I was thinking about much of what James writes and his perspectives as I read The Fourth Turning, which I generally subscribe to. I gained much appreciation for the cycles humanity routinely goes through, across generations, as laid out in the book, The Fourth Turning. It is a long book which bends some facts to fit their model, but in general, it feels like there are these forces, running like currents, through our lives and the generations.

What happens, in the Winter of the fourth turning, as multi-generational cycles arrive like seasons on the calendar? I find it curious that while so many facts of life are in our faces and lives, we (collectively) often trudge forward as if there is nothing we can do to improve things and that we self-medicate our way through the challenges as we both deny and distract ourselves from the truths.

"In regard to propaganda the early advocates of universal literacy and a free press envisaged only two possibilities: the propaganda might be true, or it might be false. They did not foresee what in fact has happened, above all in our Western capitalist democracies — the development of a vast mass communications industry, concerned in the main neither with the true nor the false, but with the unreal, the more or less totally irrelevant. In a word, they failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.”

– Aldous Huxley, 1958, in the article The Capitalist Free Press