Did you watch the first presidential debate of this election season?!

Being at war used to mean fighting an enemy in uniform, dodging bombs and bullets, and dealing with food scarcity. After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, we could no longer even identify the enemy, let alone figure out how to defeat him. Instead of using bombs and bullets, today we fight our wars on multiple fronts: biological, trade, currency, cyber, space and military.

The Fourth Turning posits that every eighty years humanity spirals to a higher level in the aftermath of a major war and technological innovation: think American Revolution and the advent of the steam engine; Civil War and continental railroads; WWII and aviation.

Today America is at war again. With our country more divided than at any time since the Civil War, we are fighting a global pandemic, re-drawing the map of the Middle East, continuing to fight the Cold War with the remnants of the collapsed Soviet Union, and standing up to China to say ENOUGH!

During WWII, many soldiers suffered from shell shock, even if they were not being shot at directly, so the theory of what caused shell shock morphed from a physical cause to a psychological one: seeing things a man should not see and will never forget. 

The loser of this year’s first presidential debate was America. We should have been spared seeing what we saw. The whole country is in shock.

If you want to see the equivalent of shell shock in our current war, look into the eyes of the working mother with three kids at home due to school closures; the concern of an unemployed father trying to house and feed his family; the trillions of dollars we keep printing and its effect on the rollercoaster public equity markets. Gold at $2000 per oz is a clarion call for troubles ahead.

The definition of the problem is half the solution. Admitting we are at war allows us to stop asking “Is it me? Am I going crazy?”. Instead, we should realize humanity is going through another cycle of death and rebirth, striving to spirale towards a brighter future.

— Sina