and demonstrations could take. Whatever form it takes, the older generation won't want to change the rules again, and the younger generation aill want to change all the rules.
The Heroes are one of the four major generational groups that are recognized by Generational Dynamics. These four groups were established by William Strauss and Neil Howe in their books, Generations and The Fourth Turning.
The Heroes are born in the period just prior to a crisis war. The last generation of American heroes were the G.I.s who fought in World War II.
They come of age during the crisis war and are the soldiers that fight in the war. The nation's survival depends on them, and so they become adulated heroes and take on a spiritual importance.
Once the crisis war is over, they become the middle managers who rebuild the country. They also rebuild their own lives, and raise their children with the vow that their children will have better lives than theirs, and that "nothing like that war must ever happen again." If their side won the war, the Heroes want to guarantee that their nation or society retains its advantage; if their side lost the war, then the Heroes will want to guarantee that they'll never lose a war like that again.
Living through a crisis war has another effect: People learn to depend on their leaders and take orders from them. We're not just talking about military discipline, though that's part of it. But when the very existence of a nation is at stake, or when the nation's way of life is at stake, then every business, governmental or educational institution takes its lead from what the nation's or society's leaders tell them to do. Even people who aren't in the military follow military discipline anyway, because everything's at stake.
In the austere time following the crisis war, the Hero generation implements the new rules and compromises that will protect their children, their families and the nation from ever having to endure anything like that again. They devise new laws and institutions with the view of keeping the nation united in remembering the lessons that have been learned. They're very sure of themselves and very much in agreement with one another. And they expect everyone to continue taking direction from leaders, even though the war is over, because that's the only way to prevent another similar war.
As time passes by, and the nation or society passes from the Austerity period to the Awakening period, Heroes grow from middle management to senior management. They're in charge now, so they're now in place to make sure that the new values are cherished, the new laws are observed, the new institutions are revered, and the new compromises are respected.
The rejection of their values, their laws, their institutions and their compromises by the younger generation (their children) is a tremendous shock to them, and it affects them in every possible way. It's one thing no longer to be respected for their war sacrifices; but it's just crazy to reject the values and rules that have no purpose other than to protect society. Their view that society is coming apart is not just the ranting of sexually repressed old people, as the students liked to claim in the 1960s, but reflects a genuine concern that real harm will revisit the society or country unless they remain forever vigilant, forever disciplined. If their nation lost the last crisis, then they may be horrified to think that the nation could be heading for yet another defeat at some future time.
It may suprprise some readers to believe that Heroes and their children could have such different world views, but in fact the differences were so enormous that it's hard to overstate them. Those readers who were around in the 60s will remember not only the constant talk about the "generation gap," but also the steady stream of articles talking about how today's leaders had treated their own parents with respect, but this new generation of kids on treat their parents with contempt.
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In my book, Generational Dynamics, I tell a personal story about growing up in the 1950s. For a high school term paper, I sent away for literature from several political third parties, including the Greenback Party, the Prohibition Party, the Socialist Party. When my father discovered that I had this literature, he became very concerned. Although he never shouted at me, I could tell that he was very upset. He reminded me that he was an immigrant working for the government in Fort Monmouth, N.J., and that if it became known that his son was in possession of third party literature, he might lose his job. I promised him I would never do it again, but in a later conversation about this with a man who had fought in the war, I was told, "It's OK, as long as your realize your mistake and won't do it again."
That whole thing seemed bizarre to me then, and would seem bizarre to anyone today, but it illustrates the vast gulf in world view between Heroes and their children.
A war is a traumatizing experience to any individual, and when it's a crisis war with the entire nation's way of life at stake, it affects entire generations. The Hero generation becomes authoritarian and resentful, and tries to use force, or the force of law, to maintain the institutions and rules that were devised during the Austerity period. The Heroes inevitably lose, of course, because the younger generation opponents outlive them.
