06-11-2021, 01:07 PM
Cultures change over time. Youth are more often the agents of cultural change than are older generations who have become more set in their ways. Middle-aged people generally quit innovating in their ways of doing things because they get comfortable with certain things and have cast off certain attempts to innovate that did not an out well.
The differences between the generations are
(1) how they are brought up (time is environment much as are ethnicity, social class, religion, region, and education). All times exaggerate some perceptions of certainty and uncertainty. Sometimes youth find gaps in the social assumptions that others have neglected. Some generations find that the time imposes at one extreme a highly-structured pattern of child-raising (which is so for Adaptive children), and some times leave children able to make very inappropriate choices (for Reactive children). The inner world can be very certain and the outer world chaotic for Civic youth; for Idealist youth, the outer world is too certain, but the inner world is a great vacuum.
(2) the store of accumulated knowledge and access to such expands over time, or at least it will until the technological civilization that we know falls apart, as would happen after global thermonuclear war, another ice age, a supervolcano eruption that decimates the human population, a powerful gamma-ray burst, or maybe a collision between the Earth and some body such as the one that wiped out the dinosaurs. (It would wipe out animals larger than cats and small dogs. Unlike the last time, an animal as fearsome as T-Rex would survive. Cats and terrier dogs might stick around. But even "weedy" large herbivores such as deer that ordinarily fill the gaps after some ecological disaster would not return.
(3) Technologies become obsolete, but people tend to do much the same things with new technologies that they did before them. Figure that such an object as the automobile has had interactions with generations from Missionaries to the toddlers of our time. Television has already been commonplace for a modestly-long lifetime. Computers that GI's introduced do what brute-force methods of calculation and record-keeping do. Technology changes attitudes far less than we think.
(4) big historical events. A country such as Japan changed greatly in how it raised children, especially in values taught, between 1935 and 1950. Dying for the Emperor in the expansion of the Empire wasn't so attractive to people who experienced the Second World War - or a younger generation that no longer was taught such nonsense. China, Russia, the USA, India, and Indonesia are just too dangerous to make any Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere in which Tokyo is the center and the Japanese people are the masters anything other than a supreme calamity.
The differences between the generations are
(1) how they are brought up (time is environment much as are ethnicity, social class, religion, region, and education). All times exaggerate some perceptions of certainty and uncertainty. Sometimes youth find gaps in the social assumptions that others have neglected. Some generations find that the time imposes at one extreme a highly-structured pattern of child-raising (which is so for Adaptive children), and some times leave children able to make very inappropriate choices (for Reactive children). The inner world can be very certain and the outer world chaotic for Civic youth; for Idealist youth, the outer world is too certain, but the inner world is a great vacuum.
(2) the store of accumulated knowledge and access to such expands over time, or at least it will until the technological civilization that we know falls apart, as would happen after global thermonuclear war, another ice age, a supervolcano eruption that decimates the human population, a powerful gamma-ray burst, or maybe a collision between the Earth and some body such as the one that wiped out the dinosaurs. (It would wipe out animals larger than cats and small dogs. Unlike the last time, an animal as fearsome as T-Rex would survive. Cats and terrier dogs might stick around. But even "weedy" large herbivores such as deer that ordinarily fill the gaps after some ecological disaster would not return.
(3) Technologies become obsolete, but people tend to do much the same things with new technologies that they did before them. Figure that such an object as the automobile has had interactions with generations from Missionaries to the toddlers of our time. Television has already been commonplace for a modestly-long lifetime. Computers that GI's introduced do what brute-force methods of calculation and record-keeping do. Technology changes attitudes far less than we think.
(4) big historical events. A country such as Japan changed greatly in how it raised children, especially in values taught, between 1935 and 1950. Dying for the Emperor in the expansion of the Empire wasn't so attractive to people who experienced the Second World War - or a younger generation that no longer was taught such nonsense. China, Russia, the USA, India, and Indonesia are just too dangerous to make any Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere in which Tokyo is the center and the Japanese people are the masters anything other than a supreme calamity.
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.
