03-02-2021, 01:20 PM
(03-02-2021, 10:20 AM)Captain Genet Wrote:(02-28-2021, 10:03 AM)beechnut79 Wrote: Same thing happened in the US as well as culture turned more conservative during the Reagan years as the AIDS scare effectively killed off the so-called sexual revolution. Went from overly hedonistic to overly workaholic nearly overnight, thus making liars out of all those futurists who had predicted that the new technology would lead to a world of ever increased leisure. Do you think we’ll ever see that once all but promised world of leisure ever arrive?
Life of productive work is better than a perpetual holiday. Age of Discovery aristocrats lived without work, and we all know how degenerate they became.
But the degeneracy of the aristocrats was possible only because the peasantry was worked to the physical limit of endurance and was always underfed. Working to exhaustion on starvation rations is the norm under feudalism and fascism (the latter the technologically-modern version of feudalism. An example: one could not change employers (unless to join the military or paramilitary organizations) without the consent of an employer.
People can adapt. There will be time for this:
Moby-Dick, or The Whale
I am not certain that we supposedly-modern people with our iPods and ultra-modern flat-screen TV's with access to over 200 channels of cable television would be any less happy reading the books that our great-grandparents read as faute-a-mieux. Entities now selling sound equipment have selections set for hearing rap "music" (an oxymoron), pop music with exaggerated midrange bass that gets tiresome fast, or country music that sounds much the same on whatever one plays it back. What if you prefer classical music, jazz, or folk?
By reading great literature one will find something worth talking about. What can one say about a trip to a casino to pump money into a vending machine whose rewards are uncertain? What can one say about visiting the "nudie bar" as the vulgarian "Al Bundy" called it on Married With Children? The shopping mall went from new and exciting to banal in about forty years. In 1975 it may have seemed the wave of the future. That future has passed, and the enclosed shopping mall has often been demolished for something else.
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.