(08-21-2017, 04:00 PM)X_4AD_84 Wrote: One of the keys to the mystery is, how did the American people change from a people who could support austerity to a people who despised austerity?
The Awakening era created (and I hate to use a book title to express an idea) a culture of narcissism. People felt entitled to an economic reality in which life was ever onward and upward due in part to public investment, inexpensive college educations, and ever-more-sophisticated technology. Thus more powerful muscle cars and stereo systems offering more watts per channel, and more people getting to do white-collar jobs that did not create capital and make things. Intelligent, competent people got pulled away from manual labor as a Wave of the Past. Meanwhile the adult population soared as Baby Boomers (extended to include the first wave of Generation X) reached adulthood and started bidding up real-estate values and rentals. Feel-good advertising pushed "lifestyles" instead of thrift, restraint, and toil -- as shown in the "shopping mall" culture in which everyone could play as if they were 'jet-setters' showing their alleged sophistication through their brainwashed purchases of consumer goodies. Going deeply into debt for consumer purchases did make one more dependent upon one's employer, so that was compensation.
America put too little talent in the creation of the real wealth of manufacturing, small business, energy production, and agriculture and too much into paper-shuffling. The fundamentals of the economy weakened while we had a veneer of post-industrial indulgence to be enjoyed even by clerks. Reverting to emphases on manufacturing, small business, energy production, and agriculture may be impossible. Most Big Business farms out manufacturing to other countries. Small business? Big Business doesn't like it because it isn't blindly obedient. Energy production? Here comes the Sun! Agriculture? Maybe our best export sector now. How long will it be before agriculture becomes a bigger share of the economic life of Michigan than is the auto industry?
But although narcissistic types fare extremely well in bureaucratic structures far away from the production of goods and provision of services, those organizations need relatively few narcissists. So prospects get humbled, and those who got into the near-apex of bureaucratic structures set very low glass ceilings. Those narcissists can find enough understudies from among those related to themselves through nepotism and cronyism, so to keep things from falling apart they establish low, rigid glass ceilings in big corporations and then inflict extreme degradation upon the unfortunate subordinates. Those narcissists may be rhetorically sophisticated enough to stop short of saying something like
Suffer for me -- my gain, my power, and my indulgence, you peons/proles! I am the best thing that ever happened to you, and you had better recognize that your poverty and pain are the greatest blessings that I, the all-powerful Boss can confer!
I am reminded of an article in a magazine of history that explained how slave-owning planters saw their relationship with slaves. There was no neurotic guilt and no recognition of the hypocrisy of eloquent praise for freedom while holding their slaves in bondage in one of the most degrading ways of life possible. Those planters saw themselves as benefactors to their slaves, the best thing that could ever happen to a slave being that he would be bought into that master's collection of assets. So there is some precedent. Style may adopt to political and technological realities, but the core personality does not.
...Just think of how Howe and Strauss see the most objectionable of Idealist traits: selfishness, arrogance, and ruthlessness. Although Idealist elites can crush these traits in fellow Idealists unfortunate enough to not be among those elites (Boomers not in those elites might learn humility to the extent of selling out all dreams as a necessity for short-term survival) those elites put themselves in their own versions of Olympus.
Now those elites can make life miserable. having dominance in control of assets and opportunity. They have taken over the political system and 'given' Americans the purest plutocracy on Earth that does not have a royal family that owns the key source of national revenue and expends it either on itself or on the enforcement of official terror. Corporate lobbyists are the real power in the Federal and most state legislatures, and Donald Trump expresses narcissism to so severe a degree that it might be sociopathy.
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.