It may be that the wolf-crying was totally true, only that the wolf was far away, so, the wolf-criers warned of the danger of letting the wolf keep coming closer, and the others, well, since the wolf was far away, why bother if life is so good ...
Oh, I agree. But the problem remains. By the time the wolf finally puts in an appearance, everybody will deny its existence until it blows their house down.
This is always the case, but the important thing is to understand the real problem, the good times "soften" the discipline and introduce behaviors that are the wolf of our history, unhealthy indebtedness, lack of civility (which implies not getting involved enough in politics to keep politicians in check), etc., etc., etc.
Those behaviors at first are sporadic, and superficial (the wolf is far away), but in a negative feedback the discipline gets weaker and weaker and those behaviors get stronger and stronger, until we have the wolf at the door, and to make matters worse we don't have a good rifle to eliminate it.
I suppose that if human beings are really intelligent, they can detect these cycles (we have already done this part) and design measures (we have not yet achieved this) to attack the causes that cause them to occur and introduce entropy in society (I use the word 'entropy' precisely because we can never stop fighting against it, once we stop fighting it, it advances and disintegrates everything).
I suppose a critical science that we need to develop, and we never did, is the study of human institutions and how to design them to be resistant to those cycles and produce human beings resistant to those cycles. We used to have religion, which I suppose codified behaviors (learned over centuries of trial and error) that generated more or less resilient human beings, today we have nothing, just a fluorescent screen that invites us to gawk ..
I disagree with your take on Millennials. The participation trophies aside, most of them came of age and sought employment around the 2008-2009 GFC. Good luck there. Then right when they are ready to start family formation, Covid hits. They have dealt with some hard times. As a generation they excel at teamwork and cooperation. They might be exactly what we need going forward.
"as a generation they excel at teamwork and cooperation" .. well, that statement is a mix of pastiche, cliche and intellectual laxity, which in itself is a merit that deserves a trophy .. and if we were to comment on the phrase "they have dealt with some hard times", well, we would already be talking about the Nobel Prize (quite devalued nowadays due to all the politicking) ..
Thanks! Good piece. As a prepper, I'm familiar with the Zombie Apocalypse concept, of course, which is really just another term for SHTF (Shit Hits The Fan). Whatever you call it, though, preppers understand that no matter what the nature of any particular version that occurs, the needs will remain the same: food, water, shelter, medicine, and firearms to both protect them (and you), and to add to food supplies via hunting and so forth.
Don't undersell the Gen Z population. Many of them have developed real-life skills since the Covid lockdowns. And, they have gotten used to living on less.
So, maybe, SOME of them will survive. With the assistance of family, some will do better. One of the reasons that social collapse happens in the 4th Turning is that the eldest generations died out.
Today, older generations survive, in reasonably good health, for longer. That ability to pass on knowledge of bad times may extend longer.
A minor correction: S&H date the inception of GenZ at 2004. The last generation to face and survive a Fourth Turning was the Hero Generation of the Depression and WW II. They haven't passed on much of anything to the Zoomers, because by the time any significant number of that generation were capable of receiving that hard-won knowledge, the givers were mostly dead.
I hope you turn out to be right. From my current point of view, though, it seems that Gen Z's most potentially useful attribute is sheer physical youth, and the advantages that come with that.
But I'm not looking for a "change producer." Generations Theory calls for an Existential Crisis, usually involving war and economic collapse. Change producer seems a bit mild to describe something like that.
The extremity of the sucking of the heroic qualities might be overexaggerated some. Perception from social media taints a lot. Certainly feels accurate on the lack of resilience though. That I seek to fix for myself.
Resilience can be consciously acquired. That is probably the whole point of prepping in the first place. In theory, I suppose, resilience could be consciously acquired on a national level, but after once losing it, I'm unaware of any cases where it was reacquired in time to head off some sort of catastrophe.
If the dollar dies, gold won't be of that much use, because people won't trust that it's real. If you want to be the key person, figure out how to do gold assays.
Yes, of course. As as a prepper, it just happens that I do have a fairly extensive little kit of metal assay equipment and chemicals. Although I should probably look into the shelf life of that stuff. It's been there a while.
