06-03-2020, 09:15 PM
(06-03-2020, 04:00 PM)User3451 Wrote: It is very clear that we are near the peak of this fourth turning's crisis. Both the international world order and the United States are visibly changing.
Where is the Regeneracy?
Nowhere -- and then everywhere. People change their ways so that there can be a better world than the yawning abyss in the event of systemic failure. If a Crisis war, then people accept conscription because people come to the recognition that there are fates worse than death. People make economic sacrifices in the form of rationing, shortages, higher taxes, and outright denials in defense of something bigger than the Self. People recognize the need for social and economic regimentation for the short term to get through a dangerous time of economic collapse, internal rifts, and external dangers.
Is the Regeneracy always benign? No. The Regeneracy that the Leadership offers might itself be perverse...
... especially if the Leadership of the time chooses to victimize innocent people rendered helpless in the name of Nation or Race, when conspiracy theories become political orthodoxy.
Truth, justice, and equity are the strongest bases of a viable and ultimately-successful Regeneracy. The arson against this German synagogue is in a way a portent of what would happen to much more of Germany's stock of buildings. I have said in some exchanges with neo-Nazis that there was nothing wrong with the German people between 1933 and 1945 that Judaism would not have solved. There would have been neither moral nor cultural loss.
Quote:I admit, I'm not all that clear on what a Regeneracy looks like, but I think we might see more momentum behind decoupling from China and the Post War world order, enhanced social benefits, new infrastructure.
The Post-WWII order is now seventy-five years old where the political orders changed least. Practically no adults from the time of the last Crisis Era -- and those people were barely into adulthood (let us say Betty White and Bob Dole). It may be surprising to many that even the post-Cold War reality in central and Balkan Europe is itself nearly thirty years old. Nobody has a stake in the Old Order when it starts to break down.
Donald Trump offered us a sort of Regeneracy, one of male dominance ("grab 'em by the kitty-cat"), strident assertions of one manifestation of Christianity (I wonder if Ivanka offended him by converting to Judaism), crony capitalism on the ground that some few Right People know what is best for us all -- essentially that those people know what is best for us all (that elite of Right People get everything and bleed everyone for the privilege of living in their world), and a mythical idea that America was somehow greater even if people back then were far worse off. Trump denies progress in the name of some mystical or mythical concept of "greatness".
Quote:There has to be something to unite a majority and get traction, correct?
Yes -- a common recognition of failure of flaws built into the system or recently allowed to infiltrate it. Elite power and indulgence at the expense of everyone else is a serious fault. Note that in recent times many of the most powerful people have deemed that the social ideal is acceptance of the sort of inequity of economic result characteristic of a social order on the brink of a proletarian revolution. Such people believe as does a Marxist that capitalism by necessity is a hierarchical, inequitable, authoritarian order that inflicts great misery upon people who are obliged to accept extreme poverty. The difference between such and Marxism is that Marxists consider such terribly wrong.
We have other problems, to be sure -- extreme concentration of opportunity in few places, with elites taxing those who live in such places heavily through rents that devour more than half of their income. So a place like Rochester, New York that used to be a very good place to live because people with high-school diplomas could get well-paying factory work that allowed them to spend like the middle class is now a nuked-out shell. On the other hand if one is a software engineer one's opportunities are heavily concentrated in Silicon Valley, one pays exorbitant rents or must find dome other way of making a living -- less than a living, really -- if one wants to have housing of reasonable cost. We have a thoroughly-awful man as President because he promised the right things to the right people in return for ignoring his severe faults. We have media that split along lines (the Huffington Post and Fox News) of telling people exactly what they want to hear. Reality is not a matter of personal choice, and we fail to recognize this at great danger.
Quote:Interested to hear others' perspectives on this.
If you want an analogy -- a Regeneracy has an analogue in people hitting bottom as their bad practices prove unsustainable. One has a destructive or wasteful habit that will bring ruin. If alcoholism it is gutting one's health and costing a pretty penny. If one is a problem gambler what one spends in the excitement of the casino or betting parlor might better be salting such funds away into a retirement account or a child's college fund.
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.