Why is there so much upheaval in the world these days? Why is there so much unrest? Why is it happening now? What do people really want? Is there any way of knowing how all of this resolves itself? Is there any way of knowing what any resolution will look like? How will our lives change on a practical, day-to-day level?

No one can answer these questions with any specificity. Yet, much can be known by a review of history and its seasons and cycles and patterns. My goal in this brief essay is to answer those questions on a high level.

There are three primary historical cycles that repeat, and whose details rhyme: the Technology Revolution, the Political Cycle, and the Revolutionary Cycle. 

Let us consider the basics of each in turn.

The Technological Revolution

The Technological Revolution (aka Kondratieff or K-waves) is on a 50-60-year cycle. 

It’s not something as singular as an iPhone; rather, it is the invention of something that changes the course of history. Think: steel, automobile, electricity, microprocessors and blockchain.

Steel enabled railroads, bridges, factories and eventually household appliances and automobiles. Not much needs to be said about how revolutionary the transition from horses to cars was. Before electricity, all light and heat required open fires. Microprocessors allow for the free exchange of information, and blockchain allows for the free exchange of value. More on this last one later.

The Political Cycle

The Political Cycle runs its course every 80-100 years. Each cycle has four parts of 20-25 years.

In their book titled The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy – What the Cycles of History Tell Us About America’s Next Rendezvous with Destiny, the authors, William Strauss and Neil Howe, explicate the four parts of each cycle, which they name: a High, an Awakening, an Unraveling, and a Crisis.

I do not recommend the book as they incorporate much more history and philosophy and generational psychology and other details ad nauseum than most of us care to have. The following is a good website to learn a bit more and discern whether you would, in fact, care to read the book: Lifecourse Associates: The Four Turnings. For our purposes, let me explain the four turnings of our current cycle in America.

The First Turning

The most recent first turning, the “High,” was the post-World War II American High, beginning in 1946 and ending with the assassination of John Kennedy in 1963. A First Turning is an era in which both the availability of social order and the demand for social order are high.

Coming of age during this High was the Artist archetype Silent Generation (born 1925 to 1942). Known for their caution, conformity, and institutional trust, silent young adults embodied the ethos of the High. Most married early, sought stable corporate jobs, and slipped quietly into America’s gleaming new suburbs.

Examples of earlier First Turnings include the post-Civil War Reconstruction Era, sometimes called the Victorian High of industrial growth and stable families, and the post-Constitution Era of Good Feelings, when Thomas Jefferson celebrated the advance of science and empire.

The Second Turning

Our latest second turning, the “Awakening,” was the “Consciousness Revolution,” which spanned from the campus and inner-city revolts of the mid-1960s to the tax revolts of the early ‘80s. A Second Turning is an era when institutions are attacked in the name of personal and spiritual autonomy.

Coming of age during this Awakening was the Prophet archetype Boom Generation (born 1943 to 1960), whose passionate idealism and search for authentic self-expression epitomized the mood of the era. Just when society is reaching its high tide of public progress, people suddenly tire of social discipline and want to recapture a sense of personal authenticity.

Examples of earlier Second Turnings include the Third Great Awakening around 1900, marked by labor protests, Billy Sunday evangelicals, “new woman” feminists, and the Transcendental Awakening, which Henry David Thoreau described as a period “when we have lost the world…and begin to find ourselves”.

The Third Turning

Our most recent third turning, the “Unraveling,” was the Long Boom and Culture Wars, beginning in the early 1980s and probably ending in 2008. A Third Turning is an era in which both the availability of social order and the demand for such order are low. Coming of age during this Unraveling was the Nomad archetype Generation X (born 1961-1981), whose pragmatic, free-agent persona and Survivor-style self-testing have embodied the mood of the era. The era opened with triumphant “Morning in America” individualism and drifted toward a pervasive distrust of institutions and leaders, an edgy popular culture, and the splitting of national consensus into competing “values” camps. Examples of earlier Unravelings include the periods around the “roaring” 1920s of Prohibition, the Mexican War in the 1850s, and the French and Indian Wars in the 1760s. These were all periods of cynicism and bad manners, when civic authority felt weak, social disorder felt pervasive, and the culture felt exhausted.