Other ways to avoid the problem. Don't stockpile gold bars. They're too big to be of any use in retail commerce. American Eagle gold coins could be useful for large transactions (real estate, etc.) but, though you pay a premium, the one tenth oz coins are more practical for everyday use. Also, supplement with junk silver (pre-1965 U.S. coins containing 90% silver content). At one point I had several $1000 face value bags of the stuff. Considering the weight involved, though, I'd go with no more than one bag, and stash whatever else you wish in gold.
Note that both gold eagles and junk silver coins have the imprimatur of the U.S. government on them. Most people will, I think, tend to take them as legitimate, although in the case of the junk, you might want to keep on hand some legitimate hard copy reference explaining what junk silver is, and its silver content.
Fatalism may seem attractive as a philosophical concept, but there is something to be said about the lack of atheists in foxholes, too. The fact that we all die (no longer, by the way, entirely a sure thing) does not mean people are crazy for trying to put it off as long as possible.
The GunTuber Paul Harrell just posted two "Top five firearms for TEOTWAWKI," a short version at around 23 minutes and a two hour long version. He stayed away (in the short one anyway) from discussing what form the collapse may take, simply making some general points about why everyone would need firearms and what he should prioritize.
Many preppers speak of the "Zombie Apocalypse," but I doubt anyone seriously expects a zombie outbreak. On the other hand, there are people who believe in the Flat Earth, or that Joe Biden received 81 millions votes in 2020, so who knows for sure? My belief is that talking of zombies keeps discussion of a potentially dark topic light, and also represents the worst case scenario. That is, if you can handle a zombie outbreak you ought to be set for whatever actually happens.
As for myself, I would not call myself a prepper, although I do have cases of long shelf life rations in the garage. That's just common sense, especially living in a rural environment. I think everyone, urban or rural, should be prepared to withstand a two week disruption of service, at minimum. City people are by nature unprepared for this mindset, as their solution to every disruption is "Call the city and wait for the man in the truck to show up and fix it." Of course, if TEOTWAWKI does happen, two weeks is nothing but a cushion to get ready for the real survival scenario. I don't know what's coming, but I am not optimistic about it.
Re: Harrel's YouTube piece: As I was watching, I checked off what I already owned. And I had everything covered that he recommended. I had a .45 carbine with matching pistol using the same mags. I had a Ruger LCP. I had an AR platform (folding). I had a Ruger 10/22 with several 30 rd. mags. I had a Ruger Mk III. I had a S&W .38 snubby. (And a .357 S&W J-Frame). And so on. Good to see that my own choices had paralleled a noted gun expert's picks for the same situations. And my own thought processes in picking what I did were quite similar to his as well.
I don't understand how you can count anything about the US and its turnings while ignoring the greatest cataclysm the planet faced in maybe 3000 years, and that was the Great War. We are still living with its aftermath, as every issue people are facing now is still a result of that detritus of that societal upheaval where Europe lost faith in being. There was no single 20 year period there culminating in that; but okay, let's pretend. But the next 80 years produced more upheaval, not less, though you can argue that the fall of communism in Europe was the fourth turning of the cycle of almost endless war that was the 20th c.
In any case, where we are now isn't the fourth of anything. Globalism was founded on the fall of European communism and the rise of Chinese totalitarianism. It began in the 1990s, whether you date it to the fall of the Berlin Wall and Tiananmen Square or the fall of the Soviet Union. But globalism has not made it even 40 years yet.
A better range of times would look at French Revolution to Napoleon to Congress of Venna in 1814, approximately 30 years, which led Europe under basic stability for 30 years until the revolutions of 1848, which all failed and cemented the powers of their day for another 60 before the cataclysm.
War was a constant in that time, too.
The fall of European communism is much more like the Congress of Vienna, and our resistance to globalism now is much like 1848, perhaps with the same crushing outcome.
It's good to remember that the upheaval of our own 1960s involved as much violence and as much decadence and sickness in our cities in the 1970s. It took 16 years from the assassination of JFK until the election of RWR and things were swinging up again.
The thing is, Strauss & Howe's Generations Theory is not intended to apply to groups of nations, or overall histories. It is applicable to individual nations. That's why a Fourth Turning is characterized as a *national* existential crisis.
Here is where I'd look for young heroes: the environmental movement. They may be lefty in outlook, but they do things with real stuff, and are big believers in self and community sufficiency. An alliance between the froggy Right and the eco hippie Left is in order.
