If Something Cannot Go On Forever, It Will Stop

So let's try to figure out what "stop" might mean in the real world

Herb Stein created his famous “law” as a useful analytical tool for approaching potentially harmful long-running economic trends, primarily to make the point that government intervention might not be necessary since, if a particular trend is not supported by existing realities, it will eventually collapse on its own.

In a way, it is an economics version of the Oliver Wendell Holmes’ tale of the One Hoss Shay.

The parson was working his Sunday's text,—

Had got to fifthly, and stopped perplexed

At what the—Moses—was coming next.

All at once the horse stood still,

Close by the meet'n'-house on the hill.

First a shiver, and then a thrill,

Then something decidedly like a spill,—

And the parson was sitting upon a rock,

At half-past nine by the meet'n'-house-clock,—

Just the hour of the Earthquake-shock!

—What do you think the parson found,

When he got up and stared around?

The poor old chaise in a heap or mound,

As if it had been to the mill and ground!

You see, of course, if you're not a dunce,

How it went to pieces all at once,—

All at once, and nothing first,—

Just as bubbles do when they burst.

End of the wonderful one-hoss shay.

Logic is logic. That's all I say.

This “shay” had been built throughout with the finest materials available, and each part lasted just as long as the others…until they all turned to dust at the same moment, leaving the man who depended upon the shay flat-assed on the ground, wondering what had happened.

Keep all this in mind while we consider a seemingly unrelated subject. I am an aficionado of cyclical theories of history, many of which are discussed in this excellent piece by Alexander Macris, The Wisdom of Naram-Sim. Let’s concentrate on just one of them for the moment, because it is currently serving as my own map through today’s confusing and perilous times:

A more recent cyclical theory of history is Strauss-Howe generational theory. According to Strauss and Howe, historical events occur in 80-year cycles, each marked by four turnings of a generation (20 years). Strauss-Howe theory has given rise to the oft-discussed concept of the Fourth Turning. Strauss-Howe theory is based on the idea that each generation of human beings predictably differs from the prior generation based on the conditions of its upbringing. Put bluntly, a new crisis occurs when the generation that remembered the last crisis dies off and a new generation that has known only good times take the wheel of the ship of state.

The concept is often summarized using the famous quote by author G. Michael Hopf in his book Those Who Remain:

Because it offers a causal mechanism based on civilizational changes, Strauss-Howe theory is close kin to Ibn Khaldun’s theory. It also has the virtue of fitting the data of my own country, the United States, relatively well:

• American Revolutionary Crisis, 1765 - 1785

• American Civil War Crisis, 1855 - 1875

• Great Depression and World War II, 1930 - 1950

• This Explains So Much, 2010 - 2030

What Strauss-Howe theory doesn’t offer is any sort of explanation of why some nations emerge from their 80-year crisis with renewed vigor and others wither and die.

I should probably leave trying to find that explanation to others, because I am far more concerned about the next five to seven years than I am about the next thousand, but I’ll take a crack at it toward the end of this essay. From the first time I discovered Generations Theory in the mid-nineties when somebody recommended Generations to me, I have used the concept as an ever-more effective aid in mapping out the future course of America and, possibly, the world.

Here is how a Fourth Turning is described in that book.

The Fourth Turning is a Crisis. This is an era of destruction, often involving war or revolution, in which institutional life is destroyed and rebuilt in response to a perceived threat to the nation's survival. After the crisis, civic authority revives, cultural expression redirects toward community purpose, and people begin to locate themselves as members of a larger group.

Nova/ChatGPT refers to it this way:

Strauss and Howe's Fourth Turning is characterized by several key features:

1. A societal crisis or major event: The Fourth Turning is marked by a significant event or crisis that requires a fundamental restructuring of society.

2. A generational shift: The crisis marks a turning point between one era and the next, with a new generation emerging to take control.

3. A sense of urgency: The crisis requires immediate action, and failure to act decisively can have dire consequences.

4. A focus on community and shared sacrifice: In order to overcome the crisis, individuals must come together and work towards a common goal, often requiring significant personal sacrifice.

5. A period of regeneracy and renewal: Following the crisis, there is a renewed sense of purpose and hope for the future, as society rebuilds and establishes a new order.

Very few people are expecting anything like this to happen, certainly not in the next five years. At least half of Americans seem convinced that the United States can handle direct military confrontations with Russia, China, perhaps Iran, and maybe even North Korea simultaneously and emerge victorious. Even more are equally sure that the U.S. is not facing any really threatening economic crisis, having heard predictions of doom on that front for at least fifty years. When I graduated from high school in 1964, the national debt stood at $312 billion, and shortly thereafter, Senator Everett Dirksen was inveighing against raising the public debt by $4 billion. Seems quaint, doesn’t it? I have been warned of the debt wolf at America’s door my entire adult life, well over half a century. and still the wolf has not yet made it into the living room. Perhaps the herd of elephants currently sitting there has frightened it away.

