Signs of a Dying Empire

[pbrower2a]

(05-07-2022, 12:04 AM)Eric the Green Wrote:

(05-06-2022, 09:48 AM)Tim Randal Walker Wrote: "....the people who shaped the Boom Awakening are largely gone now...."  S&H indicated that the 2T ended in 1984,  about 38 years ago.  The Silent generation that mentored the Awakening is dying.  Those who experienced the Awakening in young adulthood are quite aged by now; the late '50s cohorts are in the tail end of Middle Age, and the oldest Boomers have been edging into the Middle-Old years.

It's too bad that we have to age, and that time marches on. On the other hand, perhaps another Awakening will come, and some of the previous prophets will reincarnate back.

But this 4T is existential. If we don't change our current course in the next few years, there will not be another Awakening, anywhere on Earth.

It will be a different Awakening. It will begin with a higher level of knowledge and technology (well, assuming that civilization isn't destroyed in the meantime), institut8ions (which may not be better), and social change (which might be anything but benign). Should the next High be a time of reactionary politics, culture, and economics, then the next Awakening will be a stormy struggle over repression, hierarchy, and inequity. Should the Old Bastards wielding power hold that those who have economic and political power have some Mammon-granted right to exploit people completely and repress them brutally should they balk at such, then the next Awakening could be weak on culture and extremely violent in politics. We have yet to determine whether those who believe that 

He who owns the gold makes the rules

will monopolize political power and set the political agenda. Pure plutocracy may be no less compatible with liberty than Marxism-Leninism. Plantation slaves were definitely not free even if their masters enjoyed full participation in democratic process for themselves alone. 

Am I getting ahead of myself? Regrettably not. The result of this Crisis Era is far from set. We do not have a perfect analogy to the Great Depression and World War II or the American Civil War; we have yet to see the equivalent of either D-Day (the stab in the back of the Third Reich) or Sherman's "march through Georgia" that permanently severed the northeastern part of the Confederacy (Virginia and the Carolinas) from the middle (Mississippi, Alabama, and southern Georgia) so that one part could not come to the aid of the other even if it wished. This may yet have a military decision, and if so nothing says where and how that will happen. Quite possibly the decision could be political.  The Hard Right is self-righteous about sex, culture, and especially economics, and it seeks to ensure that everything works for their Power, Indulgence, and Gain (PIG), and that itself is an all-inclusive ideology. Nobody dare assume that a Crisis will end well for America. So far we look lucky. We need to be good this time. Regrettably the Hard Right and the center-Left are unable to make workable compromises. One wins and the other loses or we end up with some stalemate that cannot be a satisfying solution. 

Let me express what a Hard Right America would look like. It would be a command-and-control system in which only a small group of people get to do any thinking, and their thinking will be entirely about what serves their economic interests and keeps their power intact. They may promote religion, but it will be the sort that demands lockstep obedience to the elites or offers eternal damnation to anyone who rebels, backslides, or falls short. What they call justice will be an inescapable surveillance followed by brutal punishments of anyone deemed a criminal even for contemplating an alternative (such as what used to be good about America).  They will promote patriotism mostly in the service of wars for profit or expansion of their sick dream into places in which such is unwelcome. They could turn management-labor relations into something more accurately fitting the description "master and serf". Count on books, videos, and music being destroyed because such might distract people from working to exhaustion for coarse and barely-adequate victuals. Retirement? As soon as a prole is no longer useful he gets manumitted to starve. Teach or preach anything other than blind obedience and you at best will never teach or preach again and lose a comparatively soft job -- or be murdered.

That is the worst. Dante's Inferno is far easier to understand than his Paradiso. Note also that Man has been far better at creating Hells like holds of slave ships than at creating wonderful new orders. We are more adept at creating pain than pleasure, and in the latter, pleasure that comes with pain, shame, or ruin attached.