But getting to that point causes a great deal of social turmoil. It's worthwhile listing some of the events that happened during America's awakening period in the 1960s and 1970s:
This was the most tumultuous and violent time in America in memory today.
As you look through the issues underlying the events listed above, you can see what they have in common: The issues all had to do with individual freedom, and they focused on contempt for the Heroes' values.
Incidentally, the 1960s awakening period was not unique to America. The same thing happened to all countries for which World War II was a crisis war, both winners and losers. Student riots and demonstrations drew blood not only throughout America, but also in Canada and Europe. In Germany and France they were called the "68ers," because they become most prominent in 1968, and in France the violence was so extreme it almost brought down the government. In Japan, Japan Revolutionary Communist League demanded a return to the Japanese "purity" of the 1930s, before Japan's disgraceful defeat in WW II, and demanded severance of all ties with America. This group morphed into the extremely violent Japanese Red Army, which conducted terrorist acts in the 1970s and 80s.
Just as a crisis war often has a winner and a loser, an awakening also has a winner and a loser.
When the younger generation wins, it usually results in a "velvet revolution" or "internal revolution," that results in some major victory over the Heroes.
Some examples of awakening victories over the Heroes are as follows:
On the other hand, it's possible for the older generation Heroes to win the awakening confrontation, and this often spells trouble later as the next crisis period approaches.
A modern example is China's Tiananmen Square confrontation in 1989. The demonstration was brutally crushed by the Beijing government. A year later, the dissidents formed the Falun Gong movement, which the government suppressed and declared illegal in 1999. This movement will lead China into the next crisis civil war.
Incidentally, an awakening period is not always "antiwar." The 1800s was a period of empire building around the world, with England and France leading the way in racing to colonize as many countries as possible. US Commander Matthew Perry brought warships in 1853 and forced Japan to open its ports to trade. This triggered a crisis civil war, leading to the Meiji Restoration in 1868. In the awakening period that followed, the issue was to abandon Japan's traditional isolation and become another imperialist nation. They scored numerous victories against China and Japan, and gained numerous territories, including Taiwan, Korea, and southern Manchuria, along with other territories.
Awakenings cause a generational conflict between the kids and their parents. It's a funny thing about those conflicts: Sooner or later, the kids always win, because their parents die off.
Generational Dynamics identifies four separate generational paradigms. These four groups were established by William Strauss and Neil Howe in their books, Generations and The Fourth Turning.
Let's describe these in terms of the island example and in terms of America today:
Of the four groups above, the one that's most important to understand is the generation of Prophets. We'll discuss them more below.
With this background, we're ready to describe what happens next in our island example -- our island example during the Unraveling and Crisis periods.
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After twenty years of Awakening conflict, the social upheaval comes to an end with a kind of compromise: The old Austerity rules are no longer being honored. By this time, the society no longer has a common purpose. All the old Austerity rules and compromises, designed to unite society against potential enemies in order to prevent a new crisis war, have been attacked ruthlessly by the younger generation, to the point that society itself is unraveling.
Whereas the austerity period begins with society united for a common purpose, the unraveling period leads to a society with no common purpose, and where freedom for the individual reaches its maximum point.
Let's now describe the kinds of wars that happen between crisis wars. These are called "non-crisis wars" or "mid-cycle wars."
In a few words, mid-cycle wars are political wars, and crisis wars are visceral wars. In fact, as is described separately (where?), the way you tell a mid-cycle war from a crisis war is by a set of criteria that evaluate whether it's a political war or a visceral war.
Mid-cycle wars are usually quickly forgotten. Try this out for yourself. Almost any American you ask can tell you something about World War II or the Civil War or the Revolutionary War.
But ask anyone to tell you about the Korean War, and you'll probably get a blank stare. Ask a collect student about the 1991 Gulf War, and you'll probably get nothing. Ask about the Vietnam War, and you may hear about antiwar demonstrations, but chances are the person you ask won't even be able to find Vietnam on a map. Ask about World War I (a mid-cycle war for America), and the person you ask will probably know that it has something to do with Germany, but little more. Ask about the Spanish-American and Mexican-American wars, and you'll get a blank stare again.