The Fourth Turning

The Fourth Turning is a “Crisis.” We are in the midst of one now. A Fourth Turning is an era in which the availability of social order is low, but the demand for such order is high. This is an era in which America’s institutional life is torn down and rebuilt from the ground up — always in response to a perceived threat to the nation’s very survival. 

In every instance, Fourth Turnings have eventually become new “founding moments” in America’s history, refreshing and redefining the national identity. America’s most recent Fourth Turning began with the stock market crash of 1929 and climaxed with World War II. The generation that came of age during this Fourth Turning was the Hero archetype G.I. Generation (born 1901 to 1924), whose collective spirit and can-do optimism epitomized the mood of the era.

Today’s Hero archetype youth, the Millennial Generation (born 1982 to 2004) show many traits similar to those of the G.I. youth, including rising civic engagement, improving behavior, and collective confidence.

Examples of earlier Fourth Turnings include the Civil War in the 1860s and the American Revolution in the 1770s — both periods of momentous crisis, when the identity of the nation hung in the balance.

The Revolutinary Cycle

The final historical cycle for us to summarize is the Revolutionary Cycle. It is a 250-year cycle. The Political Cycle is 84 years long on average. If you multiple 84 x 3, you get 252. So Revolutionary Cycles occur every 3 Political Cycles.

250 Years ago we had the French and American Revolutions. 250 years before that, we had the Protestant Revolution. The interesting thing about these revolutions is that they are always about rebellion against a centralized authority, a push for more decentralization, for more autonomy and self-sovereignty.

This was obvious 250 years ago, when French citizens were toppling the aristocrats in their top-down monarchy, and when the Colonists sought independence.

What about 500 years ago? What about the Reformation? At that time, the Roman Catholic church owned the vast majority of land and controlled the flow of information. Only church authorities possessed copies of the Bible and they dispensed the “truth” to the commoners.

The Reformation conveniently coincided with the recent invention of the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg. The church waged a valiant war against decentralization of the Scriptures and other writings. Hundreds of thousands were killed who were caught in possession of a copy of the Scriptures, but, in the end, information was secured by sovereign individuals once and for all.

The Convergence of Three Cycles

Here in the 2020’s, we are perhaps at the most interesting juncture in history. For in this decade, all three of the cycles have converged. We are in a fourth turning — a populist uprising — and at a (roughly) 250-year juncture in which citizens around the world are pushing back against central governments that have become too large and too controlling.

It’s not just the pandemic that people are reacting to. Prior to the pandemic, there were over 10 countries with a million or more people protesting. So right now, simultaneous with a fourth turning, and a 250-year political cycle rejecting centralization, we have a 50-year K-wave that is giving us the tools for decentralization: blockchain and bitcoin.

Money is a form of technology: it stores the value of the hard work done for your employer. It stays in that form until you choose to convert it to a gift or a good or a service. When the government prints money out of thin air and inflates it, our labor is stolen (partially enslaving us) by devaluing our money. In 1984, 24 years before the invention of bitcoin, Friedrich Hayek, the great economist said:

It is simple math: our government will never be able to pay off its debt.

It is not just the $30 trillion; together with the unfunded liabilities of Social Security and Medicare, our nation is well in excess of $100 trillion in debt.

If our government eventually does not outright default on its debt, it will do something similar (A reset? A reorganization? A restructuring?) to devalue our hard-earned money.

It will not be getting better any time soon; this Fourth Turning does not conclude before 2028.

I would urge you to get some bitcoin. Maybe just 1% of your savings as monetary insurance.

The author wishes to acknowledge his indebtedness to the Mark Moss podcast for his education around the convergence of these cycles.