Almost 3000 years ago and before the era of the Romans there lived the Etruscan society in the area of what is today Rome.  One of the legacies the Etruscans passed on to the Romans was the concept of the saeculum.  A period of time generally considered the length of a person’s life, or in some references 110 years, but most generally a period of time when those born at the end of a saeculum have no direct memory of events occurring at the beginning of the saeculum.

In the late 90s Neil Howe and William Strauss published “The Fourth Turning”, a groundbreaking book that provided evidence of a somewhat fluid 80 year saeculum cycle broken down into four 20 year generations that has occurred repeatedly almost without exception since early Roman times.

Recently Neil Howe published an updated and revised version titled, “The Fourth Turning is Here”, which discussed in part the theory that we are in the last 20 year cycle of an 80 year saeculum referred to as the ‘fourth turning’, a time when the upcoming generation no longer has direct knowledge of what happened at the beginning of the 80 year period which will result in the collapse of the current era.    Then from the burning ashes of the old era, out of the misery and suffering of billions of people,  will arise the Pheonix in all its glory to establish a new reign of hope, and maybe one of peace and prosperity as it has in past ages.

One of most vivid examples of the saeculum is the resurgence of anti-Jewish protest throughout the world, some 80 years after the Jewish holocaust.  The slogan since then has been, ‘never again’.  So what happened?  Did we already forget? 80 years before the 1940s holocaust was the Civil War, and some 80 years before that was the Revolutionary War. Fourth Turnings all.

Why do we have this endless cycle of death and rebirth? The construct of each new era is based on rules created by humans, the logic of which will be once again forgotten over time by those born into the end of the era.  Thus the genesis of the next era comes about due to the limited capacity of the human mind to remember and learn from the past.

We may be in the end of an era.  Rough times may be ahead as our reality collapses to be replaced by a new Phoenix.  But this time could be different. This time we have the opportunity to break the endless cycle of death and rebirth with new tools gifted to us through technology. Computers, the internet, and especially the blockchain.  Now instead of a rule based society founded on the vagaries of human design and interpretation we can crate one that rests upon immutable computer code contractually imbedded in the blockchain.

Our solution and hope is that the battle cry of the Phoenix arising out of the ashes of our dying reality is CODE RULES.  Not ruled by the current opinions of people and society but ruled contractually by computer code not subject to the whims of whatever current society has of reality.