10-07-2017, 03:55 AM
(10-05-2017, 02:17 PM)beechnut79 Wrote:(10-04-2017, 12:24 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: Losing optimism in the American Dream. As America goes from being a democracy to being a Marcos-like kleptocracy, one can expect such. Politicians like Donald Trump, Paul Ryan, and Mitch McConnell (let alone such extreme outliers as Roy Moore) represent the antithesis of Millennial interests. I expect this generation to be just short of being as sympathetic to the irrationalism so much a part of American politics as the French equivalents of America's chilly Republican rationalists were to the Bourbon monarchy and its hangers-on. There might be no guillotine, though.
Sure, everyone dreams of going heavily in debt for education for a good job, only to find that unless one has the right college major that one will get something once relegated to high-school graduates or even dropouts, and that even if one gets a well-paying job one gets gouged for high rent in a tiny apartment. [/snark] If high rents are 'progress', then I (as a Boomer) can understand that some progress is not worth it.
Yet we are often told that the balance we seek between us and others can also be found within ourselves. This should mean that we have the ability to create positive outcomes by redirecting our energy to suit our own well-being. There you have the malaise in a nutshell. Most of us are so busy suiting our own well-being that we could care less about the collective welfare of the society at large. "Give me convenience or give me death", as mentioned on one thread here a while back, seems to be the battle cry of the whole society across all living generations. And until something shakes out there, nothing much will change for the better.
Most of us want more choice in the talents that we develop and use. To that end we must look into our interiors... well, if there is a gaping void we must put something into our interiors. That is one of the objectives of a high-quality education in the liberal arts, even if we are to be technical specialists or laborers.
Since Reagan, what was a relatively relaxed Class Society in which social roles were loose by current standards to one in which low glass ceilings limit most of us to drudge roles despite our talents and efforts and threaten us with the piked pit in the event of failure to comply with the whims of the economic and administrative elites. People who claim to stand for the purest freedom of enterprise (and for them Ayn Rand is the prophet and Donald Trump is the hero) fail to recognize that freedom for enterprise means that the giant corporation can become a Moloch. But this goes beyond malaise. For many this is a nightmare, one in which life becomes a struggle for survival at an animal level.
Convenience and ease are rightly suspect. I question that I alone find them boring. Who wants to keep doing exactly the same Sudoku?
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.