I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Monday Musings, I write freely and wanderingly about some topic that’s on my mind.
Last week, I began imagining an outcome to this fourth turning crisis we are facing in which the United States allies with Russia, Iran, and Venezuela to create a resource axis, standing against the manufacturing might of China and other Asian countries who provide the goods that are made out of the resources. What would Europe do? I suppose it would have to somehow create trade agreements with both of the axes of power, and likely would have to beef up its defense capabilities so that it didn’t get overrun (they’ve already started doing that).
Why was I imagining something like this? Because I know that at times in history, approximately every century according to the fourth turning theorists Strauss and Howe, the world is remade in ways that we can hardly conceive of before they happen. And I was curious to imagine one possible way things might unfold. We know that Trump loves Putin and loves oil. I’m sure he’s watching the Iranian tolls on the Strait of Hormuz and thinking that’s a business he’d like to be in. Why not join together with his favorites and leave his unfavorites (European countries) behind?
After Germany’s defeat in World War II, the United States became the most powerful country in the land, via the Bretton Woods monetary system and the Marshall Plan. The historical contingencies that led to this — first World War I, then the Great Depression, then World War II and its resolution — were entirely unforeseeable in advance. Who could have predicted the Holocaust?
And so any resolution to the fourth turning we have entered into right now is as well unforeseeable.
But I hope that the resolution doesn’t involve the United States losing its democratic freedom.
We know Trump wishes to take over authoritarian power in the United States, following in the footsteps of Orbán in Hungary, doing it not by eliminating elections but by manipulating them so that he wins, and by as well weakening the branches of government other than his, the executive branch. It’s shocking to me that Congress and the Supreme Court have been so willing to support him, but history suggests that support for fascism is not uncommon.
But Trump is fundamentally weak, and I still have hope that instead of going down the path of becoming yet another country ruled by a corrupt dictator, we will instead come out of this in a way we don’t expect, with a renewed sense of ourselves as the land of the free, under leadership that respects democracy and the Constitution.
In The Spirit of Hope, Byung-Chul Han writes of hope as an antidote to the hopelessness of Heidegger, a famous philosopher who became a Nazi and forever tarnished his reputation:
Hope, faith and love are related. Achim von Arnim calls them ‘the three sisters fair’. All three are turned towards the other. Those who hope, love or beliefe devote themselves to the other; they transcend the immanence of the self. But neither love nor faith has a place in Heidegger’s thinking, which lacks the aspect of the other. Those who cannot move beyond themselves can neither love nor hope.
Nazis, like MAGA, refuse to see beyond themselves; cannot conceive that the other has as much importance, as much existence, as much reality, as much right to happiness, as they do.
Han continues:
Hope makes us receptive to possibilities into which we are not thrown but rather dream ourselves. Heidegger’s Dasein does not dream into the future. It is incapable of daydreaming. Instead, it is haunted by anxiety dreams and nightmares. Anxiety has no access to the future as a space of possibilities. It is neither anticipatory nor visionary. Hope, by contrast, discloses futurity to us: what is coming, the not-yet-born, the latent, the becoming. It is a messianic mood.
We’ve been thrown into a nightmare with our current government, a nightmare that people voted for, despite the obviousness of Trump’s unfitness for governing. This brings on anxiety. The antidote is hope, hope that there is a way out of this that leaves us with a better situation after the crisis of a fourth turning.