https://www.honest-broker.com/p/are-there-alternating-cycles-of-hot-c6c

Ted Gioia has identified these and so has this other writer, Peter Turchin

I’ve long said that it takes 40 years [or 5] it’s an approximation] for a culture to forget – the children of the children of Thatcher have forgotten what she and her rabid dogs did to the body politic, culminating in the self-harm of Brexshit.

A new primitive – duogenerational human cycles

Below lifted from Ted, go read him!

50 YEAR CYCLES OF HOT AND COOL CULTURE

In a highly speculative two-part article (here and here), I claimed that we are living a culture that shifts from hot cycles to cool cycles—each one lasting around 50 years. We are currently in the middle of a hot cycle.

I know this sounds like poppycock. But I reached this conclusion while researching my book on the history of coolness. I can’t overstate how shocked I was to discover that the cool ethos permeating American culture during my formative years was just a passing phase. 

I had assumed that everyone always wanted to be hip and cool. But at the very moment when I started researching and writing the book, something was shifting. Hipster even turned into a term of abuse. But in a hundred other ways, I saw the culture getting hotter and hotter—promoting aggression, not coolness.

Now I’ve encountered a social scientist with a very similar story to tell. Peter Turchin has spent decades creating an enormous database in order to determine the laws of history, drawing on advanced data analytics. In fact, he is so ambitious that he is studying ten thousand years of history, and forcing it to reveal underlying rules and patterns. 

Turchin has just published a book that shares his findings. It’s called End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration. 

And guess what? Turchin also discovers 50 years cycles of hot and cool—but he draws on completely different evidence than mine. I was looking at music, movies, books, fashion, and cultural style. In contrast, Turchin was studying wars, politics, and historical conflicts. 

But we reached identical conclusions. 

Here Turchin tries to summarize what Big Data tells him about societies in crisis—explaining it in the simplest terms possible:

When we look closely at the disintegrative phases, we discover that they are not uniformly grim. Instead, the level of collective violence tends to follow a rhythm. One generation (“the sons”), scarred by violence, keeps uneasy peace. The following generation (“the grandsons”), who grew up not being directly exposed to violence, repeats the mistakes of the grandfathers. This dynamic sets up a recurrent cycle of violence of roughly fifty years in length (that is, two human generations), which persists until the structural conditions are somehow resolved, leading to the next integrative phase.

I find it curious that I’m studying Miles Davis, David Letterman, Lenny Bruce, hippies and flower power, etc. and intersect exactly with Turchin’s data anlytics of battlefields and political dissolution. 

His entire book is well worth reading. 

I continue to stand by my prediction that society is going to get hotter and angrier. But the trend must eventually reverse, maybe as soon as 2025. Coolness and conciliation will finally return—I just don’t see that happening in the coming election year.