03-15-2021, 12:20 AM
(03-14-2021, 11:07 AM)David Horn Wrote:(03-14-2021, 06:29 AM)Captain Genet Wrote:(06-29-2020, 04:05 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: If there were ever a Golden Age it would be one of a balance between the positive virtues of all four turnings with none of the vices. That is a pipe dream. We are stuck with the generational cycle a s a way of compelling us to adapt to the time and respond as quickly as possible to a needful trait that we neglect. Bad as a 3T goes, it at least forces us to pay attention to the children again so that they not become cynical and helpless and that people enjoy some hedonistic delights that give them some memories just in time for recollection for the upcoming era of stark deprivation.
When we master life extension, there will be a time when all four archetypes are equally active. Maybe that will be a golden age. But this might be stagnation. There is no rapid progress in a society ruled by centenarians.
I suspect that this would be the beginning of end of the currently understood cycle and the beginning of another as yet undetermined one. This is definitely outside our area of concern by a saeculum or two.
Maybe. Howe and Strauss suggest that America is particularly under the influence of a historical cycle because it is safe from more dangerous cycles. We have yet to freeze either some unachievable dream as an impossible objective or to acquiesce to some permanent order in which we let the horrific be the defense of something hideous. The Soviet Union tried that, warning people to stay clear of anything inconsistent with the System, but people still found the social and economic failures as well as the moral depravity. It did not quite last a full Saeculum. The bad Roman Empire effectively covered its internal rot, yet the rot eventually destroyed the system.
This is one way in which to depict the denial of a cycle of history:
A high level of formal education, once a great pride in Germany with its old and distinguished Universities, gave way under Nazi ideology to propaganda and command. Although the focus here is on primary education as preparation for become first fighters who put other nations in thrall and then slave-masters of those people in thrall, the fine Universities of Germany became diploma-mills to prepare youth as higher-level administrators and amoral professionals after such people had shown themselves as "good" Nazis. The generational cycle in America and Britain, at the least, was able to prove at the end of the war that Nazism had given the Germans and Austrians nothing worthy of cherishing.
German universities from before 1933 were well respected worldwide. German universities from after 1945 were well respected. Between 1933 and 1945 a diploma from a German university was suspect in the extreme. As German soldiers filled POW camps at the end of the war, German soldiers were generally shown to have needed basic education that the Nazis had neglected in favor of obedience to "Herr Hitler", "Herr Goering", and "Herr Goebbels". This was not only in the basic decencies of life, but even in mathematics, science, and reading.
The nation that messes up worst in the generational cycle can find the generational cycle of another system, a system that did not muck so much up, restarting the generational cycle in a way of the victor's choosing as a default.
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.