Arise, O Normie

There were a lot of people who couldn’t handle hard times or who got frustrated and who quit on us during the Trump presidency. They couldn’t handle our setbacks.

If you are reading this website, then you are almost certainly a radical. The radical is someone who wants to go straight to the root of the problem. The vast majority of your fellow citizens are not radicals and that is actually a good thing. No society could function that is full of nothing but radicals.

Peter Turchin has done excellent work on this subject. The upshot of Turchin’s work is that there are natural historical cycles and that radicals play a key role in these cycles. The number of radicals in any given society will stay low for long stretches of time before slowly increasing and then surging all at once as a society becomes decadent and plunges toward an inevitable crisis. The rise of “domestic extremism” is a pattern that naturally recurs throughout history because that is how cultures are revitalized.

In light of the Capitol Siege and the sudden awakening of the normie, it is worth revisting William Strauss and Neil Howe’s book The Fourth Turning which I was writing about last summer while trying my best to ignore the 2020 election. This book is also about the same idea of historical cycles although Strauss and Howe argue that generational turnover is the mechanism at work in roughly 80 year historical cycles. This book was published back in the 1990s and looked ahead to the early 21st century:

“A spark will ignite a new mood. Today, the same spark would flame briefly but then extinguish, its last flicker merely confirming and deepening the Unraveling-era mind-set. This time, though, it will catalyze a Crisis. In retrospect, the spark might seem as ominous as a financial crash, as ordinary as a national election, or as trivial as a Tea Party. It could be a rapid succession of small events in which the ominous, the ordinary, and the trivial are commingled.

Recall that a Crisis catalyst involves scenarios distinctly imaginable eight or ten years in advance. Based on recent Unraveling-era trends, the following circa-2005 scenarios might seem plausible …

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announce the spread of a new communicable virus. The disease reaches densely populated areas, killing some. Congress enacts mandatory quarantine measures. The president orders the National Guard to throw prophylactic cordons around unsafe neighborhoods. Mayors resist. Urban gangs battle suburban militias. Calls mount for the president to declare martial law.”