03-21-2020, 06:01 PM
(03-20-2020, 02:04 PM)jleagans Wrote: Message boards are dead y'all, is there a more frequently used place for Strauss Howe discussions ?
Strauss Howe on reddit seems the most active, for a conversation forum to exist long-term its gonna need to be on Reddit.
Only Millennials and Gen Z should try to argue with me, as Gen X and Boomers can't be trusted to know anything in regards to technology.
Try to draw people from other forums through cross-pollination. Introduce the Strauss-Howe theory into other forums and invite people interesting there here. The Fourth Turning can manifest itself in pop culture, securities markets, international and domestic politics, and history in general. It is telling that we are still about 80 years away from the Golden Age of Cinema, a time in which cinema became unusually good in satisfying omnibus audiences irrespective of class, religion, region, age, and ethnicity. I see tendencies toward such a return. As an example I used to disparage movies with lavish special effects that then covered inadequately the bad writing of the script and the shallowness of the story line. Now that movies can have both lavish special effects and solid writing I have dropped that lament.
Not that I expect tensions with Germany, Italy, and Japan to culminate in anything like American involvement in World War II, or for Southerners to attack Fort Sumter again...
We need to distinguish between what is most permanent and what is at most a passing fad. The laws of mathematics, physics (down to sub-atomic particles), and logic are there for us to accept if we be wise and reject if we be fools. We still (if wise) study ancient Greece and Rome because many aspects of life then true are still true today. Were such not so, wise people would find Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle irrelevant. One religious heritage seems to be asking and answering many of the same questions from over 2500 years ago and seems as vibrant as any even if it is a tiny minority in the world. That religion is Judaism, and it gets away with that because the conflicts between good and evil, wisdom and stupidity, and truth and falsity remain the same. Standards of beauty in the West are much the same as they were in antiquity. We can still derive much delight from structured music from at the least medieval polyphony to that of the Big Band era or the string quartets of Dmitri Shostakovich.
The cycle remains in part because the dreams of one generation require compromises for their achievement. The New Deal, for example, brought unprecedented prosperity to the Mountain South -- but failed to address anti-black racism. Maybe FDR had pushed civil rights for Southern blacks he would have gotten opposition from the South that would have turned not to the Party of Lincoln but instead to people who admired the Party of Hitler. One turn of the generational cycle brings about fresh excesses and inadequacies that must be smoothed out in the next turning.
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.