What This Country Needs Is An Enema - And It's Getting One
There's something deeply, desperately wrong everywhere and we may well be headed toward a highly unpleasant but highly necessary purge
He knows changes aren't permanent
But change is
Rush, ‘Tom Sawyer’
I just finished reading Neil Howe’s The Fourth Turning Is Here: What the Seasons of History Tell Us about How and When This Crisis Will End.
Howe and his late co-author William Strauss first published it in 1997. It details what they identified as the cycles of history, based on the last five hundred years. Four periods, named after the four seasons, comprise the ‘turnings’ of a complete cycle of human history—a saeculum, or roughly one human life span of about 80-100 years. If you’re at all unclear on where we are today, we’re in Winter, the Crisis period—right on time, about eighty years after World War II, the last Crisis. Wars tend to factor heavily in previous Crises.
Howe believes this Crisis (not necessarily war) will culminate in the early 2030s and is fraught with great danger but also holds great potential promise, if we manage not to fuck it up with, say, a turn toward totalitarianism.
The book is long and complex and difficult to follow sometimes, but the last part, about the current Crisis, its potential resolutions, and what it may mean for humanity, and particularly North Americans, was the most engaging part.
His predictions are self-admittedly speculative, and some seem downright insane, if hopeful, today: Such as that maturing Millennials may actually turn to embrace “rationalism, objectivity, and top down systemizing.” That would be a welcome change.
He notes Millennials today probably wouldn’t believe in America’s ability to come together against adversity, and notes that “one lesson of history is that the real danger may be quite the opposite—that the nation pulls together,” with the caveat that the union can be brutal or reckless. There’s a new regime coming together in the world order one way or another and that could involve autocracy—right- or left-wing.
I’ve watched my own country pull together for the last three months as scrappy, argumentative Canadians react to the direct threat from the land-, water-, and resource-hungry United States regime. So far I’m not seeing any Canadian brutality or recklessness. Maybe we’re saving that for the invading forces.
Many of Howe’s more welcome predictions—all of which are carefully caveat-ed with words like ‘could’, ‘maybe’, or ‘possibly’—include a post-Crisis “epidemic of normalcy” which would repeat the conformity, conscious cooperation, and family focus that framed the last post-war era. Yes, Elon and J.D., Americans will start #$%^ing without rubbers again after what Howe calls the ‘Epkyrosis’ and what I call the ‘Enema’.
This is the climax, the massive purge coming from a terrible event or series of them after which America, or the world, picks itself up and surveys the wreckage of whatever just happened.
The very worst outcome would be war, especially if it goes nuclear.
Another potential outcome is the possibility America could find itself “fatally undermined” by domestic division or a civil war that leads to outside intervention and conquest. Howe imagines a ‘worst case scenario’ in which America finds itself ‘torn into pieces’ or ‘occupied’.
Not beyond the ken, as the MAGA/Trump administration works to weaken America, whether it intends to or not (or simply doesn’t care). A defeated, malfunctioning, and now, self-isolated America, Howe notes, could bring down the rest of the world. (Watch it live right now on CNN!)
There’s a good reason why Howe’s language is highly speculative, based on a reading of the past. So is trying to predict what will happen by this weekend.
Our near future, and the new First Turning, could go so many ways.
Howe notes how after the last post-war enema, polarization disappeared as Democrats learned to live with Big Business, and Republicans came around to the New Deal. He theorizes the same might happen to us, which makes sense when people have to pull together to do-or-die, and become tired of conflict. There’s the very real possibility, looming even right now with Trump’s threats to invade and conquer Greenland, that we might find ourselves in a major conflict before the year ends.
One thing Howe got ridiculously wrong: Americans did, in fact, vote Donald Trump back into office.
The Enema works, Howe says, by, “sucking all surrounding matter into a single vortex of ferocious energy.” It occurs late in the Fourth Turning, and accumulates from “unmet needs, unpaid debts, and unresolved problems.” It’s a process in which the old order(s) which no longer function properly must be purged and changed. Humans don’t have much control over The Enema; the process has been set in motion and results in massive upheaval we can’t even imagine. It changes everyone radically; it’s traumatic and painful; it “shakes a society to its roots, transforms its institutions, redirects its purposes, and marks its people (and its generations) for life.”
Those who survive the current Enema will certainly never be the same: Permanently psychologically and emotionally branded. This even includes a nuclear war. We will never stop talking about The Enema, no matter what it turns out to have been.
As much as we dread the forthcoming generational and societal apocalypse, what would be worse, Howe writes, is if we don’t go through it.
The Epkyrosis is the enema that humanity periodically needs.
