PART II: LESSONS OF HISTORY AND WHY WE KEEP FIGHTING THE SAME WAR

I’m going to start with a visible example of a repeating pattern, and the resulting observations of what causes what I call our “Cultural Wobble”. We should not be surprised at where we are.

There is a repeating pattern to civilizational growth and chaos that historians and strategists have long observed but academics still debate. The Romans called it the “Saeculum”—a cycle that lasts about one long human life (80-100 years). It’s a lens, not a law, but the pattern is hard to ignore.

Every 80 years or so, we blow things up and start over. Take the U.S. as a single example:

• 1780s: The American Revolution.

• 1865: The US Civil War.

• 1945: The end of WWII.

• 2026: The tearing down of the post-WWII order.

We are in the middle of the death/rebirth phase right now.

The excellent book The Fourth Turning provides an in-depth historical review of this cycle, and it’s a fascinating and well-cited read. I first read it in the early 2000’s, and have watched it materialize as predicted ever since. There’s a sequel as well. I highly recommend it. To be clear, this cycle doesn't capture all wars, but the ones that make lasting changes to the civilizational order. The authors note that America is a useful lens as a continental power without the close proximity to other cultures with their own cycles that blur the lines a bit more, such as Europe.

Each cycle has four phases, aligned with four human generations. These phases are:

• First Turning (High): A period of strong institutions and conformity (e.g., post-WWII America).

• Second Turning (Awakening): A time of spiritual and cultural upheaval (e.g., the 1960s/70s).

• Third Turning (Unraveling): A period of weakening institutions and individualism (e.g., the 1980s/90s).

• Fourth Turning (Crisis): A time of societal collapse and rebirth, where a new order is forged (e.g., the Civil War, the Great Depression/WWII, today).

Historically, humans tend toward total war to resolve conflicts during these crisis periods. We use the biggest, baddest weapons available to settle scores.

If we do that this time with nuclear weapons and autonomous AI, the cycle could end permanently. We can not survive total war with ourselves; we are too powerful. We must change our course to get to the next Awakening and into the next cycle.

Or, we could prove we are NOT ready to handle the technology we created, and the universe tries again somewhere else. We could take our shot, or we could choose not to.

So, why do we do that?

Let’s start with a real-time observation you can easily confirm as an example to anchor the concept.

The saeculum (cycle) we’re in started right after our last major crisis phase, in 1945.

One generation later, during the next ‘awakening’ cycle after the crisis, Americans found themselves in a time they called the “Summer of Love”.

During this “summer of love” in June of 1967, the Beatles released a new single, which was the very first major live international satellite broadcast. One that one day, 400 million people watched live, the largest audience in history, using the very latest technology of the time.

“All you need is love.”

The Hippies are on the rise during an era of love, peace, justice, and social change. Free love, civil rights, and massive civil protests against injustice and war.

2 generations and 50 years later to the month, in June of 2017, Google researchers released the generative AI white paper that would change the world. They introduced the Transformer architecture, which would later become the T in ChatGPT. Also to a massive audience, and also the latest technology of the age. The title of that paper?

“Attention is all you need.”

The Hippies and emotions such as love and connection take a back seat in an era of geopolitical conflict, unsustainable debt, climate change tipping points, and a divided populace. This became the era of 'f*ck your feelings' and children separated from their parents, put in cages as policy to show ‘you are not welcome here’.

History shows that we move in cycles of 4 generations, and exactly two generations apart, we have love is all you need (inclusion of others), followed 50 years later by attention is all you need (exclusion of others).

What I’ve learned is that there is a fundamental imbalance in how we process information which makes it difficult to reconcile these two key forces, which in this case map to fundamental universal forces of individuation and of collective purpose.

Fundamental and universal. I will bring receipts.

The concept of love is not precise, but is an expression of a powerful human capability we developed to help us evolve, which is connection. We know connection is important, which is why primitive humans organized into bands and tribes. The pop culture reference here is less about loving every single person; it is a reference to love as the emotion most tightly correlated with connection. As a result, it is more accurate to frame the battle in our heads as one between individual achievement or capability plus the importance of connection and human emotion.

Negative and divisive emotion is hijacking the race condition, impairing and limiting our individual and collective abilities to achieve our human potential.

These limitations are at least partially biological in origin, but not widely factored into our geopolitical strategies or AI design.

As a species, we're unconsciously wobbling between these two forces in our collective consciousness every four generations, and we'll either figure out how to master them together, or we're going to lose control of the power we are now capable of creating.

Why do we do THAT?

We have overshot our vestigial information processing system, which was designed for a different world with different challenges. It is endemic in our biology, and is a critical limitation we must overcome.

To understand why this is the case, let’s dig into how our minds work.