(09-04-2019, 08:12 PM)Marc Lamb Wrote:I see the connection between politics, mass culture, economic practice, and educational priorities. In a 3T everything is about money and little about the work that creates wealth and renders meaning to money. When politics is about the Good Life for the few, when education is about creating wealth and not about using it to create happiness, when the typical investment is a speculative hustle, and when mass culture is a sick circus, then we are setting ourselves up for a fall. The fall is a 3T morphing into a 4T.(09-01-2019, 04:40 PM)Mikebert Wrote: I have since moved on from the generational theory as a useful way to understand historical dynamics and started working in the discipline of cliodynamics. I have published three papers in cliodynamics journal...
Accepting the premise "that politics, not economics was the key to the saeculum because all facets of the social world, economics, politics, religion, morals, in short, culture, are represented in one’s politics," I am tempted to conclude, based on what I read there, the "discipline of cliodynamics" falls flat into a meaningless abyss, of molding "cycles of history" to fit a present-day political agenda. Maybe it'll work, maybe it won't. Not much empirical there!
An effective Watchtower notwithstanding, everyone has an internal clock to rely upon. Whether it's day or night, winter or spring, first or fourth turning, it is God's universal gift to all mankind with the inherent ability discern what time it is, no matter one's "social world, economics, politics, religion" or morals yadda, yadda, yadda.
How bad can a 4T get? I think of Japan, where the heroic soldiers largely dedicated to stealing rice from the paddies of southeast Asia including the East Indies to feed the factory workers who supplied the guns and warships found themselves back in the paddies of Japan to stave off starvation. I think of Germany, which destroyed its reputation for intellectual life in favor of a Fuehrer who celebrated primitive and destructive hatred unleashed a whirlwind that ended up ravaging Germany. Survivors got to pick up the pieces -- literal rubble of ruined cities.
We rightly reward those who do the real work with solid income instead of treating them like scum, and we recognize legitimate achievements in culture as the creators of national identity. The speculators and hucksters of the 3T get paid too well for the illusory wealth that they create... until such becomes impossible.
I could create an outline of a 1T, at the least, based on other instances of 1T in America and elsewhere. The seeds of the 1T arise in a 4T.
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.
