(10-30-2016, 11:49 PM)disasterzone Wrote:(10-30-2016, 11:38 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: The High is prosperous enough to allow some attractive diversions. If people did not numb themselves in the cocktail longes of the High, there was television. Work pays well enough to provide copious cheap entertainment. Above all, 3T behavior is stigmatized for making the Crisis as nasty as it was. Cultural figures from the 2T have made their adaptations or they are forgotten. Such fictional characters as Lina Lamont (Singin' in the Rain) and Nora Desmond (Sunset Boulevard) find themselves irrelevant as cultural trends of the 4T develop; if they have not adapted they become even more irrelevant in the High.
I doubt that many people had much nostalgia for the Roaring Twenties after World War II, except perhaps for the Harlem Renaissance among blacks. Even that was scrupulously repressed outside of big urban centers in the North and West.
Where the dissent arises is among people who want to participate fully in the bounty of a High and are denied -- like Southern blacks -- or among people with empathy for the oppressed. Were the likes of Rosa Parks, Medgar Evers, and Martin Luther King rebels... or conformists? I say the latter.
The real cause of the Awakening is that for the first time people enter adulthood with no memory of the strictures of the previous Crisis, people who have the inclination for some cultural recklessness.
But what if someone's takeaway from the 4T was that stability didn't exist so you may as well take risks? Someone who instead of feeling like they were shaping the 4T that the 4T just took them along this arbitrary ride they were forced to be in. Then the 1T tried to force them in a box and take their dreams away. Who felt so deprived at the end of it, they wanted to have a 3T lifestyle?
What I wonder is how people in the 1T would react if someone lived so foolishly to them (like the 1990s or roaring 20s) but succeeded because of the extreme risk taking? In other words, how would the people of the 1T react to a person who lived against their wisdom but won or got what they wanted in the end? Would they be villainized?
Society will be taking big-enough risks (huge investments in capital, both material and human) to satisfy most people. Yes, there will be the equivalent of James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause who chafes at the strictures that he is unready to challenge.
I can't tell you what the 2030's equivalent of hot rods and motorcycles will be. Taking a bland vehicle and customizing it? Who would have expected such with the Model T and Model A Fords when such cars were still commonplace as late as the early 1940s on the highways because there were no new cars being built for civilian use. We have since seen Low-riders, very clever expressions of what can be done with old cars with clean lines. So what can you expect to be done with a 30-year-old Honda Accord? Maybe I expect the pop culture of the 2030s to show some whimsy with songs resembling "Mister Sandman", the sorts of music that repressed young Adaptive kids find tolerable. And what will be the equivalent of the malt shop? A malt shop with wireless fidelity?
The end of the 4T will be some form of stability, like it or not, that people either lack the means or temperament to challenge. That stability could either be a nation still wallowing in its righteous triumph over evil, a nation partitioned into ideologically- or culturally-disparate camps (think of the divided Germany between 1945 and 1990) in which a return to the Bad Old Days from 1933 to 1945 are out of the question (they still are, and if I were obliged to leave America as a political fugitive, Germany would be toward the top of my list as possible refuges) , or even a reversion to inescapable primitivism because of the destruction of technology and intellectual infrastructure in an apocalyptic war. It's arguable that the last is the hardest reality to escape.
But we have yet to see the final struggle of this Crisis defined. So aside from some broad generalities what can we say of what life will be like in 2035? We have yet to know what the institutions in place at the end of the Crisis will be. If certain people prevail, it will be a new Gilded Age, except with no frontier of small-scale enterprise. How does that work? 95% of the people suffer for the indulgence of 2%... and you can just imagine what sort of political dissent that will create in the Awakening.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.