What will happen if someone lives by 3T values in the 1T?

[pbrower2a]

(10-10-2016, 03:11 PM)gabrielle Wrote:

(10-09-2016, 02:32 PM)pbrower2a Wrote:

(10-08-2016, 04:06 PM)aramarie Wrote: If their 3T ideals go against what the majority live by and not seen as rational they will be ignored and viewed as a replica of the destructive tendencies of their parents generation as well as having the 4T fresh in their minds they will not want a return to that. They will crave order for the ideal of peace for at least the majority.

Precisely. The American High (1946-1963), in which nostalgia for the Roaring Twenties was unthinkable, will likely serve as a possible analogy. Trying to live as if it were the Roaring Twenties required that one live with the accoutrements of the Roaring Twenties, most of which had been scrapped, lost, unavailable, or unserviceable. In big cities, housing from the time had often become, or was about to become, slums.

By the late 1930s things were better for most Americans than they were in the late 1920s. Securities values had not recovered from the heady prices of the late 1920s, and they would not reach those prices again until the 1950s. People blamed bad behavior of the 1920s for then recent hardships and expected similar results for similar tendencies.

The last 4T was innocuous for most Americans; the few exceptions were war casualties. For some ethnic groups (like Polish-Americans, Italian-Americans, Mexican-Americans, and to a considerable extent Irish-Americans) the 4T was the time in which they started to get some respectability.  

Elsewhere? For European Jews, for the Spanish Left, for political offenders who ended up in the maws of the Gestapo and OGPU, for just about anyone living between Berlin and Vienna on the west and and either Leningrad*, Moscow, or Stalingrad*, and for denizens of Rotterdam, Coventry, Hamburg, Dresden, Tokyo, Shanghai, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki the 4T was an unspeakable horror. This time we Americans might not be so fortunate as Americans of the last 4T. Mister, we could use a man like 'Abram' Lincoln again!

The destructive weapons of our time are far more devastating, and there are fewer places in which to hide. Should we Americans get pathological government (Donald Trump will not be the last threat of such when he loses; the stresses of a 4T have typically created openings for demagogues), then we could have a 4T that causes many American cities to look like Dresden at the end of World War II. Most of the nastiness of this time reflects efforts of privileged elites to maintain the business practices and economic inequality of the recent 3T, hoping to enshrine such for all time. Such is failure.

But I digress. The recent 3T will be mocked in humor of the next 1T when it is not faulted for all the faults of the current Crisis, let alone the tragedy and material destruction at the end of the Crisis.

Just imagine what the world would be like had the victorious Allies decided to lighten up on reparations from a defeated German people in the shaky Weimar Republic. Hitler becomes an irrelevancy; large Jewish populations flourish in Europe, prospering in countries like Poland and Romania that never underwent Communist rule. We may have cures for cancer and prion diseases... and have life expectancies in the 110s. The Federal Republic of China 'missed out' on Maoism and catapulted into prosperity by 1970. Korea might have gotten independence in a form resembling Dominion status in Canada. The only separation in India is of Burma.

Umm, the Great Depression???  Pretty sure most Americans were worse off in the 1930s than in the 1920s.  Perhaps things were starting to ease up a little by the late thirties, but then came the war years--the rationing, the fears of fascism, the loss of loved ones in war.  Of course, the miseries of the last 4T were due to the excesses and errors of previous turnings, but I think by the following 1T people were starting to forget the inequalities of the 3T and nostalgically remember the fun and glamour. 

There's nothing wrong with remembering the fun times, if you also remember the bad times, and how they came to be.

Singin' in the Rain? Some Like It Hot? Two of my favorite movies, both from the American High and depicting the latter part of the previous 3T. Nostalgia for the late 1920s? Hardly. Running away from Chicago gangsters might create some hilarious situations, but only for the audience. Watching the career demise of the full-of-herself Lena Lamont while the more rational characters like "Don Lockwood" (Gene Kelly), "Cosmo Brown" (Donald O'Connor), and Kathy Selden (Debbie Reynolds) prevail suggests something about America pnce it would become more serious and rational. And could I suggest Sunset Boulevard as the logical sequel for Singin' in the Rain, at least for the Lena Lamont character, someone (in Sunset Boulevard, Nora Desmond) who made big money in the Silent era but whose talents were terribly limited and unsuited to the "talkies"? Nora Desmond exemplifies someone trying to live in the 3T in a 1T... great story in cinematic form.

...America had not solved all its problems in the late 1930s, but in material terms it was in far better shape. People had more cars, refrigerators, and washing machines per capita, leaving little doubt that working-class and middle-class people were better off in 1939 than in 1929. The economic elites were not better off, of course. But Americans would be in better shape for the hardships of restricted consumerism in the following war. The cultural trends of the 1930s ensured that the Pearl Harbor attack would be a gigantic blunder. People who thought that America was a decadent collection of playboys found that assessment terribly wrong.

America had saved itself from its greatest threat of fascism; the KKK was dying (although, to be sure, it started to collapse before the Great Depression got underway). The mass culture had become sanitary while losing no quality. America became grossly intolerant of gangsterism (and would later compare its WWII enemies to gangsters like John Dillinger and Al Capone). The Great Depression and the Second World War had their roots in the preceding Degeneracy of World War I and the Roaring Twenties, the latter featuring one of the most destructive bubbles then possible, one that resulted from American government deciding that a speculative boom was the perfect way to accelerate economic growth.