At any rate, having endured the yodeling of the wolf-criers for most, or all, of their lives, even those Americans who pay attention regard it as mostly background noise, and not worth their concern or, even more important, their action.

Humans are considered to be pattern-seeking animals. Our brains are wired to recognize and find patterns in our environment as a way to understand and navigate the world. This ability to identify patterns has been a key factor in our evolution and has allowed us to develop language, art, and complex societies. However, our propensity to find patterns can also lead to false beliefs and superstitions if we draw unsupported conclusions from incomplete or insufficient data.

So Americans see a seemingly permanent pattern of wolf-crying that results in no wolf, which then leads to another potential problem called normalcy bias.

Normalcy bias refers to a mental state that causes people to underestimate the possibility of a disaster or crisis occurring, and to downplay the potential consequences if it does occur. In simple words, it is the tendency to believe that everything will continue to function as it has been, and that there will not be any change or disruption to the status quo. People who are affected by normalcy bias often take no action (or insufficient action) to prepare for a potential crisis, assuming that things will just work out in the end.

This phenomena is often seen in various disasters, such as hurricanes or terrorist attacks, where people underestimate the potential damage or risk and do not take necessary precautions. It can also lead to a delayed response, which can exacerbate the situation.

Or, to stress the underlying theme of this site, they don’t look at the downside, because they assume it does not exist. A downside would be abnormal, and the pattern appears to demonstrate this premise is accurate. Hence I received a fair bit of mockery when I started a prepping site ten or twelve years ago, (I no longer keep up with it, but I keep it alive for the archives), though I did have something of a last laugh at the onset of the Covid event, when America marched off to the stores and stripped every shelf of toilet paper, while I surveyed the six cases of the stuff I had stashed away and chuckled softly.

Another problem that contributes to, and exacerbates, the misperceptions caused by normalcy bias is the systematic efforts on the part of the U.S. government and its corporate and other allies to create and maintain false narratives to the effect that all is perfectly fine, just ignore the nay-sayers, your democratically elected leaders have everything under control. Just do as we say, and all will be well. Left carefully unmentioned is the inherent contradiction: If you don’t leave everything to us, if you don’t do as we say, then all will not be well, and you will become prey to all the ills we tell you don’t exist. The implication is obvious. Only our benign governance and the realities it purports to spin up out of thin air are protecting you from the collapse of the one-hoss shay you’ve been riding around in for the past many decades.

Which brings us to our current state, where approximately a third of Americans really do believe that all is well, because they’ve been told by The Authorities (and their experts) that all is well, all is normal, and trusting authority is so much simpler, easier, and less worrisome than even remotely considering more frightening possibilities. These are the people who will be crushed first, and most thoroughly, when the one-hoss shay turns to dust overnight.

The second group, again about a third, have come to reflexively distrust The Authorities, to assume that establishment expertise is mostly either wrong or deliberately false in service to forces inimical to them, and are brewing up their own narratives to explain this state of affairs and to predict the future this will all entail. They will be least emotionally damaged by collapse because, while they may err in their predictions of specific forms of future danger, they are mentally prepared to face the idea that great danger lurks in their future. They will quickly adjust their own narratives about the nature of that danger to meet the danger that actually arrives.

The final third might be called the New Know-Nothings. The original American Know-Nothing party actually knew quite a bit, but just denied that it knew anything. Our current version is much larger, not actually politically or ideologically affiliated in any meaningful sense, knows very little in many different ways, and is very happy to keep it that way. This is, of course, merely normalcy bias expressed in a different format than authority worship, an infantile reaction along the lines of “If I close my eyes real tight, then bad things (ie., things I don’t like to think about) won’t exist any more.” The mantra of this crew is, “Oh, I don’t watch the news or follow social media. It’s always bad news, and who needs that?” Their most fervent belief is that ignorance is bliss. This third will also be damaged badly by the Fourth Turning collapse which will, in many cases, forcibly pull down their personal bastions of protective ignorance around their ears. As a group, they will also be at least as badly prepared to face times of trouble as the believers in the powers that be, because neither of them have had any incentive to ever consider downsides to their convictions about the current nature of the American reality, let alone make any preparations to protect themselves from such.

I mention this because the fact that about two thirds of the American public is intellectually, emotionally, financially, and physically unprepared to face any sort of major disruption to their assumptions of normality forever will make such disruptions, no matter what form they take, all that much worse, all the more mentally devastating, and all the more insurmountable. Nor can I foresee any way that having the majority of Americans in a fugue of panicked cognitive dissonance, essentially a massive psychotic break, will do anything but make the overall situation much, much worse. Historically, this has been a recipe for the appearance of the man on horseback, a Napoleon, a Hitler, a Stalin, any sort of authoritarian dictator who promises to make all the bad things go away if you only give all the reins of power into his hands. (Yes, it will be a him. Sorry, ladies.)

