05-03-2020, 01:51 AM
(05-02-2020, 10:42 PM)Classic-Xer Wrote:(05-02-2020, 04:38 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:I get the jest of theory. I'm not much of a book reader these days. So, I'll have to pass on reading up and getting more familiar with the works of Strauss and Howe at this point. To be honest, the anomaly that skewed the generations pretty killed the credibility of S&H theory in my opinion. The 1950's had little to no resemblance of the gilded age. The world had changed/advanced significantly. My grandmother's and grandfather's were born when the use of horses and buggies and heavy manual labor to do most everything was still common.(05-02-2020, 04:18 PM)Classic-Xer Wrote: Hint: If the liberals keep playing games with numbers, people's lives and lively hoods, playing games with dates/deadlines and moving goal lines this is going end way worse and way more costly than World War II and financially wipe out every social program that followed in the process. I'm not concerned about America because America was built to succeed and survive.
Did the high of the 1950s much resemble the Gilded Age? Does the crisis bring significant transformation? Do you really think we will return to what we once were?
You should really read for comprehension the works of Strauss and Howe.
Changing technology toes not repudiate the cycle. New technologies, if successful, seem to fit the culture of the time. Thus television in the 1T tended to promote cultural conformity as one would expect in a High. It was not going to challenge comfortable ideas. Likewise wars may be waged with different weapons, but all in all the American Revolution, the Civil War, and World War II show common threads of patterns of civil leadership and the enforcement of economic regimentation to fit the severity of war. COVID-19 is being treated as if a Crisis War in the sense that much economic and cultural activity is curtailed to constrain losses of life.
So if heavy physical labor was the norm in the 1890's but not the 1970's, then both Awakening Eras have other parallels. An early Ford Mustang is as compatible with the most recent Awakening Era as a horse and buggy was in the previous one. Economic reality may have been very different eighty years apart, but visual art of the 1890's and of the 1970's show remarkable parallels.
Quote:I don't believe that we will return to the Gilded Age. We are far to advanced to return to the Gilded Age. We might have to part ways with some blue states who seem more likely to be heading that direction anyway but that's their problem. I'd say the combination of World War I, The Great Depression and World II significantly transformed most of Europe. So, I'd say that's what it would take to significantly transform the US at this point. I'm not sure what the last question pertains to? COVID19? Yes, I believe that we will eventually get back to the way we were before the COVID19 crisis.
We will leave the Crisis Era with certain shared experiences between the surviving generations. A consensus of values tends to coalesce toward the end of the Crisis. Basically people decide (if informally) to not do the same things that led to the Crisis. Cultural conservatives despise the celebrity circuses and not-family-friendly expressions of cultural vileness of the 3T. Liberals and conservatives alike want to prevent another speculative boom like the one that led to the the economic meltdown that transformed the 3T into a 4T. People have judged traitors harshly, and dissidence is suspect. But so is inequality that fosters dissidence. Conformity of thought requires something closer to conformity of economic results. Disparities in compensation between bosses and toilers that may have fostered resentments as well as real pain are reduced. A 1T is not time of social revolution.
3T tendencies do not return. An America in which a few industrialists, executives, and big landowners lord it over people who suffer extreme deprivations (including hunger and homelessness) on their behalf and in which the middle class is highly productive but damned to be debtors just to get the opportunity to do white-collar work does not return.
It may be surprising that some Silent still have influence upon public life this late... think of Nancy Pelosi, Bernie Sanders, Mitch McConnell, and Joe Biden. But these are the last if them. Boomers or X will supplant them in public life. Those are extreme late-wave Silent. Culture? The biggest Silent contribution has been in comedy, and the surviving Silent comedians are retired or doing something else. When the timing goes they go to dramatic roles or take on administrative roles as producers. Example: the zany Chris Lloyd (Doctor Emmett Brown of the Back to the Future trilogy) produces the sitcom Modern Family.
Boomers will fade away from economic and eventually cultural influence. The former is a good thing, as Boomer executives have seemed to be the Simon Legree types as executives. Preserve that, and one gets a proletarian revolution. X will not get away with the personality cults as executives. Many have found that the corporate world is not for them, and small business is the best expression of their talents. Small business does not need giant bureaucracies to keep workers overworked and underpaid. The Millennial Generation will follow the GI pattern of asserting the right to a living wage suited to a breadwinner and will not believe that corporate bureaucracies have a right to exploit the weaknesses of bargaining of their employees. (I have heard the argument against labor unions and against collective bargaining that holds that without collective bargaining employers can pay workers what they deserve. First of all, any employer can fire a substandard performer, and second, the exploitation of bargaining weaknesses creates inequality having nothing to do with performance). Millennial adults will prefer teamwork to lone-wolf activities. A bunch of Millennial adults will insist that in a mass employer that they get much the same pay. Note also that Millennial adults are starting to enter the age in which the first of their generation start achieving high elected offices, and voters in their generation will find an obvious constituency.
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.