(05-19-2019, 03:55 AM)AspieMillennial Wrote:(05-19-2019, 03:41 AM)Eric the Green Wrote:(03-27-2019, 06:38 PM)beechnut79 Wrote: In just a little over nine months from now we will close the books on another decade. What will the legacy of the 2010s be? Its highs, its lows, its would've, could've and should'ves? This could be the decade that disproves at least some of the authors' theory. They identified a roughly 80-year saecular cycle, which would have made this decade coincide with the 1930s. Yet the 2010s were a far cry from the near universal misery of the earlier time. At its beginning we may have still felt the effects of the downturn of the closing years of the 00 decade, but nothing even closely resembling a second great depression occurred....
The majority of people still work for low wages and have to pay high prices. The effects of the Bush recession live on, despite Obama's actions that have made it more tolerable than the great depression. The rich get all the breaks, and the culture war drags on. The effects of the great recession and mushrooming climate change continue, and reinforce one another. Last time we had the Dust Bowl; this time there's severe droughts, storms and floods. Our 4T is literally a winter season, which will continue for decades unless things shift rapidly in the next 10 years. That could happen.
Meanwhile the refugees from the recession, climate change and the resulting civil wars that broke out in 2011 continue to stir up right-wing fears and prejudice in the USA, Europe and elsewhere, heightening the polarizations and divisions. The USA may be on the verge of a split like the 4T from 2 cycles ago, which resembles the current one even more than the previous one does. The threat of our government falling into chaotic authoritarian destruction is greater from within this time, instead of from without. Our red states may become the new Confederacy.
Culturally we have far less to escape to in this 4T than in the last one; in the last 4T we did have a golden age of film and good pop music. Now TV and movies are dull, and so is the music. Our just-previous 2T was almost as creative as the one previous 120 years ago, and our golden age of pop music occurred then, in the sixties and early 70s, with far more abundant creativity and energy than the big band era produced. And culture in the earlier times was free or cheap, whereas to see the supposedly-good TV shows today you have to pay big bucks.
Less to escape to if you're into mainstream current music and culture. More to escape to if you're an expert at using the internet to find anything.
Classical music. Academic lectures. Great literature. People just have to learn to pick and choose. I am now listening to a performance of Beethoven's Seventh symphony with Wilhelm Furtwangler conducting the Berlin Philharmonic in 1943. That is right -- National-Satanist Germany. Great musical performances can come from the most demonic time and place, the political entity then committing unspeakable horrors.
You will have to spend some money to get a good movie collection, but it is worth the outlay.
...A great fault with our educational system is that we are teaching people to become machines in the service of economic elites so that they can spend their lives working multiple jobs just to meet the demands of landlords and loan-sharks... yes, we have a thoroughly-unjust economic order devoid of any obvious virtues. We should be teaching people how to live to the fullest, and that implies a return to liberal arts as a completion of the preparation for a good life. That might not be so great for the suppliers of cultural pablum for numbed people -- but why should I care about the bilge that vanishes because people can think of better things to do with their time?
The fault is in economics, but that is a moral issue -- whether a government predicated on the enrichment, indulgence, and power of extant elites
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.