06-12-2018, 07:09 AM
(06-11-2018, 10:54 AM)beechnut79 Wrote: History seems to suggest a tendency for Crisis eras to be backloaded, meaning that the bulk of the action doesn't occur until near the end of the turning. This is way many seem to think we are stuck and that we really aren't in Crisis mode. Awakenings, or 2Ts, on the other hand, tend to be more frontloaded with the bulk of the action at the beginning of the turning. This is way we had two social moments 20 years apart and then apparently 60.
Some people love the Crisis. For several decades, many Britons considered the Second World War, when all was at risk and practically everyone not a toddler had a role in saving all that was good in life from going to the Devil, and the one intent on making the world go to the Devil was the man closest to resembling Satan in his ruthless, cunning, resolute evil, as the most fulfilling time of their lives. I cannot imagine a more fulfilling time in human history than Britain in 1940. Scary, deprived, and insecure? Sure! Crises bring fear and hardship -- but they can also have wholesome resolutions.
On the other side there are people who find the Crisis as the right time for achieving the fulfillment of their wishes -- to settle scores upon nations and peoples that one accuses of doing great personal or national harm. I am tempted to believe that Hitler thought that he was doing the Lord's Work even if it was in service of an entity that cherishes cruelty, destruction, and injustice.
The last completed Crisis took roughly sixteen years from the Great Stock Market Crash of 1929 to the moment at which General Douglas MacArthur intoned on the USS Missouri that the 'proceedings are over'.
Political leaders, not only Donald Trump, are rending our political institutions in ways inconceivable at any time since the Civil War. (American political life during the Second World War was quite placid by the standards of most times, as the focus of American life was on more pressing matters). The next few years will determine whether we have fascism or freedom. Remember: fascism and freedom are incompatible in ways in which certain forms of socialism (social democracy or a social-market society) endorse liberal democracy. Fascist politics is the denunciation of democracy; fascist economics implies a feudal organization with high technology (all the better for bamboozling the gullible masses, cowing the cowards, and eliminating dissidents).
The one thing that we Americans thought happens only to other countries -- a military coup -- seems far more possible now than at any time in American history. Our President better resembles either Benito Mussolini for arrogance or Juan Peron for demagoguery than any prior American President.
We will have either a New Birth of Freedom (Lincoln in his Gettysburg Address) or an Orwellian nightmare.
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.