What the next First Turning won't be like

[pbrower2a]

(10-26-2020, 11:46 PM)Mickey123 Wrote: There's a general impression in this forum that the worst of the Crisis is behind us and we're on the verge of entering the next High, without much of a crisis ever actually happening.  I've realized that the reason for this is that people here have no concept of what the next High is actually going to be like.

There's a vague idea among many people here that the next High is basically going to be like the unraveling, except with some laundry list of liberal improvements, like racism having disappeared or big corporations being forced to behave themselves and pay workers more.  But this isn't what it will be like at all.  It can't be, because that's not what a first turning is like.

America had an economic meltdown similar in severity after a year and a half to the first year and a half of the meltdown that began the Great Depression. 



The blue squiggly curve beginning in September 2007 at points digs lower than the gray squiggly curve beginning in September 1929 at a couple of points in late 2008 and early 2009. It's obvious that with similar policies by the federal government in 2009 that things could eventually get much worse -- like tigntening fiscal and monetary policy that was the economic orthodoxy of the late 1920's (one must balance the budget at all costs, and Hoover's attempts to economize further gutted the economy). Hoover could have prevented further meltdown by backing the banks from the destructive bank runs that utterly destroyed the financial system and nearly put America on a barter system.

Federal deposit insurance protects against bank runs, so another depression of the sort of the 1930's is impossible. 

We are not going to solve all our problems cheaply. I don't expect the full laundry list of liberal proposals to be enacted this time any more than they were enacted in 2009 and 2010 (if anything, America became increasingly reactionary in its politics through the first two years of the Donald Trump Presidency. But the sorts of reactionary practices that Trump wanted (including mass privatization of the public sector) also failed.  

Quote:First turnings are culturally conservative. They are a time of conformity.  Yes, the divide between wealthy and poor is less, but this is not because people are more liberal, but because everyone, including large corporations, is expected to do what's best for the group instead of what's best for themselves.  The last awakening began with hippies doing their own thing in the parks, and ended with big companies doing their own thing and not having to follow any particular rules or standards.  By the High this process has been reversed.  Companies do what's best for society, and so do individuals, because everyone must conform.

Figure that the cornerstone of liberal victories in elections is America's model minorities: Jews, middle-class Latinos, Asian-Americans, Arab-Americans, and the Black Bourgeoisie. Do these people seem to be part of any cultural avant-garde? It may be best that they are not. America's distress is economic, and not cultural. Such people will shape much about American culture, and much of the new shape will fit these people. The cultural divide in America will be between traditions and not between cultural hypermodernity and daring innovation in style. I expect all of these groups to return educational practice to the tried and true. Maybe norms of public education will shift from the norm of K-12 education to K-14... but such will come with more compulsory classes and fewer electives. Survey courses in economics, philosophy, psychology, comparative economic and political systems, probability and statistics, and child development look like obvious candidates. Maybe there will be some choice on a foreign language (best for most Americans would be one Romance, one Germanic, and one Slavic language, but I could not guarantee that).  Maybe I would throw in an art appreciation and a music appreciation class... people will be working fewer hours, and not more around 2040, and I can assure people that time spent in art galleries or listening to non-pop music (classical, jazz, folk, maybe rhythm-and-blues) isn't wasted time. 

If you wonder why I chose the classes that I suggested, then philosophy is the core of all learning and where one can learn formal logic. Psychology can teach us how to avoid cons; economics can give the essential lessons that there is no such thing as a free lunch and that very little that is good is cheap. Comparative systems might inoculate us against demagogues who offer some foreign ideology that somehow fails to fit America. Demagogues against which I wish we could have been inoculated include Donald Trump.        

Quote:There will be a repolarization of male/female sex roles.  Men and women will be seen as fundamentally different, and these differences will be accepted and even celebrated.  This doesn't mean a return to the 1950s system where women were not allowed to work most jobs, but it means that any ideas that men and women are the same will be abandoned.  Feminism as a movement will not exist, unless it is repurposed to point out the value of being a woman (under society's new consensus on what it is to be a woman).

