08-16-2020, 08:03 PM
(08-16-2020, 02:05 PM)RadianMay Wrote:(08-16-2020, 11:15 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: (deleted for brevity)
The school system in this country doesn't serve children and our future at all, it's just a way to keep the teen unemployment figures down. The disastrous way it's run definitely makes this seem like the case anyway.
I agree with you that civic education is severely lacking. Everywhere I go, it does seem to me that this country is a cultural vacuum, with people equating hedonistic entertainment with culture and vacuous expression with art. I too fall prey to this mindless drivel, losing hours of a day to reading and watching these things when I could be appreciating more intellectually stimulating media. I'm beginning to suspect that our culture as a whole (at least right now) cannot support intellectual enlightenment, given that people are too stressed out making ends meet to even have the mental energy to appreciate something greater. All they want is to put on another mind-numbing episode of their favorite TV show for 20 mins of escapism.
I think for this to happen we need a collective cultural awakening, a reevaluation of our values, that life is meant to be lived, not consumed. Our neoliberal values makes this impossible, where the ultimate goal is to climb the job ladder, drive the most powerful car, own the biggest house, run in the rat race. In many cases this isn't even possible, with crippling student debt being the ticket to the race, and expendable workers stopping anyone from getting far ahead at all.
High-school attendance became much more of a norm in the 1930's. Maybe if there wasn't adequate work for the teenagers (then apprenticeships or casual labor, later fast food), then teenagers might as well go to school and refine their lives in preparation for better times. It is arguable that people born in the early 1920's, late-wave GI's, were just as intellectually sophisticated as today's youth.
It is possible that after people are relieved of a political disaster they become much more attentive to the political order than before. I would guess that the legislative process in Spain, Portugal, or Greece was far more interesting after the overthrow of military dictatorships in the 1970's. Figure how exciting politics could be in Chile or Czechoslovakia alike after the demise of dictatorial regimes supposedly antitheses but really having much in common. People took American politics for granted before Donald Trump, and I suspect that they will take a long time in which to get complacent about political processes again.
Optimally politics is boring and dull. Political life is much more exciting under Trump than under Obama, if for all the wrong reasons.
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Consider well: American mass culture is mostly awful. It may be slick in image and highly sophisticated in execution, but it is mostly empty. You may have seen the knocks I made on country and rap, very dissimilar expressions of music but neither capable of elevating life in any way. We all know that mass culture is most effectively done for maximal profit if is directed at the stupidest people who might actually pay for it... and of course that is the borderline-retarded. People stupider usually lack any disposable income and others typically buy their 'stuff' for them. It may be superficially entertaining, but it is the nutritional equivalent of cotton candy.
This is the antithesis of cotton-candy entertainment:
The culmination of a complex story that has multiple themes upon which to ponder is far more intellectually nourishing. This is not twenty minutes of escapist entertainment, and people in the know pay a high price to see this. They remember it for years, which is more than one can say of Top 40 pap. And most of it is pap, the cultural equivalent of cotton candy.
But before I seem too much of a cultural snob... eighty years ago the Big Band era had sophisticated music that, like Mozart and Haydn a hundred-fifty years earlier, operated at multiple levels of aesthetic attractiveness. Example:
It is derivative of a piece of classical music, Invitation to the Dance by Carl Maria von Weber... but arguably better because of a tighter organization.
OK. Youth need to learn that there is more to life than material gain, status symbols, ease, comfort, sex, chemical highs, and bureaucratic power. Any of these can become irrelevant or rare or come at a horrific cost. As scarcity becomes less a norm because everything material (except perhaps living space and things producible only in minimal quantities) becomes easily available, status symbols of suspect desirability become pitiable more than admirable. People unable to find things worthy of sacrifice are amoral swine. Bureaucratic power which has become the most reliable way to get rich without the sacrifices of starting a business that one grows could easily disappear, and with it the spectacular pay that some of our executives enjoy (for treating people badly), if the next response to a nasty economic meltdown is to decide that some institutions are too big to save instead of (as was so the last time) too big to fail. We may go from favoring bloated, vertically-integrated oligopolies to favoring small business that does far better at serving people and providing opportunities... and jobs..
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.