Clearly there are grounds for alliance on the subject of the gurlimanification chemicals which blunt heroic potential. I would also note that the "Buy Local" battle cry of the greenies who form food coops is Trumpism Extra Strength. The eco hippies are also known to do things such as create local currencies.
Yes, the call for green energy could lead to a nightmare of interconnected grids for load balancing plus greater dependency on the grid in order to fuel electric cars.
But there is the flip side of green energy: solar panels to get off the grid. Biofuels to disconnect from Big Oil. Self sufficient communities to reduce the need for transportation, etc.
Fab, I'm sorry to have to confess that I am not as au courant on the current state of the environmental movement as perhaps I should be, probably because the current perversion of language has corrupted any such terms into just more babble-words in the all-inclusive Church of the Anti-Carbon liturgy.
It is hard to tease out the various current manifestations that still correspond to the way I understood the term environmentalism back in the 1960s and 1970s. You know, clean air, clean water, save the animals, save the plants, don't litter, that sort of thing. At any rate, are these "hippie leftovers" significant enough to be of any use in the event of the sort of calamity I foresee occurring sometime before 2030?
I'm a bit out of date myself. I left Hippyland East over a decade ago. But once upon a time I was doing Libertarian politics in Asheville, NC. I figured that if you cannot sell libertarianism in a town where people were openly smoking pot in downtown, then the Party of Pot has no future.
Well, it turned out that the local pot activists were more concerned about the environment and "big corporations" than they were about pot. And here's the key: many of those concerned about "big corporations" were business owners. While they called themselves Progressives, they were to a large degree Luddites. That is, they adhered to the Jeffersonian vision of lots of small farms and small businesses. They didn't want to shop at Wal Mart, and they didn't want to shop at Department of Retail Store #234293572 either. They wanted to shop at locally owned businesses.
Anyway, I got to know these people quite well and had some success pointing out where excessive government regulation was giving Wal Mart an advantage over Mom and Pop operations. (They didn't like the fact that Whole Foods was taking over the organic food business, either.) Many of these people were doing small scale farming. Some were converting diesel powered cars to run on heated waste vegetable oil. Some were refining waste vegetable oil to run in unconverted diesel engines. And, of course, there was lots of tinkering with solar cells, underground housing, and other means of getting off the Grid.
And some of them believed in conspiracy theories that resembled publications by the John Birch Society.
There's quite a bit overlap between the modern hippie Left and the froggy Right. The rhetoric of the former is more feminine, but many of the goals are quite similar. Go to any downtown which is on the upswing from full-on ghetto mode but hasn't fully gentrified yet, and you will find plenty of calls for buying local etc.
----
Communicating with the hippie or any other Left has gotten harder lately, due to Wokeness and Cancel Culture. That's why I reach out to the populist Right these days.
But I want to bring both together. We are too centralized. The Wall St. Woke alliance resembles the predictions in "None Dare Call it Conspiracy." While I am anti-socialist, I am anti excessive concentration of capital as well. Banks are too big. The tax code should encourage people to get out of debt before saving for retirement. The electrical grids should not be too interconnected. And the system needs to work when a grid goes down.
There are people on both the far Left and the far Right who agree with these underlying values.
Thanks, Alex. Your post was what led me to re-examine some of my own assumptions about a Fourth Turning. Unfortunately the result only turned up more downsides, and made my outlook gloomier. So, big win for the doom team, right?
Speaking of which, did you know the acronym DOOM is used in the ADHD world to mean, "Don't Organize, Only Move" to describe the way many neurodivergents try to organize, well, any sort of disorder?
Which may have some application to our national neurodiverged mind.
It may be that the wolf-crying was totally true, only that the wolf was far away, so, the wolf-criers warned of the danger of letting the wolf keep coming closer, and the others, well, since the wolf was far away, why bother if life is so good ...
Oh, I agree. But the problem remains. By the time the wolf finally puts in an appearance, everybody will deny its existence until it blows their house down.
This is always the case, but the important thing is to understand the real problem, the good times "soften" the discipline and introduce behaviors that are the wolf of our history, unhealthy indebtedness, lack of civility (which implies not getting involved enough in politics to keep politicians in check), etc., etc., etc.
Those behaviors at first are sporadic, and superficial (the wolf is far away), but in a negative feedback the discipline gets weaker and weaker and those behaviors get stronger and stronger, until we have the wolf at the door, and to make matters worse we don't have a good rifle to eliminate it.
