03-04-2022, 12:16 PM
(10-17-2021, 02:37 PM)pbrower2a Wrote:(10-17-2021, 12:53 PM)galaxy Wrote: Obviously it's still very much a 4T, but I can't help but notice it gets a little awaken-ish sometimes.
There have been some 2T-isms in different ways - 2012-2015 stands out as a period of "cultural awakening" to me. At the time it kind of seemed like we were heading toward another sexual revolution, for example.
What was opening was LGBT rights at the same time in which America was cracking down on child sexual abuse and domestic violence (much of the latter sexual). America was liberalizing in one direction and clamping down in others, which is not characteristic of an awakening. LGBT interests got their way by shoving the pedophiles under the bus just as sexual traditionalists were doing.
I could tell you much about the 'gay' scene of the 1970's; much of it was men picking up boys for sexual gratification, and that was called "sexual liberation". In the 2010's the LGBT appeal was to accept what adults were doing already and to not treat youth finding that they were homosexuals as pariahs. At one point three of every ten teenage males committing suicide were gay. Allowing LGBT adults to do what straight adults were doing and to not reject LGBT children isn't an awakening. It is simply practical and humane.
Quote:New media was appearing everywhere, the world was superconnected and it seemed to be going well
That is technology, and technology simply offers new modes of expression without creating new ones. The effect of the internet and virtual reality on culture is parallel to the influence of the automobile on the lives of young adults (then the Lost) about 110 years ago. People could go off in their "merry Oldsmobile" to get away from the prying eyes of repressive adults. Technology will fit the culture, but will not create it. The Internet functions like many things that have long existed: the book, the broadsheet and tabloid, the telegraph, the telephone, the stock ticker, the phonograph, the camera (still or video), radio, and television -- all well entrenched.
Quote:(the Internet at the time only showed tiny hints of the dark side it would fully reveal later in the decade). It felt like the cultural future would be bright, even if the environmental (climate change not really being seriously fought) and political (endless gridlock) futures looked dark.
As if people have not used telephones, radio, posters, motion pictures, and television to get people to do horrible things long before there was an Internet. The political gridlock that we have came into existence before the Internet, and it reflects the conflict between entrenched power and democratic tendencies. American plutocrats are no different from feudal lords in expressing the sentiment that he who owns the gold makes the rules. A corollary of that view is that no human suffering can ever be in excess in the service of the rich and powerful. A real awakening would challenge those precepts. By 2016 the people who most clearly held those precepts held both Houses of Congress, and in the Presidential election those people got Donald Trump, who exemplifies flamboyant 2T indulgence and arrogance and those two precepts of pure plutocracy. Trump has never been involved in any Voyage to the Interior or quest for deep knowledge as was the norm for smart Boomers (he is one of the hollowest people that I have ever seen in the news media). The pole stars of his existence are power, sex, and luxury irrespective of how those hurt others. Trump got nothing out of the Boom Awakening, but he is very much a 3T character.
3T behavior becomes discreditable, offensive, and ineffective in a 4T as social needs come to the fore. Trump is catastrophic failure as President, but this is what one can legitimately expect of someone who believes that he who owns the gold makes the rules and that no human suffering can ever be in excess in the service of the rich and powerful.
Donald Trump never grew out of the infantile ideal that the world revolves around him. Most of us find all that revolves around us is people who believe that they have some claim to our toil and our earnings and assets.
Quote:And at least to me, it felt like the national mood steadily brightened from about early 2012 until the middle of 2015. Or maybe that "bright cultural future/dark material future" thing is just the last bits of Unravelingism dying away (very clear that 2016-2020 was a period of rapid 4Tification).
Obama promoted optimism, and the economy was picking up -- at least in terms of stock prices and property rents. People scared of America going into as catastrophic a tailspin as the one that started in 1929 were reassured. Obama was much more like FDR than like Hoover.
Quote:Meanwhile, looking at the current time, it kind of feels like ever since later in 2015 we've been retracing the 1890s - high inequality, high political polarization, lots of social movements, fake news and just general "media wars" ("the new yellow journalism"), and then of course there's the remarkable comparison between the 2020 and 1896 elections.
The movements on the Right have overlapping concerns... and direction. So far they have excellent coordination and copious funding. Obviously in an inhuman plutocracy he who owns the gold makes the rules and that no human suffering can ever be in excess in the service of the rich and powerful. With such questionable doctrines as the mandatory focus of us all, rather few people can be happy. The Hard Right rules by cunning exploitation of visceral fears of people of difference among a near-majority of people and by dashing the hopes of people who refuse to believe in the economic agenda of the Hard Right. (Work and starve, and take delight in our castles and palaces going up!)
Quote:I'm not sure what it means, if anything, but it's been on my mind lately as I begin to speculate about near-future elections. Will 2024 look like 1900? From where I am right now in October 2021, it kind of seems like it might, and that 2020 might be the realigning election that begins the Seventh Party System, which might be a mirror-image of the Fourth Party System (which began with 1896)?
COVID-19 is killing like a badly-bungled shooting war. That may be the bloodletting (or in its case the breath-denying) that marks other Crises. If there is to be a Seventh Party System, then such begins with a crushing of the near-majority Right or Left. Americans can adapt to the new potentialities of high technology that can relieve us of much toil, or they can abandon those potentialities on behalf of people who can do quite well with any level of technology so long as 95% of the populace suffers with exhausting toil for near-starvation rations of those who own the gold and make the rules and can enforce the doctrine that no human suffering can ever be in excess in the service of the rich and powerful.
In case you think it impossible that a sophisticated, modern society can revert to a new form of serfdom, then recall the Third Reich. Even without the militarism, racism, mass murder, and brutal repression Nazi Germany was a worker's Hell. Aside from overt victims, the people who had most to lose were the toilers of field and factory.
Do you think that we will ever stop treating those who engage in sexual activity for money as pariahs, as we now for the most part have with gays despite some obvious holdouts? Seems as though the opposite has happened in this sphere, in that we seem to be stigmatizing them even more.
Decriminalization if not outright legalization needs to happen here. Then they will at least be able to report abuses without fear of arrest. Now that gambling is nearly everywhere and marijuana chasing at its heels, why hasn't the sex work domino fallen yet?