What Is the Fourth Turning?

Jimmy Carr lays out Neil Howe's case that history runs in four turnings and that the world is entering the fourth one now. Howe wrote The Fourth Turning in 1996 and predicted everything happening in the world right now. The end of the war in 1945 is the foundation myth, the story that we won the war, and the myth is crumbling. As the myth crumbles, institutions crumble with it. Life now is a revolution, and a revolution means the replacement of elites.

Academia has lost all credibility. A replication crisis runs through the social sciences. Traditional political parties are falling away while everything lurches to the left and to the right at the same time. The medical community once trusted is falling away too. Crisis times happen every 80 years or so, and then society rebuilds. American history has had four of them. In global history, Vico, an ancient Italian philosopher, described the same four periods of humanity, like one long human life.

When the foundation myth fails, the elites who stood on it fall, and a rebuild follows the crisis.