11-15-2018, 10:47 PM
(11-15-2018, 07:53 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: We can say things will be purged, but actually nothing is gone forever and virtually everything gets revived in some way at some time or another, probably unfortunately.
Indeed I can predict a big, corrupt, doomed speculative boom much like those of the mid-1850s, mid-1930s, or Double-Zero decade somewhere between 2080 and 2095 culminating in a financial panic analogous to those of 1857, 1929, and 2008. People who will have been beyond infancy in 2008 will then be largely out of public life. American political leadership of the time will be awful (basically permissiveness toward whatever the loudest shysters want, the shysters having convinced practically all politicians that they alone offer what is best for America), and the mass culture will be depraved and raucous.
No star cycle applies here; the extinction of the last prominent childhood memories of bad consequences of a big, corrupt, speculative boom as the result of such a bubble will make such possible. Remember: blunders must first seduce.
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.