For myself, it’s helpful to think of it that way since I’m caught in the forthcoming Crisis at a much more advanced age than my parents. I can certainly see we can’t keep going on as we have been. We can’t stop the mighty forces now. It’s almost like a human’s very worst physical nightmare—a massive purge from both ends to rid the body of its toxins before it kills you. If you survive, you’re going to feel so much better—and more at peace.
Buddhism teaches that resistance always makes a bad situation worse. What we can’t stop, we must accept and work with and do our best to help ourselves, and others, to survive. Thich Nhat Hanh wrote of his experiences as a young monk during the Vietnam War, building and rebuilding villages the Americans had bombed. It was a living embodiment of the lessons of impermanence—and regeneration.
In America, we rebuilt the lives of the returning G.I.s. We rebuilt Europe. We even rebuilt Japan. The old enmities fell away and human beings came together to do what needed to be done.
We are a hardy, persistent, and cooperative species.
Purge that shit
I see the need. For all of us.
What also arose out of the ashes of two very brutal world wars, along with hope, union and regeneration, was growing Communism and then the Cold War. Of the creation of Israel borne of the vicious antisemitism of the Third Reich and the Islamic world. It stoked further antisemitism which has spread like wildfire once again around the world, along with ferocious Islamic terrorist death cults.
After the last Fourth Turning came the Spring, the First Turning of the new saeculum, which brought a golden age of growth and prosperity for many, and a new world order tired of war.
The Awakening, the Second Turning arrived when the imperfections and failures of the Golden Age became impossible to ignore. The age of prosperity hadn’t been for everyone; black people and young women had been excluded while young people demanded the right to drop out of life, to the horror of their parents, who wanted them to finish college and start families like obedient Americans.
The Third Turning is the Unraveling, the Fall, where institutions weaken, individualism strengthens, and the old civic order unravels.
For those of us alive today, it began in the early 2000s, perhaps marked by 9/11. Others point to the 2008 financial crisis.
Today, I look south to my mother country and I don’t recognize it. Nor do I recognize either the stodgy but sane Republicanism I grew up with in my family. I especially don’t recognize my former Democratic Party. It’s become the same, a coalition of identity-driven autocracy, authoritarianism and fundamentalism which those who still hew to it can’t see. They point their righteous fingers at the other side, the Republicans, the MAGAs, accusing them of their very same sins of which they themselves are guilty.
They condemn Elon Musk for destroying the government, though they themselves have been tearing down America’s institutions for years. And the antisemites spread their moral disease like cockroaches in a cheap slum.
I never knew you, depart from me, you who practice lawlessness! - Jesus, Matthew 7
Donald Trump is, right now, America’s enema, purging more than just the government, even as progressives and MAGAs clench their butt cheeks, resisting The Deluge.
I watch the forthcoming Enema/Epykrosis not with pleasure—it will be traumatic for everyone, and will purge us all of our moral rot—and people will likely die. A lot. Maybe me and you. But I take the Buddhist, or perhaps a revamped AA credo—I must accept what I cannot change, change the minds I can, and be prepared to head north into the Canadian hinterlands if the nukes start flying. Or the drones attack.
"You maniacs! You blew it up! Ah, damn you! God damn you all to hell!" - Astronaut George Taylor (Charlton Heston), Planet of the Apes
The ‘Strauss-Howe generational theory’ is not without its critics. Some claim it’s more science fiction than science, although it’s clearly based on a speculative reading of generational history.
Others say it generalizes too much. That it’s pseudo-history, which I acknowledge. Predicting the future is often a fool’s errand, and five hundred years isn’t far enough back to go.
Their focus is European-American history. How does this stack up for other parts of the world? For China, for example, the world’s oldest civilization? For Africa? For Southeast Asia? Or even until recently, a really isolated group of islands called Japan?
The critics are correct that the theory is still too new, even at nearly thirty years old, to determine how reality-based it is, or not. And maybe one simply can’t effectively predict the future, especially when it involves eight billion wild cards.
But I do see, even before I began the book, a potential global setup for war. Maybe a war within. On January 19th, I never dreamed the U.S. harbored imperialist fantasies of fellow First World allies. Now it’s severed those ties, and reordered the world.
But I do believe one thing: We are all about to get a massive Enema. I’m with Howe that it’s needed and none of us should look forward to it with smug grins thinking it’s only for Them. I’m considering that I may not survive it. I don’t know. And neither does anyone else.
But I think if I live, I will feel much, much better.
When I’m not wondering whether I should spend all my retirement money now or wait lest that results in a poverty-ridden end of life, I help women and others reclaim their power on Grow Some Labia.
Fantastic. As a batshit Prepper I approve of this message :)