There is another potentially worrisome factor I see as a possibility, although there is not enough history available to put a great deal of emphasis on it. Nonetheless, I think it worth mentioning. The Fourth Turning that culminated with the American Revolution involved a war against a foreign power. The next one, culminating in the Civil War, involved a war between two domestic powers, the North and the South. The one after that, the Depression/WWII crisis, again involved a war against foreign powers. (All of them involved national financial ruination. It seems to be a feature of Fourth Turnings). If that alternation is any predictor, we should now be looking at some sort of domestic conflict, perhaps urban against rural, or another round of secessionary conflicts. I tend to favor the first as a primary possibility, given that urban enclaves tend to be solidly blue, no matter what overall color their states are.

Complicating matters is that Americans are the most gunned-up people in history. In rural areas, almost everybody owns, or has easy access to guns. This is less the case in the urban areas, although thanks to criminal gang activity, as well as armed “revolutionary” organizations, that is changing as well. And both sides have informal but potential paramilitary organizations. In rural areas, these might be hunters, over fifteen million strong, almost all of whom have used weapons, mostly rifles, to hunt and kill living things. There are also “militias,” much smaller in number, that claim to be prepared to use firearms to protect themselves and their communities.

In urban areas, criminal gangs based mostly in the drug trade as of 2010 might number 1.5 million members. Current statistics about gangs today are difficult to locate. FBI statistics pages are not dated, and various federal agencies seem to have differing sets of statistics and reach differing conclusions as to total numbers. Nonetheless, most members are armed, or could easily become so, and are acculturated to the idea of shooting those viewed as threats or enemies. There are also so-called “revolutionary cadres” representing various ideologies, mostly of the left. These appear to be relatively small, at least in their ability to field armed paramilitary forces, but by all indications they are growing, although to what extent seems unknown. Perhaps deliberately so.

When considering the characteristics of a possible collapse over the next six years or so, one has to take into account the brittleness and fragility of almost all aspects of American life today. In 2008, for instance, the collapse of a pile of criminally negligent home financing schemes almost brought our entire financial system to ruin.

Our just-in-time delivery systems on everything from groceries to bulldozers, designed to avoid various federal and state inventory taxes, guarantees that most Americans are perhaps a week away from empty stores of all kinds in the event of a system-destabilizing shock. The hyper-partisan ideological schisms between tens of millions of Americans, many of them armed, would seem to indicate that violence on a large scale would occur sooner, rather than later. Our transition to a low-trust society, especially among those who still consider themselves to possess agency on a personal level would mitigate against political authorities being able to do much to interfere with, or stabilize, a fast collapse.

This is even more the case given how sclerotic, inefficient, and uncaring our governments at all levels seem to have become. The fact that those with the institutional memory, practical know-how, and real expertise in our government workforce has retired without being replaced only compounds that problem.

Our educational systems no longer produce either well-educated people, or people whose knowledge of history and culture allow them to be resilient in the face of adversity. Even worse, much of what the current youngest generation and its immediate predecessor have been and are being taught - in matters cultural, economic, historical, political, and ideological is not just wrong, but catastrophically unworkable. In the event of a collapse of any sort, this will become immediately and unavoidably obvious, which will result in massive cognitive dissonance piled atop more massive cognitive dissonance within the two generations that we are told to expect to save us from disaster.

Many observers forget that the tides of history don’t shape men, men shape the tides of history.

Also forgotten, or ignored in the above attempt at summing up Generations Theory is that its heroic/savior generations, of which Millennials are supposed to be our current example, must have some significant underlying characteristics that permit their strengthening to meet hard times. The participation generation, raised on trophies for all and a tremendously bloated sense of both entitlement and grievance against earlier generations, don’t strike me as necessarily possessing those underlying characteristics. As for their successors, the Zoomers, the problems, while similar, are far more acute. A generation that prizes floridly displayed mental illness as a sought after social signifier is not going to be of much use in any system wide American collapse.

Strauss & Howe were careful to note that there is no guarantee a nation would survive its Fourth Turning crisis, which is why they called it an existential crisis: For the hero generation to fail to meet and overcome it would mean the nation itself would cease to exist. The Boomer generation cannot help. We are too few and too old and too powerless. GenX is too small, and growing old itself. Gen Z, at least at this point, looks simply hopeless. The Millennials are the army we have, and it is the army that is going to have to lead us through to the other side. Or not.

Thought experiments.

