Winter is Coming: Making Sense of Our Upcoming Years

Winter is coming.

Or rather the winter, the Fourth Turning, of this saeculum (natural century or long natural life) started some time between the 2008 financial crisis and Brexit.

Former Vice President Al Gore has called Generations by Strauss and Howe the most stimulating book on American history he'd ever read and sent a copy to every member of Congress... Apparently most of them have not read it.

According to Strauss-Howe Generational Theory, Millenials are the Hero generation who will fight during a period of crisis that is likely to happen between 2005 and 2025. Their forecasts written in the 1990s have been surprisingly accurate. According to this model, an elder from the Prophet generation typically leads the young Millenial warriors to action. The leader is called a Grey Champion, whose appearance marks the arrival of a moment of “darkness, and adversity, and peril,” the climax of the Fourth Turning of the saeculum. That Grey Champion was Ben Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, and FDR... and our current Grey Champion might be Donald Trump.

I want you to detach yourself from your emotional response to Trump for one minute. Trump exists in reality: any overly emotional negative or positive response demonstrates your inaccurate perception of reality. Whether it's an irrational fear of uncertainty or a naive overconfidence, reality doesn't give a shit about your opinions. Even if he wasn't elected, we are still in the saecular winter. The crisis of the Fourth Turning happens whether you like it or not, in one form or another, outside of our complete comprehension. Everyone intuitively feels that a huge change is happening, and nobody knows for sure what it is. Regardless what your personal political opinions are, this is something that we can all feel.

There is no guarantee that the Grey Champion can overcome the challenges of our times. But there is no guarantee of another great war either. The saecular winter is an era of trials and suffering, but it does not have to end tragically. When it happens, we will all feel that there is a clear sense of the end of an era. There will be destruction, but there will also be heroism and a sudden spike in human progress.

Social Justice Warriors (SJW) is a manifestation of the Hero generation. There are the Paternalist Heroes decendent from the Progressive Party of Theodore Roosevelt of the last saeculum's autumn. They seek to save humanity through pushing progressive Western ideals upon everyone in an effort to raise their own karma points and earn salvation.

4Chan meme magicians is another manifestation of the Hero generation. The horrors if the last great war has now been forgotten by most living people and the current generation of young adults crave the glories of the meme wars and enjoy digital guerrilla warfare through trolling. This in turn, creates casualities among the SJWs who acquire PTSD from being too fragile to handle the meme war.

Tech entrepreneurs are also a manifestation of the Hero generation. They seek the glory of bringing us closer to the next saeculum through rapid technological progress. There's a strong hope of a transhumanist spring after we emerge from this winter crisis. These futurists' attention is focused on the Singularity which will happen in the summer of the next saeculum.

As we complete a full saecular cycle in history, history repeats itself in a different form but with similar sentiments. It has been nearly a full saeculum since the last great war/crisis/winter, WW2. It has also been half a saeculum since the Awakening (summer) of this saeculum, the consciousness revolution from 1960s to 1980s. During our saecular summer, there was a rise of atheism and Westerners' interest in Eastern mysticism.

Even the culture of rationality and science cannot escape the turning of the times, which is tied to our biological life cycles and each generation's time dependent umwelt. Like Theodore Roosevelt, in the autumn of our current saeculum, we saw the rise of the environmentalism championed by Al Gore and the rise of the paleo diet. We instinctively know that winter is coming, and we prepare for it through a nostalgia of more primal past. "Make America Great Again", rise of renewable energy, fear of global warming, hunting, veganism, etc are all different manifestations of the same phenomenon. A sense of the need to return to the tribe to prepare for the harshness of the upcoming winter, the Crisis of the Fourth Turning.

In this period of saecular autumn and winter, we become more conscious of our own mortality, and the urgency to prevent existential risks. This is demonstrated in the popularity of the Mayan Calendar Doomsday of 2012, Nassim Taleb's books, Elon Musk's sense of urgency to colonize Mars, MIRI's mission to prevent the existential risks of AI, the missions of various environmentalists, the rise of Donald Trump, and more. No matter how much we try to detach ourselves from history, each and every one of us are still merely cogs in the machinery of the cycles of history.

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Thanks for reading!