01-15-2020, 06:58 PM
(01-15-2020, 01:21 PM)Anthony Wrote: The 2010s will go down in history as a restatement of the 1920s.
Which stands to reason: Both were "3-decades" - in that 1+9+2+0=3, and 2+0+1+0 also equals 3.
Both decades played host to hideously widening income and wealth inequality, along with finger-wagging elders constantly kvetching about youth whose hedonism was not tempered with so much as a hint of idealism.
Let's see; 1+8+4+0 is 3, modulo 10...
We had a big economic meltdown beginning in 2007 (maybe earlier if one counts the mass foreclosures in real estate) culminating in the Crash of 2008 that reversed in 2009... if anything, the Double-Zero Decade is the analogue to the Roaring Twenties. The problem is that the 2010's have brought to America the economic inequality characteristic of a feudal order or a fascist regime. Our economic order is fascist, and it has only three objectives that I can easily fit into the acronym PIG -- (elite) Power, Indulgence, and Gain at the expense of all else. What passes as the job market is a grim contest to determine who can accept and endorse the nastiest in their lives on behalf of rapacious overlords who increasingly look like the first people to be executed in the wake of a revolution.
Let us not fault X and Millennial adults. Those are the ones who endure American capitalism at its worst, and they could never understand or assimilate the aetherial anti-materialsm of Idealist generations at their best because they were not raised for such. Boomers? Most Boomers are innocent of the worst deeds of the elites because they never had a chance. A Boomer truck driver, barber, or nurse typically did nothing to shape the culture of untrammeled greed among people in a position to monopolize the economy and squeeze small business. People who have had to do real work have been shut out from advancement in bureaucratic corporations since the time when Boomers were young workers. Boomer economic elites have been horrible.
We had a Crisis event to initiate a Crisis, and we found ourselves in an even worse Degeneracy.
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.