Does this 4T seem a little 2T-ish to anyone else?

[pbrower2a]

(03-29-2022, 09:57 PM)echnut79 Wrote:

(03-29-2022, 06:22 PM)pbrower2a Wrote:

(03-29-2022, 03:45 PM)David Horn Wrote:

(03-28-2022, 11:43 AM)Eric the Green Wrote: I'm still of a mind to remind you that prophet generations are victory children. I rather think that if we don't make at least some of the needed changes in this 4T, we won't have another 2T. 4Ts are not so much about paradigms, but making institutional change. Once a real 4T gets going, who knows what changes might come. Generations will live up to the need, once it can no longer be avoided.

Change can be many things. It's hard to say that a "failed" 4T is really a failure, until it really is.  There's a lot of dead wood that needs to burn, and that may be the change we get this time.

Bingo!
One of the hallmarks of a Crisis Era is that people are obliged to give up some bad habits, and even some usually-harmless indulgences, for "the duration".
(lyrics by Irving Berlin):

Quote:We all have been selected from city and from farm
They asked us lots of questions, they jabbed us in the arm
We stood there at attention, our faces turning red
The sergeant looked us over and this is what he said:

[Refrain:]
This is the Army, Mister Jones
No private rooms or telephones
You had your breakfast in bed before
But you won't have it there any more

This is the Army, Mister Green
We like the barracks nice and clean
You had a housemaid to clean your floor
But she won't help you out any more

Do what the buglers command
They're in the Army and not in a band

This is the Army, Mister Brown
You and your baby went to town
She had you worried but this is war
And she won't worry you anymore

[Alternate verse from sheet music:]
A bunch of frightened rookies were list'ning filled with aweo
They listened while a sergeant was laying down the law
They stood there at attention, their faces turning red
The sergeant looked them over and this is what he said:

When part of the objective of "the Duration" is to be able to enjoy the witty songs of Irving Berlin instead of enduring such vile bilge as the Horst-Wessel-Lied, people are able to make some sacrifices.

First, hasn’t plenty of dead wood already burned over the past few decades. Word processors and the Internet made typewriters obsolete, just one example among many.

Much the same would happen if we still relied upon typewriters, rear-wheel-drive cars, vinyl ecords,  and landline phones. Some activities have become more efficient, but the boon in productivity has largely gone to the economic elites.

Quote:What we have had since the postwar years is the nearly endless March of ever greater convenience, with each generation demanding more convenience than the previous one enjoyed. A prime current example is how you can order food and many other things via your smartphone and either pick it up ready to go or have it delivered to your door. Of course there have been subtractions such as the vast decline in social capital. Our fetish for ever increasing is most likely one of the biggest reasons that we lag in combating global warming and climate change. If we don’t take steps to reduce auto dependency the congestion will still be there. We simply can’t continue to build our way out of congestion forever. The pandemic created forced sacrifice of sorts but actually enhanced the convenience fetish per more delivery of food and other household items.

All in all, much of our problem is that we Americans try to live with a population of 175 million when we in fact have more like 350 million. Such means that we need roughly twice the housing, twice the highways, and twice the consumption of fossil fuels. This may be inexact, as people may be taking longer commutes but in more efficient vehicles. Some communities, especially on the West Coast, East Coast, and parts of Florida, will need to scrap suburban-style tract housing for high-density housing characteristic of Seoul or Hong Kong.

The profiteers in real estate (in those places with vibrant economies) are able to buy up existing housing and compel people who live in such places to bid up the rents. Neoliberal doctrine advises the politicians to keep taxes down as an incentive to build supply -- but maximal profits come from constraint of supply instead of meeting needs. Meanwhile the public infrastructure deteriorates, and the solution to that is to give it away to monopolistic profiteers who then gouge users who are a captive market.

I may end up a lonely old man, but I am glad at this stage that I have contributed no children to suffer that nightmare or to risk the brutality of either a proletarian revolution, as success and failure of both are similarly horrific. Stalin or Hitler, take your choice? Good lord! I'm not really so much a socialist as a successor of Henry George in pushing the idea that it is better to tax easy money than to let its possessors become our masters. Then again, we know how fervently slave-masters fought to resist any challenge to slavery back in the 1860's. I'm not convinced that our economic elites are in better than those -- or of the Junker class that lorded it over German agriculture until World War II and became the economic base of Nazism. Elites are infamous for murdering anyone who challenge their economic supremacy when any threat, even one that those elites provoke, emerges.

Quote:Perhaps a supreme irony is that the elder Boomers who spent much of their youth in the sign of the dreamer and the mystic May now feel the need to enforce a level of seriousness on those below them vastly different from the way they governed their own youth. Yet one segment of their youthful idealism may indeed be what’s needed now. And that is that they may be called to provide emotional support to those they love and also to those they may have not been so friendly to in the past. Being a present and compassionate listener is healing for all.

Some of us never were dreamers or mystics. I could see through "peace, love, and dope". Some people are militaristic creeps who can ensure war. Some people are incapable of love but instead full of hate. "Dope" is good mostly for self-delusion. If we cannot enforce seriousness upon people, then reality might.

We need to better understand human nature than we do. We have gone away from liberal education that allows people to learn the intricacy of human behavior in favor of mechanistic sciences and studies that turn us into laboratory rats. Yes, we need technological skills, and we certainly need our accountants and financial experts. Indeed, economics at its best looks like chemistry without the reagents, with economic results (usually money if a stable measure) as a surrogate for energy or pressure.

Life cannot be 100% rational. The irrational includes love, the arts, natural beauty, and ethics. Maybe one fault is that the arts have often transmuted into formulaic pap if accessible. Another is that the egocentric dark triad (narcissists, sociopaths, and psychopaths) prevail when the economic order itself becomes dehumanized; such people are either the selfish elites or their brutal enforcers. Finally, the people who often pose as the defenders of morality (clergy) are often corrupt or immoral themselves (I need name no names) or completely reject scientific evidence and conventions of logic that run contrary to such pseudoscience and pseudohistory as they promote.