I suppose that if human beings are really intelligent, they can detect these cycles (we have already done this part) and design measures (we have not yet achieved this) to attack the causes that cause them to occur and introduce entropy in society (I use the word 'entropy' precisely because we can never stop fighting against it, once we stop fighting it, it advances and disintegrates everything).
I suppose a critical science that we need to develop, and we never did, is the study of human institutions and how to design them to be resistant to those cycles and produce human beings resistant to those cycles. We used to have religion, which I suppose codified behaviors (learned over centuries of trial and error) that generated more or less resilient human beings, today we have nothing, just a fluorescent screen that invites us to gawk ..
I disagree with your take on Millennials. The participation trophies aside, most of them came of age and sought employment around the 2008-2009 GFC. Good luck there. Then right when they are ready to start family formation, Covid hits. They have dealt with some hard times. As a generation they excel at teamwork and cooperation. They might be exactly what we need going forward.
"as a generation they excel at teamwork and cooperation" .. well, that statement is a mix of pastiche, cliche and intellectual laxity, which in itself is a merit that deserves a trophy .. and if we were to comment on the phrase "they have dealt with some hard times", well, we would already be talking about the Nobel Prize (quite devalued nowadays due to all the politicking) ..
Yes, that is Howe's current take on the Millennials as well.
A good companion piece:
https://hwfo.substack.com/p/the-surprisingly-solid-mathematical
Thanks! Good piece. As a prepper, I'm familiar with the Zombie Apocalypse concept, of course, which is really just another term for SHTF (Shit Hits The Fan). Whatever you call it, though, preppers understand that no matter what the nature of any particular version that occurs, the needs will remain the same: food, water, shelter, medicine, and firearms to both protect them (and you), and to add to food supplies via hunting and so forth.
Don't undersell the Gen Z population. Many of them have developed real-life skills since the Covid lockdowns. And, they have gotten used to living on less.
So, maybe, SOME of them will survive. With the assistance of family, some will do better. One of the reasons that social collapse happens in the 4th Turning is that the eldest generations died out.
Today, older generations survive, in reasonably good health, for longer. That ability to pass on knowledge of bad times may extend longer.
"many of them have developed real-life skills" .. could you enlighten us as to what these useful skills would be?
Make sure you are labeling your generations correctly. Projecting the Strauss-Howe formula forward from Boomers to Zoomers
Boomers - born 1945 to 1959
GenX - born 1960 to ~1980
GenY aka Millennials - born ~1980 to ~2000
GenZ - born ~2000 to ~2020
At this point, only the very oldest members of GenZ have passed out of childhood.
Also, older generations are almost as likely to pass on maladaptive information as good information.
A minor correction: S&H date the inception of GenZ at 2004. The last generation to face and survive a Fourth Turning was the Hero Generation of the Depression and WW II. They haven't passed on much of anything to the Zoomers, because by the time any significant number of that generation were capable of receiving that hard-won knowledge, the givers were mostly dead.
I hope you turn out to be right. From my current point of view, though, it seems that Gen Z's most potentially useful attribute is sheer physical youth, and the advantages that come with that.
I think that covid (or should we say - the covid response) qualifies as a fourth turning.
I would submit that it did not produce nearly enough devastation to meet the qualifications.
If the sole criterion is devastation, point taken. But if one is looking at 'change producer', I would say perhaps it does.
But I'm not looking for a "change producer." Generations Theory calls for an Existential Crisis, usually involving war and economic collapse. Change producer seems a bit mild to describe something like that.
The extremity of the sucking of the heroic qualities might be overexaggerated some. Perception from social media taints a lot. Certainly feels accurate on the lack of resilience though. That I seek to fix for myself.
Resilience can be consciously acquired. That is probably the whole point of prepping in the first place. In theory, I suppose, resilience could be consciously acquired on a national level, but after once losing it, I'm unaware of any cases where it was reacquired in time to head off some sort of catastrophe.
If the dollar dies, gold won't be of that much use, because people won't trust that it's real. If you want to be the key person, figure out how to do gold assays.
Yes, of course. As as a prepper, it just happens that I do have a fairly extensive little kit of metal assay equipment and chemicals. Although I should probably look into the shelf life of that stuff. It's been there a while.
