Seasonalism

I was thinking recently about how we are wired for narrative, and how we view the world collectively through a small number of common myths. We tend to get trapped in patterns of meaning.

The now popular book "The Fourth Turning", published exactly twenty years ago, is based on repeating "seasons" of history, a book I really liked at one point until it got appropriated and became a playbook for revolutionary thinking, i.e. that we must have a Fourth Turning before a new Golden Age (First Turning), thus informing policy decisions based on what the First Turning should look like.

This again reminds me of Thomas Cole's Course of Empire (1830s), (which interestingly is a pentaptych, breaking away from the pattern of four).

We are pattern-seekers, but that doesn't mean they repeat without some variation. In Cole's paintings, there are actually five, not four "seasons", which correlate with the Fourth Turning hypothesis.


Fourth Turning ("Destruction") 4 of 5


First Turning ("Pastoral State") 2 of 5