Deep In The Fourth Turning: The Darkest Hours Are Before The Dawn

Via Gold and Geopolitics Substack,

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.

The same boiling water that softens the potato hardens the egg.

— Roald Dahl

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!

History doesn’t move in straight lines. It breathes, it pulses, it turns through seasons as predictable as winter following autumn. William Strauss and Neil Howe discovered this pattern in 1997. Like clockwork, every 80 years or so – a human lifetime, America faces an existential crisis that threatens to tear apart everything we thought permanent. We’ve been through this three times before, and we’re going through it again right now.

Strauss and Howe predicted in 1997 that around 2005, some spark would ignite a Crisis mood. They suggested it might be “as ominous as a financial crash, as ordinary as a national election, or as trivial as a Tea Party”. They nailed it. The 2008 financial crisis wasn’t just another recession—it was the moment the post-World War II global order began its death spiral. Lehman Brothers’ September 15, 2008 collapse marked more than a bank failure; it marked the beginning of the end of trust in the system itself.

I’ve started following these markets around 2007, and what happened after that particular collapse was unprecedented. The Federal Reserve’s balance sheet exploded from $900 billion to $4 trillion in a matter of years, then to $9 trillion during COVID. The national debt, which stood at $10 trillion in 2008, has now reached $37 trillion as of August 2025. We didn’t solve the crisis—we papered it over with printed money and kicked the can down the road. We didn’t solve the problem—we made it exponentially worse. As someone who tracks gold markets, I can tell you with increasing clarity: the people who actually understand money are quietly converting their paper promises into something that can’t be printed.

The response to 2008 revealed something critical: our institutions no longer functioned as designed. The Federal Reserve, created to be a lender of last resort, became the market itself. Banks that should have failed were declared “too big to fail”. Capitalism’s core principle—that bad bets lead to bankruptcy—was suspended for the connected class while enforced ruthlessly on everyone else. The very people who caused the crisis not only avoided jail but got bonuses funded by taxpayer bailouts. The social contract didn’t just fray; it snapped.

What most people didn’t understand then—and many still don’t grasp now—is that 2008 never really ended. Each intervention created larger distortions requiring bigger interventions. Zero interest rates led to asset bubbles. Quantitative easing led to wealth inequality explosion. Each “solution” deepens the underlying problem: a system that could only survive through ever-increasing debt monetization. The music has stopped, but the Fed keeps the party going by turning up the volume until everyone is deaf.

The knock-on effects rippled globally. European banks, stuffed with toxic American mortgage securities, required massive bailouts. The European debt crisis followed, nearly destroying the euro. China, terrified of global depression, launched the largest credit expansion in history, building ghost cities and redundant infrastructure. Every major economy became addicted to monetary heroin, and seventeen years later, we’re still shooting up.

But the financial crisis was just the catalyst. What makes this a Fourth Turning isn’t the proximate cause but the comprehensive breakdown that follows. Look around. Every institution Americans once trusted—government, media, academia, medicine, law enforcement, intelligence agencies—has suffered catastrophic reputational collapse. When the CDC changes its story for the fifth time, when the FBI raids a former president, when the Supreme Court’s legitimacy is openly questioned, you’re not watching normal political friction. You’re watching the complete unraveling of institutional authority.

This Fourth Turning differs fundamentally from all previous ones because of technology’s role. We’re not fighting with muskets or tanks—we’re fighting with algorithms, narratives, and digital currencies. The battlefield isn’t Gettysburg or Normandy; it’s your smartphone screen, your social media feed, your digital wallet.

Previous Fourth Turnings required mass mobilization of physical bodies. Men marched to war, women worked in factories, everyone bought war bonds. Physical presence mattered. But our Fourth Turning is being fought in the realm of information and perception. When you can’t trust any source of information, when deepfakes make seeing no longer believing, when AI can generate unlimited propaganda at zero marginal cost, how do you even know what you’re fighting for or against? The fog of war has become the fog of everything.

Consider the comprehensive surveillance apparatus that’s emerged since 2008. Edward Snowden’s 2013 revelations showed us the NSA was collecting everything—every email, every text, every call. But that was just the beginning. Now we have AI-powered behavioral prediction, social credit systems, and facial recognition networks. China leads the way with 700 million surveillance cameras—more than half the world’s total—but Western “democracies” aren’t far behind. London has more cameras per capita than Beijing. San Francisco uses the same facial recognition technology as Shanghai.

The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated this technological authoritarianism by decades. Digital vaccine passports normalized the idea that you need government permission to enter a restaurant. Contact tracing apps trained us to accept constant location monitoring. QR codes made every movement trackable. What would have taken a generation to impose gradually was accomplished in months under the banner of “public health”. The ratchet only turns one way—powers gained during a crisis are never voluntarily relinquished.

Consider the Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) agenda that’s advancing globally while most people remain blissfully unaware. This isn’t just digitizing money—it’s making money programmable, controllable, censorable. The Federal Reserve, Bank of England, and European Central Bank are all developing CBDCs, following China’s lead with the digital yuan. Imagine a world where your ability to buy gasoline depends on your carbon credit score, where your grocery purchases are limited by your BMI, where your savings can be “expired” to force spending. Money that can’t be used for disapproved purchases, that can be frozen instantly if you express wrongthink.
It’s not imagination — China is already doing it. Europe is launching trials. The Federal Reserve is “researching” it.
This is the ultimate fusion of monetary and social control.

Bitcoin emerged from the 2008 crisis’ ashes with a message embedded in its genesis block: “Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks”. The cypherpunks who created it—whether Satoshi was an individual or a team—understood that monetary sovereignty required technological sovereignty. But here’s the uncomfortable question: did we play them or did they play us? Bitcoin’s transparent blockchain makes every transaction traceable forever. The NSA’s 1996 paper “How to Make a Mint” described a system remarkably similar to Bitcoin. The CIA met with Gavin Andresen, Bitcoin’s lead developer, in 2011. Was Bitcoin genuine resistance or the perfect trap—getting libertarians to build their own financial panopticon?

The promise was decentralization, but the reality is increasingly centralized. A handful of mining pools control Bitcoin’s hash rate. A few exchanges handle most trading volume. BlackRock and other institutions now dominate ownership through ETFs. The rebels who thought they were building an alternative to Wall Street may have just built Wall Street 2. 0. With better surveillance.

Every Fourth Turning includes a monetary reset. The Revolution gave us the Constitution’s gold and silver clause. The Civil War brought greenbacks and the National Banking System. The Depression/WWII era ended the gold standard domestically and created Bretton Woods. What’s coming this time will be even more dramatic.

The numbers are so large they’ve lost all meaning. The U. S. national debt stands at $37 trillion as of August 2025. Unfunded liabilities—Social Security, Medicare, government pensions—exceed $200 trillion. The Federal Reserve holds over $1 trillion in unrealized losses. Commercial banks sit on $600 billion in underwater securities. We’re not approaching insolvency. We’re already there. Just one repricing away from systemic collapse. And everyone in finance knows it. The only question is whether it happens slowly (inflation), suddenly (default), or systematically (CBDC rollout).

My money, literally, is on “all of the above”.

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