Probably so. There will be fewer hours needed to achieve our basic needs, so it may be far safer to put women back in the kitchen with the children and going to religious services with the children in tow rather than creating a large number of unemployed men who go to the bar to get drunk on liquor and extremist politics. (Think carefully; all fascist causes are bad-boy clubs, whether the KKK, Mussolini's Fascii di Combattimento, Nazis, and [if perhaps without the liquor] al-Qaeda and Daesh. There's good reason for the victorious Allies insisting on votes for women in Italy and Japan upon victory and even in France, which had more than its share of defeatists and collaborators aligned with German and Italian fascism). Talented women will get highly-desirable jobs, but I expect the large number of female salesclerks and cleaners to diminish greatly. 

I expect real costs of housing to plummet, mostly because much economic activity will return or emerge in places recently ravaged. Concentration of economic activity on the coasts will diminish, so people will be able to make solid incomes in places like Cleveland, Milwaukee, Detroit, and St. Louis again. If one can make it there one need not pay the exorbitant rents of coastal cities -- right?    

Quote:People will respect social institutions, respect the government, the press, the police, and so on.  This doesn't mean that these institutions will fundamentally be better than they are now or were in the past, but the time for criticism of them will be over.

People will demand better of institutions and get better behavior from those institutions. I look at Black Lives Matters as a cause that can attract people to the recognition that we have far too many cops much more trigger-happy with black people that they stop than with white people.  On the other hand, criminal behavior will be far easier to detect, and prosecution of offenders will be far more efficient and decisive. Welcome to a pattern known in another advanced industrial country: Japan. Do not be a criminal in Japan, for you will be treated like a political offender is in China with thought reform.  

I expect much consolidation of media markets. It may not be so obvious, but I can easily imagine close-by cities being merged into the same media market for newspapers and television (if not radio). As an example, expansive Nevada is basically two TV markets (Reno and Las Vegas). Nebraska has lots of small-town TV stations... except that those are really repeaters of the Lincoln market. I can see much the same happening in such states as Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, Missouri, Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. I expect people to demand better of news media (more genuine news and less fluff, let alone overt propaganda -- on that here's a Bronx cheer to "Stinking Liar Broadcasting"

https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/sinclair-...ast-group/

Again, a well-educated populace is much less vulnerable to propaganda because it recognizes the manipulation and fabrication when such presents itself. 

Quote:We are a long, long way from the above.  How do we get there from here?  The answer is, we don't.  We can't go directly from here to there.  The only way to get there is for the crisis to be so large that everyone comes together to solve it, and then the spirit of coming together lasts once the crisis is over. 

After the invective that seems built into the system, we will be ready for more placidity in politics and find such refreshing when it arrives. It will be a good idea to have a tax system that creates niches for small business so that people create jobs instead of depending upon a race-to-the-bottom in a bidding war for employment in corporate America. We are at the end of the era in which further productivity itself creates more happiness through the potential for consumer spending (no, we don't need two washing machines or two dryers, more than one car per adult driver, two giant refrigerators, or more than one TV per person)... Status symbols will become meaningless. 

Quote:I'm guessing this will take some sort of revolutionary or civil war in the U.S.  It might be something else, but it won't be "and then Joe Biden was elected and a vaccine was found for covid-19 and everyone lived happily ever after".

"Happily ever after" exists only in fairy tales. People will eventually tire of the 1T.

By the way -- COVID-19 is a genuine crisis event. In eight months we have more deaths from it than the total combat deaths of the Union side in the Civil War (which took four years, even if with a much smaller population); we are approaching the total combat death toll of American armed forces in World War II. Some Americans are responding to COVID-19 as if it were a genuine Crisis necessitating major changes in life, and some are failing to do so... and failing to do so could cause mass death.