Other ways to avoid the problem. Don't stockpile gold bars. They're too big to be of any use in retail commerce. American Eagle gold coins could be useful for large transactions (real estate, etc.) but, though you pay a premium, the one tenth oz coins are more practical for everyday use. Also, supplement with junk silver (pre-1965 U.S. coins containing 90% silver content). At one point I had several $1000 face value bags of the stuff. Considering the weight involved, though, I'd go with no more than one bag, and stash whatever else you wish in gold.
Note that both gold eagles and junk silver coins have the imprimatur of the U.S. government on them. Most people will, I think, tend to take them as legitimate, although in the case of the junk, you might want to keep on hand some legitimate hard copy reference explaining what junk silver is, and its silver content.
If you tell someone that the gold that they're about to buy isn't actually gold, the person who wanted to sell it won't be very happy.
There is some interesting history about assay offices during the various American gold and silver rushes.
Kin die, Kings die, one day you shall die.
All things perish under the sun.
Old wisdom but still true. Someday the ideal that this republic was shall fall too, if it hasn't already.
Fatalism may seem attractive as a philosophical concept, but there is something to be said about the lack of atheists in foxholes, too. The fact that we all die (no longer, by the way, entirely a sure thing) does not mean people are crazy for trying to put it off as long as possible.
The GunTuber Paul Harrell just posted two "Top five firearms for TEOTWAWKI," a short version at around 23 minutes and a two hour long version. He stayed away (in the short one anyway) from discussing what form the collapse may take, simply making some general points about why everyone would need firearms and what he should prioritize.
Many preppers speak of the "Zombie Apocalypse," but I doubt anyone seriously expects a zombie outbreak. On the other hand, there are people who believe in the Flat Earth, or that Joe Biden received 81 millions votes in 2020, so who knows for sure? My belief is that talking of zombies keeps discussion of a potentially dark topic light, and also represents the worst case scenario. That is, if you can handle a zombie outbreak you ought to be set for whatever actually happens.
As for myself, I would not call myself a prepper, although I do have cases of long shelf life rations in the garage. That's just common sense, especially living in a rural environment. I think everyone, urban or rural, should be prepared to withstand a two week disruption of service, at minimum. City people are by nature unprepared for this mindset, as their solution to every disruption is "Call the city and wait for the man in the truck to show up and fix it." Of course, if TEOTWAWKI does happen, two weeks is nothing but a cushion to get ready for the real survival scenario. I don't know what's coming, but I am not optimistic about it.
Re: Harrel's YouTube piece: As I was watching, I checked off what I already owned. And I had everything covered that he recommended. I had a .45 carbine with matching pistol using the same mags. I had a Ruger LCP. I had an AR platform (folding). I had a Ruger 10/22 with several 30 rd. mags. I had a Ruger Mk III. I had a S&W .38 snubby. (And a .357 S&W J-Frame). And so on. Good to see that my own choices had paralleled a noted gun expert's picks for the same situations. And my own thought processes in picking what I did were quite similar to his as well.
I don't understand how you can count anything about the US and its turnings while ignoring the greatest cataclysm the planet faced in maybe 3000 years, and that was the Great War. We are still living with its aftermath, as every issue people are facing now is still a result of that detritus of that societal upheaval where Europe lost faith in being. There was no single 20 year period there culminating in that; but okay, let's pretend. But the next 80 years produced more upheaval, not less, though you can argue that the fall of communism in Europe was the fourth turning of the cycle of almost endless war that was the 20th c.
In any case, where we are now isn't the fourth of anything. Globalism was founded on the fall of European communism and the rise of Chinese totalitarianism. It began in the 1990s, whether you date it to the fall of the Berlin Wall and Tiananmen Square or the fall of the Soviet Union. But globalism has not made it even 40 years yet.
A better range of times would look at French Revolution to Napoleon to Congress of Venna in 1814, approximately 30 years, which led Europe under basic stability for 30 years until the revolutions of 1848, which all failed and cemented the powers of their day for another 60 before the cataclysm.
War was a constant in that time, too.
The fall of European communism is much more like the Congress of Vienna, and our resistance to globalism now is much like 1848, perhaps with the same crushing outcome.
It's good to remember that the upheaval of our own 1960s involved as much violence and as much decadence and sickness in our cities in the 1970s. It took 16 years from the assassination of JFK until the election of RWR and things were swinging up again.
