11-11-2019, 01:34 AM
It's the latter part of the 3T that makes the storm of a 4T possible. Consider what goes on in a degeneracy: institutions other than for-profit institutions weaken, with the for-profit institutions tending toward monopoly and brutal methods of command-and-control. Because honest work is severely underpaid, people start finding get-rich-quick schemes all the more attractive. Mass culture gets raw and cynical, and it falls for showy glitz. Enterprise goes from investment to what is for all practical purposes gambling.
The Degeneracy is a time in which people become materialistic in the extreme -- yet fail. Lust for anything rarely gets one what one wants, whether in sex or wealth.
Political life reflects the economic values, and the sort of leadership that people seem to want -- and get -- is weak leadership that encourages people to do exactly what they want, which is to make money and enjoy the results. Such reforms as there are are tax cuts.
Eventually it fails. Speculative booms are get-rich-quick schemes on a grand scale One can tolerate the nastiness of a 3T so long as one expects that easy money is in reach. When that comes to an end, then all Hell breaks loose. Peopel realize that their lives, politics, and culture are all wholly unsatisfying. In a romance it is perhaps like finding that the Big Spender is bankrupt, perhaps kiting checks to create the illusion of solidity.
The Degeneracy is a time in which people become materialistic in the extreme -- yet fail. Lust for anything rarely gets one what one wants, whether in sex or wealth.
Political life reflects the economic values, and the sort of leadership that people seem to want -- and get -- is weak leadership that encourages people to do exactly what they want, which is to make money and enjoy the results. Such reforms as there are are tax cuts.
Eventually it fails. Speculative booms are get-rich-quick schemes on a grand scale One can tolerate the nastiness of a 3T so long as one expects that easy money is in reach. When that comes to an end, then all Hell breaks loose. Peopel realize that their lives, politics, and culture are all wholly unsatisfying. In a romance it is perhaps like finding that the Big Spender is bankrupt, perhaps kiting checks to create the illusion of solidity.
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.
