The Fourth Turning Meets the Ways of the Duck | Responding With Calm in a Chaotic World

Our daily news cycle has moved from continuous to relentless, and now it's just brutal.

Our world is in hyperdrive, hurtling what appears to me like a fast approaching cliff.

Maybe it looks that way to you as well.

It's understandable if you're feeling shell shocked.

At the risk of torturing The World War II analogy beyond recognition, I wouldn't be the first one.

These past few months since the start of Trump 2.0 bring to mind the German blitzkrieg, which tore through the ardennes forest in 1940 to capture the prize Paris.

The blitzkrieg strategy gave the Germans a physical and psychological advantage.

In the war's first days and months between 1939 and 1940, the Poles, French, Norwegians and Belgians suddenly awoke to a new world order.

Their land occupied, their lives upended or just ended.

The German army seemed unstoppable.

That didn't stop the resistance in France, Britain and throughout Europe.

A resistance that slowly eroded the German stranglehold that, along with the Allied military, eventually led to the collapse of Hitler's Germany.

Whether we characterize our current moment as a political blitzkrieg flooding the zone with shit or quietly sucking the oxygen from the room, perhaps all three at once, nonetheless the intent is the to overwhelm, disorient, demoralize, and disperse any opposition to the attack.

It may work at first with ground captured and imagined enemies vanquished, but the scale of the resistance is proportional to the oppression.

It has patience and resolve.

It is centered and quietly courageous.

It prepares for battle wisely and deliberately.

This isn't Europe in the 1930s and 40s, but we ignore history only to repeat its themes and fall endlessly into its traps.

And meeting our current moment, I argue that it is worthwhile to consider what brought the world back then to such a devastating war, the political forces and social conditions at play, and how the human spirit can overcome its worst impulses.

So if it seems bleak right now, well, my friend, it is.

Under the barrage of destructive policies, hateful rhetoric and mass delusion, fed by a finely tuned misinformation machine that's now running on AI warp drive, we feel powerless against the forces of history, the relentless pace of technology, and the corrupt foolishness of the ruling class.

But as the adage says, this too shall pass.

We may not be powerful, but neither are we helpless.

In their 1997 book, The Fourth Turning, authors William Strauss and Neil Howe proposed the aptly named Strauss Howe Generational Theory.

The book gets into the weeds, but Strauss and Howe posit that Anglo American history unfolds in predictable 80 to 100 year cycles called Sicula.

That's S A E C U L A.

Each of these sicula is divided into four 20 to 25 year turnings.

These turnings oscillate between institutional cohesion and societal fragmentation, and driven by generational archetypes whose values clash or align with the dominant mood of the time.

The theory divides these turnings into four high, awakening, unraveling, and crisis.

High is upbeat, characterized by optimism.

Institutions are strongest and individualism is weakest.

Seeking unity, social values, convergence.

Awakening is a passionate era.

Values are questioned, individualism strengthens and institutions weaken.

In unraveling the Third Turning, things get downbeat.

Individualism peaks and institutions are at their weakest.

Society unravels as values diverge.

Crisis.

The Fourth Turning is a decisive era.

Whatever happens, it won't be like it was before.

Unraveling leads to upheaval and finally to a new normal.

For each turning, the dominant generational archetypes are prophets, nomads, heroes, and lastly, artists.

In the Crisis or Fourth Turning.

Strauss and Howe cite historical analogues to the Fourth Turning, including the American Revolution, the Civil war, and the 20th century eruption of fascism.

The particulars diverge, but the themes follow similar tracks, characterized by social turmoil and authoritarian challenges that tested democratic resilience.

The last crisis phase culminated in the paroxysm of the Second World War.

A fourth turning of the Sicila cycle progresses in roughly 20 to 25 years, from catalyst to culmination.

A destabilizing event catalyzes public urgency, panic and fear, such as in the 1929 crash, the 2008 recession, 9, 11, or the pandemic, for instance.

In response to this destabilizing catalyst, society gravitates to central leadership, unifying around new priorities informed by this perceived threat.

