Yeah. So far it's just this Hodge podge of unrelated problems that create this crap sack situation. We can't spend our way out, we can't fight it way out, we gotta fix our way out.

Go in, unravel all the problems, institute long term work intensive solutions and... I think here's a common communication error, when Boomers say "change the system" they mean "make mild course corrections", when Millennials say it, they mean "switch systems" and this requires a lot of system switching. Not in an ideological sense, in a methodological sense... so switch systems.

It's just a long laundry list of making long term fixes.

Originally Posted by TimWalker

A house cleaning 4T?

A 3T usually imposes some very bad habits -- bad mass culture, profit-first business, corruption, bad government (Pierce-Fillmore-Buchanan; Harding-Coolidge-Hoover; Dubya, the latter only one President but horrid if you see him telescoping the bad Presidents of the 1920s with the addition of costly and bungled wars), pathological contempt for benign institutions, reckless speculation, underinvestment in the basics that make life tolerable... and a 4T usually forces big changes as a collapse begins. If things go right, people revert to unglamorous, long-term, low-yield, can't-run-from-without-ruin activities which created prior successes. Mom-and-pop business will create more wealth and satisfy more customers than will bureaucratic organizations that devour capital and may be headed to their doom... and the infamous public-private partnerships that have taxpayers putting up the investment and profiteers skimming the profits.

Kepi,

Who in God's name could invade us? Canada? Mexico? Or do you envision someone defeating the US Navy and subsequently launching an amphibious assault and subsequent occupation FROM ACROSS THE OCEAN?

EDITED TO ADD In the face of our nuclear deterrent as well.

I recall a post awhile back.... A possible distinction between the roles of Civic generations. Some such generations participate in grand Crises that transform the world. Other such generations basically fix a going concern. Millenials-fixers rather than founders?

Originally Posted by TimWalker

I recall a post awhile back.... A possible distinction between the roles of Civic generations. Some such generations participate in grand Crises that transform the world. Other such generations basically fix a going concern. Millenials-fixers rather than founders?

Sounds an awful lot like the whole Atonement/Advancement split again.

Yes, I believe that that distinction conforms to the double rhythm. Grand, transformative Crises fit with Advancement cycles, while the Atonement cycles tend to have civil wars.

Given that we are in an Atonement 4T, we may actually be lucky to have a hodge podge of seemingly unrelated problems. Better that than a civil war.

Originally Posted by TimWalker

Given that we are in an Atonement 4T, we may actually be lucky to have a hodge podge of seemingly unrelated problems. Better that than a civil war.

But what if one problem becomes irrepressible?

A hodge podge of problems-a crap sack situation-definitely suggests that we need a house cleaning rather than a civil war, or a grand crusade overseas.

************************************************** ***********************************

Originally Posted by herbal tee

But what if one problem becomes irrepressible?

Then it will be time for younger generations to pull a Gilded.

How's this as a name for this 4T? The Crap Sack Crisis. ​Or maybe The Crap Sack Years.

Originally Posted by Kepi

I doubt anyone would really want to wage retribution it they didn't have to, especially because that would depend on relying on leadership that nobody trusts. This just isn't a wartime 4T. It's a clearing house 4T.

Yes, it has been commented that Boomers are distrusted by the other generations. In contrast to the trust that the G.I.s had for their Missionary leaders.

Originally Posted by TimWalker

Yes, it has been commented that Boomers are distrusted by the other generations. In contrast to the trust that the G.I.s had for their Missionary leaders.

For good reason. Boomer leadership has shown itself inordinately selfish, ruthless, and arrogant whether as student radicals in the 1960s or the contemporary leaders of business. Some have been so reactionary that they would return science to the 18th century or re-establish peonage. Their religiosity is often crazy.

Discussion of Crap Sack world. Note the knights in sour armor.

Originally Posted by TimWalker

A hodge podge of problems-a crap sack situation-definitely suggests that we need a house cleaning rather than a civil war, or a grand crusade overseas.

I agree. Unfortunately, a house cleaning implies an consensus about what needs improvement and what needs to go. With the political balance as it is, I don't see this happening.

Which suggests that this 4T may end up muddled, at best.

Originally Posted by Marx & Lennon

I agree. Unfortunately, a house cleaning implies an consensus about what needs improvement and what needs to go. With the political balance as it is, I don't see this happening.

Yes, I think that lack of consensus will impose limitations on change. For example, the idea of turning the U.S. Federal gov't into a parliamentary system-considering how divisive our politics is now, how would you get a consensus for a major restructuring?

