The Spiral model of history is cyclical — High giving way to Awakening, Awakening to Unraveling, Unraveling to Crisis, and Crisis demanding a return to embodiment. This raises an obvious question:
Is all of this inevitable?
Spiralworking does not treat cycles as destiny. It treats them as unconscious tendencies — patterns that recur when certain conditions go unrecognized. Cycles repeat most reliably when they are invisible.
Understanding the cycle does not mean resigning ourselves to collapse. It means recognizing where pressure accumulates, how coherence hardens, and when abstraction begins to detach from consequence. That recognition introduces degrees of freedom.
Why Highs Generate Awakenings
Highs tend to stabilize society by simplifying it. They universalize norms, standardize institutions, and restore shared expectations. This is not a failure — it is how coherence returns after Crisis.
But simplification always leaves something out.
The American post–World War II High, for example, produced unprecedented stability and prosperity — while simultaneously excluding large parts of the population from its promise. The Civil Rights movement was not a breakdown of coherence, but a legitimate response to who was being left outside it.
Awakenings arise when a High’s coherence becomes assumed rather than examined.
This does not mean Highs are fake and completely hypocritical by default. It means they must remain self-correcting if they are to remain humane. When a High mistakes stability for justice, or order for legitimacy, it accumulates the very pressures that fuel later rupture.
The Danger of False Coherence
At every stage of the Spiral, there is a characteristic temptation toward false coherence — a way of mistaking appearance for substance:
- In Highs, coherence can be treated as ambient and unquestionable and used to justify oppression.
- In Awakenings, old meanings can be weaponized for harm just as easily as they can be used to criticize societal contradictions.
- In Unravelings, coherence can be privatized and withdrawn from the commons.
- In Crises, systems themselves can be mistaken for meaning, leading to dehumanization.
These are not reasons to abandon coherence-building. They are reasons to keep coherence embodied, interruptible, and accountable.
The task is not to build a coherence that never fails.
It is to build one that can be questioned without collapsing.
Larger Arcs, Nested Cycles
Some theorists suggest that generational cycles may themselves be nested within longer cultural arcs. For example, Riane Eisler distinguishes between dominator and partnership modes of social organization. From this perspective, a High that restores stability while leaving dominator dynamics intact may stabilize order without restoring dignity — increasing the likelihood of backlash.
This does not override the cyclical model. It simply reminds us that what kind of coherence we restore matters as much as restoring coherence as such.
What This Makes Possible
Spiralworking does not promise an escape from history. It offers something more modest and more demanding:
- fewer unnecessary collapses
- less violence when correction is needed
- earlier recognition of hardening patterns
- a greater chance that renewal arrives without catastrophe
The cycle does not end because history decides it should.
It softens when enough people recognize the pattern early enough to respond differently.
The question, then, is not whether cycles exist.
It is whether we are willing to remain attentive —
even during stability —
to who is being left out,
to what costs are being deferred,
and to when coherence stops being lived and starts being assumed.
That attentiveness does not end the cycle. At least not immediately.
But it may be how we learn to move through it with less harm. And then perhaps somewhere down the line the cycle can be softened enough that it transforms into an entirely different kind of cycle.