A crisis wars is visceral and genocidal. It may start out slowly, but it gathers speed and reaches an explosive conclusion. It usually begins with a surprise attack following a secret mobilization. There's usually a sustained program of several months of mass murders, mass rapes, massacres or forced relocation of huge populations, with the objective of forcing the enemy into extinction or into unconditional surrender. After the explosive ending, there's usually a time of healing, with rules and compromises designed to prevent any similar war for as long as possible.
A mid-cycle war is political. It starts out with determination, but unless there's a quick victory it tends to stall out. Mobilization for the war is open, and usually accompanied by political objectives ("withdraw from Kuwait or we'll force you out"). If there's no quick victory, then the public quickly grows tired of the war, and there's an active antiwar (pacifist) political movement. When the war ends, the resolution is often so indefinite that it does nothing but lay the groundwork for the next crisis war.
In our island example, the population has been growing faster than the food supply for a number of years, so the price of food and the number of people in poverty have been increasing. This could lead to anything from looting and rioting to a mid-cycle war.
Let's assume that the partition has turned out to be better for the Reds than it's been for the Blues, and the Blues are suffering more poverty than the Reds are. The partition agreement that was reached at the peace conference is now really unraveling. There is lots of discontent with the partition, and little acceptance of the need
Let's look at some of the possible conflict scenarios:
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In all of these scenarios, there's a desire to avoid conflict, to avoid risking a larger war. Both sides are willing compromise. Problems are contained. Neither side takes any unnecessary risks. That's what happens during an Unraveling period.
The Artists are the people who grow up during the crisis war as children. They're middle managemers during the Awakening period. During the Unraveling period, the Artist generation moves from middle management to senior management.
Although the Artists grow up during the war, their experience is different from those in the Hero generation. As children, they don't fight in the war, and they aren't subject to the kind of "military discipline" that their elders do. For that reason, they never completely buy into the aggressive top-down austerity program implemented by the Hero generation because they're too young.
But they aren't completely out of it either. They grow up at a time when there's death, disease, starvation, homelessness and suffering all around them. Each of them is certain to have lost an older brother, a father, or at least a friend's brother or father. If the war takes place on home soil, then he may grow up seeing homes and buildings all around him destroyed.
In America during World War II, Artists grew up first seeing the devastation of the depression, then watch as their parents were traumatized by the threat of Japanese and German bombers, then seeing their brothers and fathers head for near-certain death on the shores of Normandy. But even worse, kids living in London, Dresden and Tokyo saw their homes and their neighbors' homes firebombed and destroyed on a daily basis, as if they were having several 9/11-type attacks every day for months. And in the case of Japan, these kids saw two of their cities annihilated by nuclear weapons.
When someone is traumatized and abused as a child, he's likely to grow up into a risk-aversive adult.
Kids growing up in the traumatizing atmosphere of a crisis war suffer a kind of generational child abuse, and they all grow up into a risk-aversive generational of adults.
When the war ends and the Hero generation tells them, "We have to guarantee that nothing like that happens again. We want our children to have better leves than we had," then they accept those goals, along with the rules and compromises that go along with them.
These children, the Artist generation, become the middle managers during the Awakening period, and the end up being caught in the middle of the generation gap, forced to mediate between the older Heroes and the younger rebels and torn between them.
When the Awakening period ends, then the Hero generation starts to retire and the Artists become the new senior managers.
When the Artists take charge during the Unraveling, there's another major transition in the society. The humiliated Hero leaders who had been forced to back down on all the austere values that they had imposed on society are replaced, all at around the same time, by a new risk-aversive generation.
From the time they were children during the crisis war, the Artists had leaned on the Hero elders to provide guidance and direction, and now they're gone.
The result is a society that has little or no direction, little or no real leadership from any institution, whether governmental, business or education. It's a time of maximal individual freedom, with little or no public pressure to support the country or society as a whole.
