In this episode, I talk to my friend Andy Schaalman, who has Substack, Fourth Turning Chronicles but whose work can be found mostly on his YouTube page, where all of his great videos are.
We talked for almost three hours, so it’s a real Joe Rogan-type deal. Both of us have been interested in the Fourth Turning for many years. He is a millennial, and I am Gen-X. We get pretty deep into it, so it probably might not be interesting to anyone who isn’t interested in the concept. But if you are, have a listen.
Referenced in our podcast is this episode:
But many of his videos are worth a watch. You can find them here.
Meanwhile, here is some Fourth Turning info referenced in the podcast.
Here are some quotes from The Fourth Turning, a link to the book, and videos.
“At each of these great gates of history, eighty to a hundred years apart, a similar generational drama unfolded. Four archetypes, aligned in the same order—elder Prophet, midlife Nomad, young adult Hero, child Artist—together produced the most enduring legends in our history. Each time the Gray Champion appeared marked the arrival of a moment of “darkness, and adversity, and peril,” the climax of the Fourth Turning of the saeculum.”
“What will America be like as it exits the Fourth Turning?
History offers no guarantees. Obviously, things could go horribly wrong—the possibilities ranging from a nuclear exchange to incurable plagues, from terrorist anarchy to high-tech dictatorship. We should not assume that Providence will always exempt our nation from the irreversible “tragedies that have overtaken so many others: not just temporary hardship, but debasement and total ruin. Since Vietnam, many Americans suppose they know what it means to lose a war.
Losing in the next Fourth Turning, however, could mean something incomparably worse. It could mean a lasting defeat from which our national innocence—and perhaps even our nation—might never recover. As many Americans know from their own ancestral backgrounds, history provides numerous examples of societies that have been wiped off the map, ground into submission, or beaten so badly they revert to barbarism.
