The Darkest Hours Are Before The Dawn
The Darkest Hours Are Before The Dawn
The same boiling water that softens the potato hardens the egg.
— Roald Dahl
Foreword
I first thought to write this as a multi-part series, but I finally decided to group everything together as it wouldn’t do justice to this article. There’s a lot to unpack when discussing the ongoing societal changes, and I feel I barely touched on anything but the essence of that. Even then, standing at more than 6000 words, and spending nearly 10 full waking days refining it, the scope of what we’re witnessing feels almost too vast to capture in any single piece.
The Fourth Turning doesn’t reveal itself gradually—it crashes over you all at once when you finally start to see the pattern. Writing this piece felt like trying to grab sand in my hands; every attempt to contain one aspect of the transformation led to three more slipping through my fingers.
What you’ll read here is my best effort to trace the contours of something far larger than any individual could possibly comprehend.
We’re all in the same boiling water now—the Fourth Turning’s Crisis that began with Lehman Brothers’ collapse in 2008—but whether we emerge hardened or dissolved depends entirely on what we’re made of. We’re now deep in the Fourth Turning, the winter of this historical cycle, and if you think the past few years have been chaotic?
You ain’t seen nothing yet!
Continue reading from the PDF below.
