Dear Matt,
This is in response to
http://fourthturning.com/forums/view...=144763#144763
Originally Posted by
MichaelEaston10
> What I meant was, how do you prepare? I know you are pessimistic
> about your health, but is there anything that you do? What I am
> trying to get at is...what would you advise me (I think I might
> know the answer to that question but I need to hear someone else
> say it)?
> Like I have said, my brain believes in the theory, but my heart
> does not.
> Unfortunately my brain tells me that my heart is wrong, because I
> would have felt the same way in 1928 and other times just before a
> crisis.
This is a very big question, and the following is a long, rambling
answer that starts with a lengthy diversion on how I spend my time,
and then make some suggestions for you.
As you know, I post several new articles on my web site every week.
Some of these articles flow so easily, they practically write
themselves. Others are so painful, typing each word is like pulling
a tooth. Writing these articles is very time consuming.
This requires keeping track of everything going on in the world. Ten
years ago I could listen to a BBC world service broadcast and not
even know what 2/3 of the stories were talking about. Today I'm happy
to say that I know what's going on in all of the stories I hear on
BBC. At work, when I'm not in a meeting or on the phone, then I'm
working at my computer with the headphones on, and I'm listening to
the BBC world service. At night and on weekends at home I watch all
the news channels -- CNN, FNC, MSNBC, and other news things. However,
don't think that there's no "fun" in my life, since I also watch all
the major prime time entertainment shows. After all, it's important
to have a balanced life.
I also try to answer all the e-mail messages that my web site readers
send me, subject to my workload in other areas, and I take part in
this forum. This gives me a feel for what people think about my web
site and what's going on in the world.
I also keep huge numbers of articles on file. I copy and save
probably a dozen or so articles a day, on the average. This is
important because news articles are available on the internet only
for a few days after publication in most cases. If I want to write
about something that happened in 2003, I usually have a wealth of
information right on my own hard disk to draw on.
But knowing what's going on in the news is not nearly enough, since I
have to interpret every news story from the point of view of
Generational Dynamics. There are 200+ countries in the world, and
every one of those countries has a unique history, a unique
generational timeline, and a unique set of fault lines. These all
have to be understood so that current events can be put into a
historical context. And there are many dangers that I have to avoid.
Since fault lines are religious, ethnic and racial, I'm constantly
writing about things that could be offensive to some groups, and I
have to be very careful to be balanced. Thus, if I call the
Palestinians genocidal then I have to call the Jews genocidal as
well. (Not a problem, since every nation is genocidal in the end.)
Another danger is stupidity. If I write something that's obviously
wrong to somebody living in the country I'm writing about, then I
really look stupid, which means that I have to know enough about every
country to write intelligently about it. Another danger is political
silliness. 99% of the newspaper columnists today define anything that
happens in the world in terms of something Bush said or did. There is
nothing quite so idiotic as this practice, especially since most of
the major trends in the world today were established decades or
centuries ago. Another danger is obfuscation. This is more a writing
thing, but it's still important. The articles have to be written in
clear language, written so that an American with very little knowledge
about the subject can still understand the issues.
There's always something new to study. For example, Ethiopia is
close to civil war and close to a border war with Eritrea. If
there's a war, will it be a crisis war? I've never looked much at
Ethiopia, so I'm unprepared for this situation. In order to figure out
what's going on in Ethiopia today, I have to figure out the
generational timeline for at least a century or two. That can be very
time consuming, as I've discovered in the past. It took me a couple
of months to figure out Haiti's timeline. And it's important because,
with the end of the Darfur crisis war, it would be the only crisis war
currently going on in the world today.
And I've never really focused a lot of South America, which is very
unfortunate because I wish I had something to say about the thousands
of anti-American demonstrators in Mar del Plata Friday. (Although
I'm very well aware that the fault lines in South America are across
the market-dominant minorities originally from France and Spain and
other European colonizing nations versus the poor indigenous Indian
groups.)
Putting everything together, the long term goal -- and this has been
my dream for a couple of years now -- is to put together a "model of
the world." This model would take into account the hundreds or
thousands of nations, tribes, regions, ethnic groups, religious
groups, racial groups, and so forth, establish their generational
histories for several centuries back, and then use the model to
project into the future. Everything I do on my web site and in my
books is moving in that direction, but it's a huge amount of work. If
I live long enough, then some day I hope to get some funding so that I
can work on it full time.
And as long as I'm on the subject of funding, I'd love to oversee
what might be called "turning polls" around the world. These would
be very simple polls that could be conducted in shopping malls --
just ask people a few questions about their attitudes towards other
groups and nations -- this would firmly establish (I believe) exactly
where each nation is in the turning paradigm (beginning or middle or
end of 1T, 2T, 3T or 4T), and would be highly predictive of crisis
wars. When fed into the "model of the world" that I described, we
would have something comparable to the power of "psychohistory" in
Isaac Asimov's "Foundation" novels.
I think you can see that even though I've been developing
Generational Dynamics pretty much alone, it's already become a very
large subject. I could teach a college course that would easily fill
up two semesters at either the undergraduate or graduate level. The
theory is robust enough so that it serve as the basis of a graduate
level thesis in history or economics or possibly even mathematics.