The ultimate winner of a Crisis is usually the one who can offer an optimistic vision that elevates far more people than it ruins. We are still in a world far better than that of the 1930s, when most of the world far from seeming on the way to becoming a Dantesque Inferno if it wasn't already there (think of Stalin's Soviet Union, the Third Reich, and Thug Japan) was going bad quickly. Dictatorship had become the norm in Europe, with most of the new democracies of 1919 having failed, most notably Germany. Even France was on the brink of a fascistic takeover. The capitalist order had itself largely failed.

Those who acquiesce in rottenness will get it. They could get thuggish regimes that offer pageantry in the service of a personality cult in return for tyranny and inequity. Nazi Germany defined that well -- but just imagine how vicious a KKK-dominated America would have been. Gaudy spectacles might have culminated in 'modern' versions of autos-da-fé -- perhaps some in which Catholic priests would be burned at the stake for refusing to recant Catholicism. It was the great good fortune of America that the 1915 Klan, a movement that anticipated the ugliest characteristics of the fascist regimes that America would face in a death struggle, imploded before the economic meltdown of 1929-1932. In view of the lynchings, beatings, and bombings of the KKK that it did to the extent that it could get away with and its wide range of hatred, just imagine how horrible a Klan-dominated America would be if the Klan could have gotten away with whatever angry deeds that its leaders and their close associates could get away with with impunity.

A Crisis Era has its own reality, and one of reality is that if things go well the People cast off the unsupportable nonsense of earlier times without soiling themselves with a descent into the abyss. The philosophical basis of life simplifies to something that practically everyone can understand, shared purpose becomes the norm, ambiguity in moral choices all but vanishes on the grand scale, pointless grudges are cast off, ability trumps identity, mass culture sanitizes, and baroque ornamentation gives way to accessibility and ease of replication. A Crisis Era goes well if people see the need of achieving something materially and morally better -- without ambiguity, and if people seek allies instead of scapegoats.

I can't say that this Crisis will turn into a death struggle with foreign enemies that adopt anti-human ideologies incompatible with everything that most Americans cherish as in the last Crisis or that America will rift into inimical regions as it did in the Civil War. It can get nasty, but one thing is certain: no "crap sack" vision in which people accede to something tolerable as 'dreadful' as a bar to the 'horrific' can succeed. People might not get all that they want, for there aren't enough castles to go around. Self-reliance even to the extent of creating opportunities (because our ruling elite will surely not do that on our behalf) will improve us. Part of the "crap sack" world is that many of us have crappy values.

Much of the American way of life -- "affluenza" for the classes from skilled workers to Old Money and grinding poverty for all others, a depraved and pessimistic mass culture, anti-rational rejection of science, enmity toward people unlike oneself, Orwellian propaganda in mass media, education that offers no means of judging good from evil or beauty from ugliness -- must go. We will need to constrain our devouring of resources and alleviate the suffering of the working poor (the majority in America). We will need to return colleges to the purpose of civilizing callow-but-promising youth so that they can see more to life than luxurious indulgence as the purpose of life -- "sex&drugs&rock-n-roll" with reptilian drives for sex and power just aren't enough. We need to take government away from the corporations and their well-paid lobbyists who ensure that only stooges can win.

In the meantime we need to make clear that those superficially-polished brutes who make life loathsome for the vast majority so that those brutes can enjoy sybaritic excess that depends upon the poverty of everyone else that those brutes are themselves evil, and that they can enforce their way only through means that will get mass resistance at best or at worst wars that will destroy them.

We create our own better world lest the one that we drift into implode.

Wild card/black swan events may occur. We could end up with a crisis that nobody envisioned and that nobody would want. In which case vision may be lacking. What would save us would be Nomad pragmatism, leading to unexpected outcomes.

Other than Culture Wars, what we seem to have in the present is a hodge podge of small 'c' crises, adding up to a Crap Sack CF. So not only is our politics divided, but so is our attention.

Originally Posted by TimWalker

Other than Culture Wars, what we seem to have in the present is a hodge podge of small 'c' crises, adding up to a Crap Sack CF. So not only is our politics divided, but so is our attention.

Don't expect mass acquiescence in a permanent "crap sack" result.

Originally Posted by TimWalker

Other than Culture Wars, what we seem to have in the present is a hodge podge of small 'c' crises, adding up to a Crap Sack CF. So not only is our politics divided, but so is our attention.

I have often wondered what CF stands for on this forum. Clusterf***?

Yes, I do believe that is what CF stands for. I never asked, because the meaning seemed to be implied by the topics.

Originally Posted by Brian Beecher

I have often wondered what CF stands for on this forum. Clusterf***?

chaotic and messy situation from multiple mistakes or problems happening in rapid succession