The thing is, Strauss & Howe's Generations Theory is not intended to apply to groups of nations, or overall histories. It is applicable to individual nations. That's why a Fourth Turning is characterized as a *national* existential crisis.
Quite disturbing!
Here is where I'd look for young heroes: the environmental movement. They may be lefty in outlook, but they do things with real stuff, and are big believers in self and community sufficiency. An alliance between the froggy Right and the eco hippie Left is in order.
Clearly there are grounds for alliance on the subject of the gurlimanification chemicals which blunt heroic potential. I would also note that the "Buy Local" battle cry of the greenies who form food coops is Trumpism Extra Strength. The eco hippies are also known to do things such as create local currencies.
Yes, the call for green energy could lead to a nightmare of interconnected grids for load balancing plus greater dependency on the grid in order to fuel electric cars.
But there is the flip side of green energy: solar panels to get off the grid. Biofuels to disconnect from Big Oil. Self sufficient communities to reduce the need for transportation, etc.
Fab, I'm sorry to have to confess that I am not as au courant on the current state of the environmental movement as perhaps I should be, probably because the current perversion of language has corrupted any such terms into just more babble-words in the all-inclusive Church of the Anti-Carbon liturgy.
It is hard to tease out the various current manifestations that still correspond to the way I understood the term environmentalism back in the 1960s and 1970s. You know, clean air, clean water, save the animals, save the plants, don't litter, that sort of thing. At any rate, are these "hippie leftovers" significant enough to be of any use in the event of the sort of calamity I foresee occurring sometime before 2030?
I'm a bit out of date myself. I left Hippyland East over a decade ago. But once upon a time I was doing Libertarian politics in Asheville, NC. I figured that if you cannot sell libertarianism in a town where people were openly smoking pot in downtown, then the Party of Pot has no future.
Well, it turned out that the local pot activists were more concerned about the environment and "big corporations" than they were about pot. And here's the key: many of those concerned about "big corporations" were business owners. While they called themselves Progressives, they were to a large degree Luddites. That is, they adhered to the Jeffersonian vision of lots of small farms and small businesses. They didn't want to shop at Wal Mart, and they didn't want to shop at Department of Retail Store #234293572 either. They wanted to shop at locally owned businesses.
Anyway, I got to know these people quite well and had some success pointing out where excessive government regulation was giving Wal Mart an advantage over Mom and Pop operations. (They didn't like the fact that Whole Foods was taking over the organic food business, either.) Many of these people were doing small scale farming. Some were converting diesel powered cars to run on heated waste vegetable oil. Some were refining waste vegetable oil to run in unconverted diesel engines. And, of course, there was lots of tinkering with solar cells, underground housing, and other means of getting off the Grid.
And some of them believed in conspiracy theories that resembled publications by the John Birch Society.
There's quite a bit overlap between the modern hippie Left and the froggy Right. The rhetoric of the former is more feminine, but many of the goals are quite similar. Go to any downtown which is on the upswing from full-on ghetto mode but hasn't fully gentrified yet, and you will find plenty of calls for buying local etc.
----
Communicating with the hippie or any other Left has gotten harder lately, due to Wokeness and Cancel Culture. That's why I reach out to the populist Right these days.
But I want to bring both together. We are too centralized. The Wall St. Woke alliance resembles the predictions in "None Dare Call it Conspiracy." While I am anti-socialist, I am anti excessive concentration of capital as well. Banks are too big. The tax code should encourage people to get out of debt before saving for retirement. The electrical grids should not be too interconnected. And the system needs to work when a grid goes down.
There are people on both the far Left and the far Right who agree with these underlying values.
Wow. Well put.
Thanks for the link, Bill! I just cross-posted it to Tree of Woe readers.
Thanks, Alex. Your post was what led me to re-examine some of my own assumptions about a Fourth Turning. Unfortunately the result only turned up more downsides, and made my outlook gloomier. So, big win for the doom team, right?
Speaking of which, did you know the acronym DOOM is used in the ADHD world to mean, "Don't Organize, Only Move" to describe the way many neurodivergents try to organize, well, any sort of disorder?
Which may have some application to our national neurodiverged mind.
I didn't know that about DOOM, no, but it definitely tracks with how I see our world operating...
In general it is hard not to feel discouraged when looking at the cycle we face. We need what Tolkien called a "eucatastrophe"...