10-13-2021, 05:44 PM
(10-13-2021, 11:33 AM)tg63 Wrote: I equate this feeling to the sense of urgency that a 4T brings - the same drivers that require a response to the crisis of the day are the things that make us unable to relax & slow down at a personal level.
Really what you're asking for is a 21st century version of a Leave it To Beaver lifestyle ... it's coming ...
It won't be quite the same, but the next 1T will be
material and not spiritual (Boomers really blew that on the whole!)
intolerant of the lunatic fringe
conformist (at least within the ethnic groups)
male-chauvinist (sorry about that, feminists: those who still have professional occupations will keep those, but the rest of womanhood will be re-cast into traditional female roles. Getting male breadwinners to work may be far easier if women are again relegate d to Kinder, Kuche, and Kirche... which is far better than having angry, unemployed men joining the K... K.... K....
Politically we will see one side of the political division prevail, with the other side rendered irrelevant. If the Right wins, then we will see a social order that lionizes the economic elites and expects everyone else to defer in all things -- and be thankful to those elites for all the blessings of a plutocratic order. The worker will be humiliated with the expectation to be thankful to his bosses and the executives for not firing him today (as everyone not in the elites deserves either to starve or die of exposure) in an economic order devoid of any safety net. Elites will be pitting regions, religions, and ethnic groups against each other in a world in which everyone competes to protect themselves in a race to the bottom while making things worse for everyone else. Labor unions? They will probably be criminalized. There might even be a secret police that harasses anyone seen as an "enemy of prosperity". That would set up a highly-politicized 2T in which Socialist revolution becomes possible. What do you have to lose, exploited and humiliated Proletariat? Lives of extreme deprivation and anguish with elites putting it in your face?
More likely, American people are better than that. They can demand that prosperity be the norm for all but the laziest, stupidest, and most profligate. As the American Civil War and the Second World War showed it is far safer and reliable to use consumer goods as rewards than it is to use the lash as the incentive. We will need to deal with the end of necessary scarcity, and that will require that people not be able to profiteer from creating and exploiting scarcity. The technology of manufacturing will be so efficient that people will need to work much fewer than 40 hours a week unless they are trying to achieve some unusual level of excellence (extreme excellence necessary for being a ballerina, concert violinist, film star, popular musician, physician, attorney, or pro athlete will still take the 10,000 hours of preparation that Malcolm Gladwell says is necessary for such. More people may get to put in such efforts, but such is itself progress. Having to work 70 hours to pay off money-grubbing monopolists who have hooks into people because they must buy housing, food, or medical care is pure, simple exploitation.
As in the late 1940's and the 1950's, an honest social order will promote cheap housing. There will be slum clearance, and many of the tiny post-WWII that can't be sold because they have only one bathroom and a one-car garage will be demolished for high rises with far-better urban planning than the infamous "projects" that became crime-infested nightmares for residents and police alike.
I hope to see a tax system that fosters small business. Maybe the new sort of housing will be more like a block in New York City in which the lowest floor has stores and shops -- with part of the housing block having room for elementary schools, medical offices, daycare centers, postal substations, repair shops, and places of worship. We will need small business for that. One of the glories of small business is that it can't buy the political system as was the norm for giant enterprises in the neoliberal era.
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.