And finally, the era culminates in a decisive conflict, a war, a revolution bringing resolution, and a new civic order.

When the book was first published in the late 90s, the authors suggested that the end of the last century was an unraveling.

A third turning.

Neil Howe's 2023 sequel, the Fourth Turning is here suggests, as you might guess, that we are well into a Fourth Turning that will culminate by the early2030s.

How pins the catalyst of this Fourth Turning to the Great Recession of 2008, and I suggest, perhaps supercharged by a global pandemic.

But we see the signs all around us.

Talking about it almost feels cliche.

The polarization, the persistent, alarmingly tepid response to climate change, the relentless assault on the biosphere and our attention spans.

Billionaires untethered to reality and rising authoritarianism and militarism fueling democratic erosion.

If only all that were a tired cliche.

I'm not sure whether to laugh or cry.

So here we are.

According to how all of us who can hang out, say, six, seven or eight more years, the prophets, nomads, heroes and artists will all witness the culmination of a fourth turning, a new sicula, as Strauss and Howe describe in their generational theory.

My father, who would have turned 98 earlier this year, joined the war in 1945 during the MOP up phase in the Philippines.

The generation that put down fascist authoritarianism in the mid 20th century is fading into history along with the battles they fought.

Historical cycles do not preordain the future, but they do help us frame our responses to these overarching historical social cycles to gather strength and build community.

Understanding the outlines of history, seeing its patterns, can lift us above the fray, reveal the larger context of human history, and provide us with choices.

But how do we stay sane and productive, able to respond as best we can to these historical forces?

Yeah, that can be a can of worms.

All that highfalutin talk of generational theories with their turnings and archetypes is all well and good, but may I suggest we learn to follow our inner duck?

I was introduced to the world of beloved Australian artist philosopher Michael Leunig by Scott Poynton, founder of the School for Duck Whisperers.

Leunig often used the image of the duck as his leitmotif in his works, a simple drawing of a humble man praying to a duck, to his duck, to his inner duck.

The rendering's simplicity conveys a poignant potency.

In his introduction to A Common Prayer, Lunig writes, the duck represents one thing and many nature, instinct, feeling, beauty, innocence, the primal, the non rational and the mysterious unsayable.

The duck, Lunig writes, can be seen as a symbol of the human spirit and in wanting connection with his spirit.

It is a symbolic picture of a man searching for his soul.

Ludig died in 2024, but many still find connection, calm and resilience in his metaphorical rendering of the duck.

In his introduction to the School for Duck Whispering, Scott Pointon writes that following our inner duck allows us to live authentically, guided by intuition, humility, and balance.

It's a philosophy that invites us to find calm, reconnect with our values, and align our actions with what truly matters.

There are many ways to approach what Leunig and Boynton suggest in the Duck through meditation.

We can live in the present moment by serving others.

We can find humility and balance by seeking beauty instead of ugliness, questions instead of answers, mystery in place of dogma, we can find calm and resolve.

In a chaotic world.

We risk our health and humanity by remaining perpetually enraged and constantly triggered.

This is not the way of the duck.

Through the dross of human ugliness and excess, there is calm, even transcendence, even in the bleakest of times, so that we can move through crisis into a better world.

A fourth turning is an era of crisis, but not one of surrender.

Perhaps that is another lesson we can glean from the 1930s and 40s to not surrender our values or forego hope that from crisis will come something better.

The long fight ahead requires rest, reflection and communion with beauty.

When I sit quietly and watch the ocean waves on a sunny Sunday afternoon or listen to the interweaving lines of music as I lie in bed at midnight, it's there I discover my inner duck.

We live, even thrive, to fight another day.

Check the Show Notes for more information on the Strauss Howe generational theory and the Fourth Turning, the work of Michael Lunig and the School for Duck Whisperers.

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We'll see you next time on Global Warming Is Real.

Feed the inner duck not with human news or greedy things that suck, but give it quiet views, comments from the moon, opinions from the sky, the insights of a tune, the wisdom of a sigh.

Michael Lunig It.