08-31-2019, 06:00 AM
(08-31-2019, 04:50 AM)Bill the Piper Wrote: In the post-WW2 period there was a lot of anti-technology sentiments. Beatniks and hippies wanted to go back to nature, 1970 anarchists destroyed computers and after the Chernobyl disaster anti-nuclear sentiments became mainstream.
And then millennials came, trusting technology as no generation since the GIs. I know this is what S&H predicted, but what specific reasons made millennials develop this way?
The Millennial Generation, unless growing up in extreme destitution or in a culture (Old Order Amish) that rejects technologies of entertainment has lived in the most technologically-advanced world. Although the technology of the 1980's (like VHS tapes and VCRs) is often so obsolete that it hardly sells at Goodwill, even that was remarkable at the time. Much of what we consider technological progress is in practice doing more with lesser inputs of material; mass alone demonstrates the difference between a now-primitive 25" monitor TV that one can hardly lift and a 32" LED TV that one can handle easily.
Technology makes access to entertainment far easier, and in a mass culture like ours that matters more than does the quality of what is on it. Even so, the Millennial Generation has not had life as easy as any generation since at least the middle waves of the Silent Generation. It has responsibilities to economic elites that themselves show no responsibility except to themselves, people whose ideology is best described as mirror-image Marxism*. The people who really rule us, the tycoons and executives, want America to act as one big, happy plantation.
If the sole purpose that the Master Class offers to the common man in life is to make people already filthy-rich even more filthy rich, then life is little more than a gritty struggle for survival. Such a world has high costs and low rewards, and the beatnik and hippie could get away with his way of life because life could be inexpensive. $3500 a month for a studio apartment in a society with too few jobs that pay $10K a month (I remember when a guideline on hosing costs was that nobody should get a mortgage loan. let alone pay 35% of income on rent)... the landlord is King in America and is the real whip-snapper in this One Big Happy Plantation of a society.
*Marxism-Leninism begins with the observation that capitalism is a cruel, corrupt, dehumanizing, inequitable way of generating prosperity because the prosperity goes only to the economic elites -- and as the moral premise that such is very wrong. The mirror-image Marxist believes exactly what Marx said that capitalism is -- except that the mirror-image Marxist endorses what most people see as objectionable or even criminal.
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.