08-24-2019, 07:29 AM
(08-20-2019, 10:37 PM)Marc Lamb Wrote:(05-06-2016, 04:53 AM)Mikebert Wrote: One of the reasons S&H do not get serious attention from scientifically-inclined social scientists might be because they gave little for scholars to work with.
S&H never game an explicit cause for their cycle... but why? To get answer this I turn the focus to politics, in which the formative events are political moments are the generations are political generations, that function very similarly to the core generation concept as we shall see. I shift to politics for two reasons. The first is a discussion I had with Marc Lamb, whom some of you remember as a troll. He was that, but he was more and he and I had productive discussions in his early years over 2001-2003... Marc liked my economic stuff, but argued that politics, not economics was the key to the saeculum because all facets of the social world, economics, politics, religion, morals, in short, culture, are represented in one’s politics.
Ah, yes, I remember the discussions well. What an obnoxious, trolling Cassandra I was! How dare this right-wing nutcase proclaim no S&H 4T present following 9/11?
lol.
Many years pass... nearly twenty years later was the former Devil's Advocate woefully right, or trollingly [sic] wrong? But, for that matter, does it really even matter, here in 2019?
I saw 9/11 at first having characteristics of the Pearl Harbor attack or the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter, bolts out of the blue with the potential to goad Americans into a Crisis-like response. Then I saw the President (Dubya) telling people to do things characteristically 3T (go shopping; do recreational travel) very different from what FDR told people to do after Pearl Harbor. I saw no celebrities and sport stars (other than Pat Tillman) giving up lucrative careers to serve their countries. I did not see celebrities going on tours to promote the sale of war bonds. I did not see posters warning people that if they drove without a companion they were riding with
Instead we got a President pushing a speculative boom in real estate... the analogue of the Double-Zero decade was the Roaring Twenties, and not some part of the Depression-WWII Crisis, American Civil War, or Revolutionary Era. We got George Babbitt as a hero, and not Audie Murphy.
If people act as if they are still in a 3T, then it is a 3T.
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.