The Grids and Networks Go Down

Something (there are several possibilities, pick any that you like) causes either the Internet or the power network, or both, to fail. Immediately, anything that depends on either of them fails as well, followed within a day or two by the national realization that the checks aren’t going to be coming, creating mass panic among the hundred million or so of Americans who depend on those checks to one extent or another. At which another couple hundred million are shocked to discover that the “money” they thought they had stored in banks is nothing more than electronic dottle, and is now mostly unobtanium. As for all those carefully husbanded stocks, bonds, IRAs, and other such retirement funds, just more digital dottle, suddenly as vanished as the dodo.

This is just a scenario. But in general form it will resemble all other collapse scenarios. Some major shock to the system will kick off a cascading collapse that will occur with a speed that, we will be told, “nobody could possibly have imagined,” when, in truth, many might have imagined such, but almost nobody believed they could possibly happen. There’s that normalcy bias again.

Now let’s compare some of the differences between our last Fourth Turning - the Depression/World War II - and our current Fourth Turning state of play.

When the U.S. stock market collapsed, (with shocking and unexpected speed) only about ten percent of American families owned stocks. Should the market collapse today, 58% of Americans own stocks. This Motley Fool cite makes much of the fact that the very wealthy top one percent of Americans own half of those stocks, but in tough times, a few thousand bucks could, and likely would, mean far more to the remaining 99% than ten or a hundred million to the very wealthiest of us.

My own father, who was 23 in 1929, owned no stocks. However, he did have money in his bank account, a solid local bank that did not fancy financial shenanigans, just loaned money to folks who offered sufficient collateral and were of acceptable repute to be considered good risks to repay the money loaned. The bank went under, and took my dad’s savings with it. He never got a cent of it back, and never really trusted banks ever after, even though he continued to use them, because the local bankers were all personal friends. He was not alone in his loss, though.

In all, 9,000,000 savings accounts vanished without a trace during the Great Depression. Still, that represented less than ten percent of the total population of about 123 million. Today, about 81.5% of American households are considered “fully banked.” That is the vast majority of individual Americans. Anything that cuts those Americans off from that money will very shortly result in blood in the streets and fire in the buildings between those streets.

In 1933, 25% of all Americans worked on farms. Farms were small by today’s standards, and much more human-labor intensive. They had also been mostly in a state of economic depression due to overextension during World War One, resulting in a collapse in farm commodity prices, the repossession of many farms, and the collapse of rural banks that ended up stuck with a lot of essentially worthless farmland and the mortgage paper on it. In 1930, fewer that 10 % of all farms were electrified, so for the remaining 90-plus percent, a “power grid” was a nonexistent factor. This is not to say that Depression-era farmers had an easy time of it - they did not - but they were without a doubt more resilient and less dependent on national infrastructure like power grids and computerized logistics systems that were completely beyond their control.

He didn’t need gasoline or a computer to run this rig.

Today almost the opposite pertains. Farm and ranch families comprise less than 2% of the U.S. population. Farms themselves are larger, and vastly more productive. Agriculture in America today runs on four major pillars: Electricity, computers, diesel, and fertilizer. All four are entirely exposed to failure in any system-wide collapse. In an enterprise as intensely interlinked as is modern farming, almost no resilience remains. Failure here would be a follow-on to collapsed distribution systems exacerbated by the just-in-time deliveries demanded by today’s retailers, and would tend to increase the probabilities of mass starvation.

Very efficient, very expensive, and not very resilient.

Bad as the Great Depression was, America was in a considerably greater state of resilience than it is today. We were by far the largest industrial manufacturing plant in the world. Every aspect of our nation and culture was at much less risk due to the absence of everything being connected to, and dependent upon, everything else. There was hardship during the Depression, both rural and urban, but there was very little actual starvation. Far fewer people were directly and immediately affected by the various economic collapses that took place. Unemployment peaked at 25%, not the plus 95% you should logically expect in the event of a modern systemic collapse. And the Great Depression did not have the instant-communication media and social media networks that bring everything to everybody in just seconds or minutes. Back then most people had at least a little time to prepare themselves before the waves of destruction hit their personal shores.

There doesn’t seem to be, among the general public, and even among more specific demographics that should, in theory, be more knowledgeable, any real awareness of all these factors, and certainly no notion that such are even possible.

I could write a whole book, in fact, I already did, about them, and am currently writing another one. This second book is something of a reach, because it involves a normalcy bias predicated on the notion that things will hold together long enough for it to be of any value, or even for it to come fully into existence.

The upshot of all this is a possible answer to the question that Alexander Macris himself asks:

What Strauss-Howe theory doesn’t offer is any sort of explanation of why some nations emerge from their 80-year crisis with renewed vigor and others wither and die.

When you have a Hero Generation that has been deliberately drained of almost all heroic qualities, faced with a disaster so far beyond current human reckoning that it is inconceivable to most people as even a potential problem, in a completely deracinated and non-resilient society singularly ill-equipped to respond rationally or effectively to reality, then you have a recipe for a perfect storm of perfect storms. And then you wither. And then you die.