Summarize world history without help

[Eric the Green]

(04-03-2019, 06:03 AM)Bill the Piper Wrote:

(04-02-2019, 11:43 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: "The generation born after the war was especially prone to selfish hedonism and naive mysticism."

LOL There you go Bill. That's where you and other boomer-knockers miss the boat  And you say this was a reaction to a war that we never experienced?

Yes it wouldn't happen without WW2. The war made many people question the ideas of rationality and progress. Hippies merely put this into practice, but the theoretical ideas existed as early as 1950. See Ray Bradbury's stories. His philosophical underpinnings are similar to what radical students of 1968 believed. And he was born in 1920!

Ayn Rand claimed the hippies were most conformist among all boomers, since they did what the post-war intellectual establishment preached. I'd add: some of this stuff goes back to the radical, Jeffersonian wing of the American revolution. But without the post-war disillusion, counterculture would be a fringe movement at best.

The same attitudes were present after WW1, but because it was another phase of the cycle, they didn't gain so much currency.

Being a boomer and a semi-hippie, of course, I disagree. That's not how it happened at all.  Not having experienced the war, hippies did not have many thoughts about it. What they responded to was the spirit-death of the post-war world. That is what the war helped to create among those who preceded the Boomers. So it was a very indirect factor, and quite normal according to the saeculum cycle. The spirit-death of the post-war world helped prepare the way for boomer and others' questioning of rationality and progress from the mid-60s on, and so did our observation of where the world was going; toward depersonalization, nuclear war and ecological destruction. An "anesthetic culture of comfort with few intellectual challenges"; that's well-said too.

But the hippies discovered alternative realities, partly inspired by psychedelics, partly due to the saeculum turning and the other cosmic cycles in play; so a general mystical awakening happened among the people. Mysticism, we discovered, is true, and materialism is false. Not being awakened yet, many millies don't realize this fact. That does not make us naive; it makes you guys naive. Sorry to be so blunt, but sometimes it seems necessary. It's up to you guys what your world view needs to be. I can't impose it on you; it's your life journey; just to be clear

Materialist and spirit-dead worlds cannot continue without either dying or spawning an awakening. Cycles happen. Since the post-war West and USA was a prosperous materialist society that believed in material (but not other kinds of) progress, it was not dying materially, but was already dying spiritually; so an Awakening naturally occurred, and hippies and many others discovered different ways of thinking and living. 

There was more hedonism, and no doubt some mystical ideas were naive. Naivete happens among all stripes of opinion. But overall, this awakening was not simply naive or hedonistic. It was an Awakening much like previous ones. Like the last 2 or 3 of them, non-traditional forms of spirituality appeared, as we had progressed in our cultural awakening beyond traditional Christianity. But like previous awakenings, traditional forms also were revived during the Awakening-- generally not for the betterment of society in this case.

Ayn Rand, being a total idiot, has nothing worthwhile to say. I disagree fully with that paragraph. The post-war intellectual establishment in the USA was gung-ho for materialism and progress. University philosophy departments had been reduced to linguistics and positivism.  Scientism was predominant there totally. Progress was our most important product. The space needle of 1962 celebrated science's great achievement in the space race. Hippies were the greatest non-conformists in history, and their new life in the 1966 period was spectacular.

Again, there was NO post-war disillusion in the USA. Your view on that is mixed up. WWII was a victory that left the USA as the only standing world power. The post-war was upbeat. The dominant songs were "Get Happy" and "Accentuate the Positive". Strauss and Howe are definitive on this. Young Boomers were upbeat too, not disillusioned; they just looked around in their boring and useless classrooms and factories and realized there's a lot more to life than the standard American Dream. They saw the limitations of many of the worldviews of the time too, and thus feminism, ethnic liberation movements, and gay liberation movements happened, as well as the movement against environmental destruction, and against a totally unnecessary war that was killing not only American youth, but millions of others in a foreign land for absolutely no reason whatsoever. It was not World War Two which spirited young boomers, hippies, yippies and many others of all ages protested against in the late sixties. It was the Vietnam-American War! And they were totally correct, and eventually they became the first Americans and maybe the first people anywhere in history to stop a war.

Thanks for the opportunity to re-tell your story as it really was, as I see it instead.