Will Everything Change in 2020-2025 or Will Nothing Change?
Any domino-like expanding crisis will unfold in a status quo lacking any coherent response.
Longtime readers know I’ve often referenced The Fourth Turning, the book that makes the case for an 80-year cycle of existential crisis in U.S. history.
The first crisis was the constitutional process (1781) following the end of the Revolutionary War, whether the states could agree on a federal structure; the 2nd crisis was the Civil War (1861) and the 3rd crisis was global war– World War II (1941).
According to this proposition, we’re fast approaching an existential crisis that could upend the status quo in a fundamental fashion.
While there is a great deal of historical evidence for cycles, predicting a major transition based on previous cycles is obviously a guess rather than a certainty.
So will everything change in 2020-25, or will the present simply extend another five years? We have to start by defining what qualifies as fundamental change. In my view, if the current distribution of income, power and ownership of capital remains unchanged, nothing of import has changed.
There might be dramas playing out in the political theater, but if the asymmetrical distribution of income, power and wealth doesn’t change, then the dramas are merely another form of distraction / entertainment.
The other type of change that qualifies as fundamental is the breakdown of the structures of everyday life: the distribution, cost and availability of food, fresh water, energy, healthcare, income and basic security.One way to measure the vulnerability of any society to breakdown or a fundamental reshuffling of income, wealth and power is to examine its buffers–the resiliency and reserves of the core systems.I often reference buffers, as these are largely invisible to everyone who isn’t intimately familiar with the workings of each system: the reserves that can be drawn upon in crisis, the redundancies, the staff and management training to handle crises, and so on.
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