(06-16-2018, 09:34 AM)beechnut79 Wrote: Do any of you see any hope for another period of time charged with radical fun if you want it? Seems that mindset disappeared circa the mid-1980s when society went from hedonistic to workaholic almost overnight. Aren't there at least some left who want to love, play, dance and create?
As America became increasingly inegalitarian, hierarchical, and repressive, a certain mindset could emerge among the economic elites of ownership and management -- the idea that the rest of Humanity exists solely to suffer for the rapacious greed of elites. To that end, monopolization, privatization (to crony capitalists), and managerial brutalization offered the means of Making America Great Again -- if by 'greatness' one means the Gilded Age. Donald Trump is not the cause; he is a symptom.
That's the early capitalism that Karl Marx knew and thought would lead to proletarian revolutions, to socialism and in turn Communism. Capitalists learned at a certain stage that the only way to make the proletariat something other than sullen dissidents awaiting a proletarian revolution is to make them markets for the stuff that they produce. That implies lower profit margins to be made up on higher sales volume -- and more work.
Even education seems dedicated now to making machines out of children. Toiling machines, that is, who can rent a little over-priced entertainment in return for working hard and paying off debt that they are expected to assume so that they can buy into some debased image of the American dream -- and never forget, to pay exorbitant property rents in an economy dedicated to the rentier capitalist. (Rentier refers to passive collectors of income, and not only landlords).
I can easily imagine some owner or boss proclaiming himself as the fount of all economic blessings made possible only through the suffering of the masses for that owner or boss. I can imagine that vile plutocrat telling people "Why can you not suffer more for my gain? You can't or won't? Then starve to death, and let your family starve, too!" Such is the start of a plutocratic reign of terror.
I expect the next Awakening Era to be a rejection of what remains of the inegalitarian, hierarchical, and repressive society seeming now in formation in America. Even if Donald Trump and his associates be successful in transforming America into a fascistic order, an Awakening Era will dismantle it. Such happened in Portugal and Spain.
Moral compromises in the name of personal survival become untenable as survival gets easier. That's how things go in an Awakening -- maybe around 2040.
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.