06-30-2022, 04:34 AM
(06-28-2022, 05:04 PM)David Horn Wrote:(06-28-2022, 02:01 PM)nguyenivy Wrote:(06-27-2022, 10:50 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: ... There's no technological fix for hunger, and hungry people upset with flagrant displays of conspicuous consumption by people devoid of conscience are exactly the ones to fall for Marxist rhetoric. Marxist ideology among its intelligentsia may be abstruse, but Marxist propaganda directed at semi-literate masses (and the optimum level of learning for a nasty social order such as a plutocratic nightmare is marginal literacy).
If we handle this Crisis Era badly, either solving nothing or -- worse -- regressing to an economic order that serves only elites while squeezing, bleeding, and brutalizing everyone else, then the next one will be a horror that will make World War II look gentle. The wars will be more destructive and the genocide more horrific.
I repeat -- global warming and overpopulation (and the two are connected) are crimes against humanity!
You mean Crisis of 2100 (78 years from now), right? I believe given humanity's current behaviour, we aren't fully ready to deal with what will likely be the showcase event of that time: full impacts of climate change. If things really do play out in the ways the theory claims (the 1T & 3T after Crisis nothing major happens), we will have totally missed our shot by decade end. Are 2Ts usually a time to fix issues that affect the world as a whole or more localised/national issues?
If this 4T dies on the vine, and that's looking more and more likely at this point, then the 2T will be the crisis response we're lacking now. I fear it may be a kinda-war of autocrats and anarchists -- not quite real-world dungeons and dragons, but close.
The next 2T would be an Awakening Era, and if America has stagnated culturally and politically to an extreme extent, then we can expect a monster of an Awakening Era. The oddity may be that the Millennial generation finds itself in a situation in which it has no hubris -- no legacy of saving the Outer World from a calamity. The worst that I can imagine is the Trump agenda being largely enshrined and entrenched without input from the Millennial generation. The time would be objectionable not only for its cultural staleness (just listen to the record collections that most GI's bequeathed to their families if they were not the cultural elite -- no, don't!) but also for moral failures of economics such as cronyism and economic disparity as well as corruption built into the system to ensure that "he who owns the gold makes the rules" with no room for dissent. (OK, if one is investing other people's money, then one has responsibilities to one's lender or sugar daddy. If it is a movie or a construction project, then there is a reasonable assumption that the funds go into making the movie and not across gaming tables, up one's nose (cocaine), or into the vaginas of high-cost whores. If politics... then that means that the tycoons, executives, and big landowners decide that government of THE people, by THE people, and for THE people shall not be challenged even if the arrangement creates mass suffering, ravages the environment and depletes resources, or initiate wars for profit that turn out badly).
Should life be grim -- and it would be if the economic elites could restore the social relationships of the Gilded Age or the Roaring Twenties -- then even some healthy demands for hedonism would constitute a significant part of the Awakening.
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.