In America in the twentieth century, there were two unraveling periods: the 1920s and the 1990s. Both periods saw increased drug use, higher crime rates, looser sexuality, and financial credit bubbles. Today, in 2004, the major nation currently in an unraveling period is China.
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Returning now to the island example, things are getting a lot worse. The population has been growing, and so it's getting more crowded.
In addition, as usual, the population has been growing faster than the food supply. This means that food has been getting more expensive and that poverty has been increasing. There are undoubtedly "poor neighborhoods" and "affluent neighborhoods."
It has to be stated at once that there is no possible resolution to this situation except another war. And not just a "little war." It has to be a war severe and genocidal enough so that it kills enough people so that there's enough for the remaining people to have enough food.
It's worth emphasizing this because there are people today who believe that if we all reason together and love one another then there need never be war. It could also be argued that having sex only gets you into trouble, so you should never have sex. Both sex and genocidal war are part of being human, and they can't be eliminated.
So we can show with simple mathematics that there must be another genocidal crisis war.
When does this war occur? That's the question that Generational Dynamics answers: The next crisis occurs at around the time that all the people who remember the last crisis war are gone (retired or dead).
This usually occurs around 60 years past the climax of the last crisis war. In our island example, this would be around year 140.
Wars like this occur all the time. You can pick any day in any year in the last century, and there were 20-40 wars going on on that day, and many of them were exactly this kind of crisis war, where the population had grown too quickly for the food supply (or other resources).
Many of these wars appear to be spontaneous explosions. In the French Revolution, the people spontaneously initiated a Reign of Terror and beheaded not only the aristocrats, but anyone with any relation to an aristocrat.
In the section above, "Political mid-cycle wars," we described a number of conflict scenarios that can occur during the awakening or unraveling periods: looting, a punitive mid-cycle war, or renewed peace talks are examples.
As long as the country or society is being guided by the wisdom of leaders who lived through the last crisis war, and remember how horrible and traumatic it was, there will not be another crisis war. But as soon as that last generation is gone, as soon as the leaders come from the generation born after the crisis war, then that wisdom is gone, and a new genocidal crisis war breaks out.
That's why looting or other low-level violence that occurs during the awakening and unraveling periods don't lead to war. But once the generational crisis period begins, then it only takes the right kind of spark for looting and demonstrations to "spiral out of control" and lead to full scale warfare.
Some people object to my use of the word "genocide" in describing crisis wars like World War II. Aren't some belligerents more moral than others?
Studying history and war cycles has perhaps been given me a more jaundiced view of life than many others might have. I do believe that America is more moral in warfare than many other countries, but the fact is that even a completely moral man will someone in self-defense, a completely moral tribe, society or nation will not hesitate to exterminate as much of an enemy as possible if it feels that its way of life is in danger.
There are degrees of genocide of course. Using nuclear weapons to finally end the blooshed of World War II is a more reasonable, rational thing to do than the "ethnic cleansing" campaigns that occurred in the Balkans and Rwanda in the 1990s, or in Cambodia in the 1970s, or, as I write this in 2004, in the Darfur region of Chad.
I hypothesize that just as each human being has a sex drive that drives him or her to have sex frequently, there is also a "genocidal spark" in each human being.
When the genocidal spark is activated, the human is driven by a hatred, a desire for vengeance, to exterminate those people whom he or she feels are trying to extermine him or her.
But unlike the sex drive, the genocidal spark is not activated frequently; it's activated only once in a person's lifetime.
Once a person lives through a crisis war, the genocidal spark is extinguished forever. That's why the cycle length of Generational Dynamics is roughly 80 years, the length of a human lifetime.
But if a person has never lived through a crisis war, then the genocidal spark remains, waiting until the right opportunity to be activated.
What causes the genocidal spark to be activated?
It appears that the genocidal spark is activated in a person whose way of life or family is in danger from an identifiable demographic group.
