Election 2018

[Bob Butler 54]

(11-18-2018, 10:41 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: Technological and artistic achievements will color any age in the cycle. Such an introduced technology as the automobile, phonograph,  television, or the Pill will shape how the Crisis expresses itself. The higher speeds and (by necessity) paved roads allowed people to go farther and faster than in "the surrey with the fringe on the top" and allow to do more hanky-panky in privacy. (The automobile had not made its way to Oklahoma in 1907, but it would soon). Recorded music offered the music being listened to live elsewhere or recently, perhaps disseminating the popular music of the time into places where it might not otherwise be heard. Okay, the recording art around 1940 was better suited for some musical instruments than others -- brasses instead of strings, which ensured that Big Band music would not be played by string orchestras. Television offered much the same material that people saw in a movie theater (cartoons, newsreels, and travelogues), on stage (most of the early TV stars had done vaudeville before the movies did vaudeville in), or perhaps even in church (sermons). Any generation would have found some use for the Pill.

But technologies and cultural achievements do not themselves force the movement of the saecular cycle. They allow reflections. Had television existed in the 1930s as something other than a laboratory curiosity, then  Americans would have gotten news, cartoons, serials, and advertising before they got something cheaply produced or available cheaply -- like a feature film from two years earlier. There might be one network, probably analogous to the Armed Forces Television, and people would get what the government wanted them to get. Much would be didactic (drive safely, how to get more farm output and protect against erosion, advice on cooking, canning, and cleaning... nothing to shake things up).  

The conflict is not of technology between the Industrial Age and the Information Age. Both use the same technologies. What differs is content that differs due to differences in core beliefs. The now-reactionary elites associated with the Industrial Era have no desire to suppress the technology of information; it wants to control that information to enforce its ways.

It is hard associating productivity with one particular age boundary.  You can go back to the tractor and it's lightening of farm labor required and the associated migration to the cities and factories of the Gilded Age.  The productivity question has been with us for a long while.  It is just that we have to keep adjusting working hours to how much work to be done.  The New Deal got it pretty much right in its time, but the numbers have not changed since.  The technology has.

I do see changing technology as driving the cycles.  If nothing else, new elites have new wealth and a need to weaken the old elites to optimize their own profits.  The civilizations that win are aligned with the people who have the wealth.  The new elites make promises to the People in exchange for power.  The new structure has political power adapting to the source of wealth.

Once upon a time, the Robber Barons were a progressive force, removing political power from the hereditary landowners, the nobility, freeing slaves, giving power to the legislative branches, away from the kings.  With the submergence of the nobility around the US Civil War and the world wars, they became the dominant and conservative force.  They have long since reached the point where they have rigged the system to favor them, where they own the imbalance of wealth.  

Democracy favors the workers, however.  It is a matter of the workers waking up.  We are going to need every dollar to create a sustainable future.  We will no longer be able to afford absurd wealth vanishing to the hands of a few.