09-02-2016, 09:43 AM
The eighty-year cycle reflects a biological reality: the extinction of the memories of the memories of children five to ten years old when events happened. Those are the last people to remember events and popular culture, and the last to warn us of the bad consequences of trends that they resist from early adulthood. The real-estate bubble that Sinclair Lewis described so well in the 1920s in Babbitt was impossible so long as many people dreaded another real-estate bubble was impossible so long as people who remembered the reality behind Babbitt were still around, even if they had been 'only' in early elementary school at the time. By the latter part of the Double-Zero Decade such was possible again because people born in the early 1920s had vanished from public life. People who could see only the quick profits coulld rule the day. (They even used much the same arguments -- such as that everyone will be able to tell when to get out. Sure. And cats are vegetarians!) Between the 1930s and the 1990s Babbitt seemed solely a recollection of the past. In the Double-Zero decade astute people could see it happening again as one of the basic rules of sound business (whatever you do, do not hurt your immediate or ultimate customer) got fresh neglect.
Crisis Eras get nasty because people start thinking (as Adaptive adults leave the scene) that demonizing people and using the most horrific weapons possible is reasonable so long as it serves some noble end. Highs get stale and complacent because Idealist types who could stir up some controversy as muckrakers are no longer around, and conformity seems a pragmatic way of doing things. An Awakening abandons much touch with reality as Civics begin gigantic projects that they believe can generate their own impetus, Adaptives break from their shells (Georgy Girl , iconic song from an under-recognized movie about an English equivalent of a Progressive-generation young woman), and Idealists take an often drug-sodden and boozy Voyage to the Interior just as children get neglected as Reactive adults would never let happen as happened to them in the most recent Awakening Era -- about as the Reactives start dying off. The Degenerate Third Turning becomes possible when the Civic types who start getting recognized as the social glue of a workable order start dying off in large numbers.
So what did America learn from the bubble economy of the Double-Zero Era? That real estate is to be seen only as an object to be doled out sparingly, with landlords' income the primary objective of residential building even if such means that tenants are to be gouged for urban housing, and real estate rentals are to cost about half the income of a middle-class person in urban California or New England. Don;t like such? Then go to places like Milwaukee, Detroit, and Cleveland where there are no opportunities. I doubt that we have filly learned the lesson that d*** is a nastier word than the crude words associated with sex and excrement.... don't worry. We will find that out fast enough as people living in cramped apartments and in thrall to legalized loan-sharks turn against landlords and loan-sharks as this Crisis unfolds. We will have to learn the hard way that business practices that hurt the worker and the ultimate consumer are themselves bad models of business due to their lack of sustainability.
Considering what disasters we Boomers have been as business executives and right-wing politicians, it will be easy for adult generations of the 2040s to not miss us... until something starts going seriously wrong in a deadly-serious world of numbing conformity.
Crisis Eras get nasty because people start thinking (as Adaptive adults leave the scene) that demonizing people and using the most horrific weapons possible is reasonable so long as it serves some noble end. Highs get stale and complacent because Idealist types who could stir up some controversy as muckrakers are no longer around, and conformity seems a pragmatic way of doing things. An Awakening abandons much touch with reality as Civics begin gigantic projects that they believe can generate their own impetus, Adaptives break from their shells (Georgy Girl , iconic song from an under-recognized movie about an English equivalent of a Progressive-generation young woman), and Idealists take an often drug-sodden and boozy Voyage to the Interior just as children get neglected as Reactive adults would never let happen as happened to them in the most recent Awakening Era -- about as the Reactives start dying off. The Degenerate Third Turning becomes possible when the Civic types who start getting recognized as the social glue of a workable order start dying off in large numbers.
So what did America learn from the bubble economy of the Double-Zero Era? That real estate is to be seen only as an object to be doled out sparingly, with landlords' income the primary objective of residential building even if such means that tenants are to be gouged for urban housing, and real estate rentals are to cost about half the income of a middle-class person in urban California or New England. Don;t like such? Then go to places like Milwaukee, Detroit, and Cleveland where there are no opportunities. I doubt that we have filly learned the lesson that d*** is a nastier word than the crude words associated with sex and excrement.... don't worry. We will find that out fast enough as people living in cramped apartments and in thrall to legalized loan-sharks turn against landlords and loan-sharks as this Crisis unfolds. We will have to learn the hard way that business practices that hurt the worker and the ultimate consumer are themselves bad models of business due to their lack of sustainability.
Considering what disasters we Boomers have been as business executives and right-wing politicians, it will be easy for adult generations of the 2040s to not miss us... until something starts going seriously wrong in a deadly-serious world of numbing conformity.
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.