Dr. Forbush Thinks

I am currently reading a book on the Future of America. I was wondering how things were going to turn out, so I grabbed the following book from the library. It is called, “Generations: the history of America's future, 1584-2069” by William Strauss and Neil Howe.

This book is quite interesting, because it was written 15 years ago and we can see how well it got these 15 years. But, the point of the book isn’t the exact events of the future, but instead the personalities of the generations that have come since the founding of the American colonies and will come over the next 50-some years.

If you have any doubt about the ability to predict the future please refer to my piece on “Free Will.”

In this piece I show how people tend to do the same thing every day. In principle most people follow routines and when something happens to them they react in predictable ways. People rarely if ever exercise their free will by choosing to do something different or out of the ordinary. If we have a large group of people that are doing things in predictable ways, then it shouldn’t surprise us that we should be able to predict how history might unfold in a predictable way.

Well, exact events on exact dates might be impossible to predict, but more generalized things might be predictable. For example the personality of a generation is predictable. And, this book seems to be able to do just that, predict the personality of the coming generations. One way to describe different generations might be to talk about their upbringing as children first. This book tells us that children in America have actually been brought up in four different ways over the last four hundred years in America. Some children were brought up “protected,” others were brought up “coddled,” others were brought up “disciplined” and the final group was brought up “ignored.” There is actually a fixed pattern of disciplined youth, coddled youth, ignored youth, protected youth, and then disciplined youth again. The cycle lasts about 88 year or about four 22 year generations.

These four different ways in which children are treated actually effects the way in which parents bring up the next generation. And, the way children are brought up results in the way each generation sees itself and the other age groups. These factors result in the way in which each group lives its life. For example, the baby boom generation was actually brought up by parents expecting the children to know discipline but they were coddled from the extremes of discipline. This coddling actually caused these children to be introspective and the result was an outpouring of self-reflection, but this also resulted in the ignoring of the next generation of children. These children were left largely to fend for themselves and learn to deal with the dangers of life very early. This generation actually felt the worst dangers of the drug culture. The baby boomers used drugs in a curious way to further their self-discovery, but the next generation used drugs to escape the lack of caring in their young lives. The boomers realized that drugs were a faulty path and then they criticized the next generation for being stupid and using drugs. Well, the next generation that knows the dangers of the world worries about these dangers and they react by protecting their children and sure enough the current generation of children are protected. This protection continues until the next generation that is disciplined in an effort to force their children to be rational, after seeing the results of their irrational elders. The cycle continues when these disciplined children that coddle their children in an effort to protect them from the discipline they had been subjected to as youths.

The interesting thing is that this cycle continues to this day 15 years after the book was written. The current generation of children have been kept inside away from the dangers of the world around them. They sit playing video games or trying to work on the Internet, if their protective parents allow them to. But, this isn’t the extent of the prediction of the future. It turns out that the 1960s and early 1970s was actually a spiritual awakening that repeats itself every 88 years or so. The dates are not exact, but they are certainly close. This is because every fourth generation groups of introspective youth grow up and realize that their elders don’t know all that there is about life. In general these elders have maximized their externally oriented civic-minded personality to leave spiritual ideas to the wayside. But, the spiritual mind of this boomer generation rebel’s against these ignorant elders. These rebellions repeat every 88 years or so beginning with the Puritans. But, this next spiritual awaken isn’t due until 2055 or so, when everyone has mostly forgotten the 1960s. The event that is the antithesis of this awakening is a crisis. This crisis event is most likely a war, but it could be an economic depression. The point of the crisis is to demonstrate to the coming generation that working together pays off. The Great Depression and World War II was an enormous crisis that taught a generation that working together works. Since a crisis could happen at any time, the idea is more likely created by the elder generation in response to some spiritual awaken awareness. The crisis of the Revolutionary War was created this way, as was the Civil War. It could be argued that if another generation was in control with another personality then World War II might have been left to the Europeans, as it wasn’t really our problem.

Based on what I know the War on Terror might culminate into some crisis. It makes sense, because the current rulers are creating this crisis by the way they have chosen to handle the problem. This is due to the spiritual awakening personality of the generation. It has bred a deep-seated idea of black and white, right and wrong that the majority of this generation has accepted. This black and white idealism was alive during the Revolutionary War and the Civil War and the Great Depression/WWII. And we should expect a crisis in the next few years of this order of magnitude. Unfortunately it looks like we will continue on this cycle for some time, until some of us claims to exercise his free will and break this chain of repetition.










-----------------------------------------------------





Don't forget what Stephen Colbert said, "Reality has a well-known liberal bias."


Cross Posted @ Bring It On, tblog, Blogger and BlogSpirit



Politics