Many times this has to do with money. As I mentioned earlier, my thinking on this question was influenced by the American public's attitude in 2001, prior to 9/11, in conjunction with the Enron scandal. I was shocked at the extent to which Americans seemed to want all corporate CEOs to go to jail, even though probably no more than a dozen or so had broken the law.
Population grows faster than the food supply on a global basis. If we exclude wealthy countries like America, then population grows faster than the food supply on a local basis in every country around the world, and poverty and starvation increase every day. So we get this sequence of events:
Incidentally, the issue may not always be just poverty. For example, in the American Civil War, one reason that the South began the war was because they felt that the North was supporting servile insurrection (uprising of slaves), which would put their families' lives in danger.
The Prophets are the first generation born after the end of the last crisis war. They have no personal memory of the war. They become the society's leaders during the next crisis period.
....... Finish:
Heroes v Prophets in awakening, Heroes + Prophets in crisis
New Heroes during awakening - unstructured
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We'd like to discuss one more scenario, so let's assume that the Reds were truly genocidal in the literal sense of the word, and were successful in exterminating the entire Blue race. (If there were a few Blues left, they were assimilated into the Red population.)
What is likely to happen in this situation? The fact that the Blues are gone doesn't mean that there won't be any more crisis wars. Quite the contrary, the same basic problems arise: population grows faster than food supply, so there'll have to be another crisis civil war to thin the population.
We're reminded of the poem "If," where Rudyard Kipling counsels us to "meet with Triumph and Disaster and treat those two imposters just the same." The Reds will celebrate this war as a great, heroic, historic victory, and yet in the long run the same thing happens.
Since the natural fault line between the Reds and Blues is gone, a new fault line will develop within the Reds alone. Perhaps it will be a geographic fault line - the Northern Reds versus the Southern Reds. Of, if there's more than one religion, it might be one religious group versus another. There are many ways that a new fault line can form, but we can be sure that it must form, and that there'll be a new crisis war roughly 60 years after the previous one ended.
However, we'd like to go in a different direction for this final scenario. Suppose that our little island is "discovered" by some seafaring nation that decides to colonize it, in order to mine some of its natural resources.
Colonization is often treated as having negative connotations, but in many cases the exploitive motives are mixed with humanitarian ones.
The reasoning is this: Since the island is poor and underdeveloped, the colonizers can use the profits gained from mining to build new industries and create an import/export trade, so that the inhabitants of the island will be wealthier.
So the colonists come to the island and make the following proposal to the inhabitants:
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It's a great idea, and it appears to be a "win-win" for everyone.
It leads to the adjacent map, which shows that the colonists are now occupying a small region in the northern part of the island.
About 15-20 years after any generational crisis war, the generation of children who were born after the war (the Prophets) come of age, and a new awakening period will begin.
These kids will find plenty to riot and demonstrate about. They'll be furious that their fathers agreed to allow the colonizers to control the island's industries, and they're allowed to plunder the country's resources.
Even worse, the promises that the colonizers made -- an end to poverty, and end to hunger, will begin to fray. As population increases, it is literally impossible for the colonists to keep their promises. As the price of food increases, pockets of poverty and hunger grow in the population.
The older Hero generation is happy the way things are. The colonizers are building new workplaces and promising more. The Heroes don't want to see their children have to fight in another war like the last one, and so they would like things to keep going the way they are.
The younger Prophet generation rebels against their parents, as is usual in an awakening period, and they find plenty to be angry about.
The situation that arises is called a "market-dominant minority," where a minority of the population controls most of the marketplace.
Market-dominant minorities occur around the world, according to the book World on Fire, by Amy Chua.
where the colonists control most of the market, even though they're only a small
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Finally, at approximately time T=220 years, the
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&& ................ (crisis war intro) (STAMP: Friday, July 2, 2004, 16:06:11)
http://www.generationaldynamics.com/cgi-bin/D.PL?d=ww2010.wk.crisisintro