Fun Friday: reflecting on N.S. Lyon's post with a film clip

The Upheaval was the first Substack I started reading, and I highly recommend it.

Sławomir Grzymkowski stars as Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski in the new movie Prophet.

Perhaps this isn’t as fun as a usual fun Friday, but today I enjoyed (if that’s the word) reading the latest post from The Upheaval by N.S. Lyon, which was a review of Neil Howe’s The Fourth Turning is Here. (If you’ve never read this seminal Substack, check it out.) I’ve been hearing a lot about Howe’s work and the book he co-authored, Generations, for the past year or so, and have watched several interviews with him. While I find his thesis, which is a sort of “which personality type are you?” writ large throughout throughout the decades, I don’t buy his overall premise, which reduces history, that drama of damnation and redemption, to a series of predictable cycles. It kind of reminds me too much of fate, karma, and all sorts of vague pagan ideas which end up undercutting human free will.

But N.S. Lyon put his finger on something I had felt but couldn’t articulate about Howe’s work.