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Isn't it a possible exception from the generational cycle?
In most Western democracies, the activist community exists since the 1960s There were boomer activist students, Xer activist students and millennial activist students, all standing for a similar set of Inclusivist views. Will there be homelander activist students?
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(03-16-2021, 04:32 AM)Captain Genet Wrote: Isn't it a possible exception from the generational cycle?
In most Western democracies, the activist community exists since the 1960s There were boomer activist students, Xer activist students and millennial activist students, all standing for a similar set of Inclusivist views. Will there be homelander activist students?
Some Boomers will be late-middle-age or outright elderly activists. These may seek to achieve what they could not achieve as social reforms and cultural ferment in the Boom Awakening. To be sure, the Boomer pigs who saw the 3T mostly as an opportunity to live well off class privilege while advocating fundamentalist religion and the economic norm of people being overworked and underpaid as the sole means of creating a more prosperous world may be kicked to the curb. They were the problem, and not the solution, and Donald Trump is only the most blatant exception.
Obviously the "Peace-Love-Dope" agenda is going nowhere. Millennial adults aren't going to sacrifice their young for any Voyage to the Interior. Boomer liberals may be the sorts of leaders that set the tone for Millennial adults who are too conformist and not imaginative enough to do that themselves.
Much of the Millennial concern will be fair pay and good working conditions that they never got to enjoy in the Neoliberal era in which little mattered except that profiteers and business executives raked in the money. Note well that the Neoliberal era was also the peak time for religious shysters who found that they could uniquely bless huge donations. That may not have been exclusively a Boomer phenomenon, but Boomers were definitely in on it.
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.
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03-16-2021, 06:10 AM
(This post was last modified: 03-16-2021, 06:15 AM by Captain Genet.)
The activist community is not about a "voyage to the interior", but about reshaping the exterior in name of pacifism, environmentalism, cultural relativism and high lifestyle freedom. I suspect these will be seen as establishment values during the 2T. Some people already see them this way, but they oppose them in name of hard nihilism, rather than any competing form of idealism. It seems only Prophets can introduce a novel idealistic worldview into the public consciousness.
(03-16-2021, 04:54 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: Much of the Millennial concern will be fair pay and good working conditions that they never got to enjoy in the Neoliberal era in which little mattered except that profiteers and business executives raked in the money.
I agree. During the 1T everybody who tries to debate cultural or moral issues will be seen as a laggard who has yet to recognize the truth of Inclusivism and wants to bring back the culture wars.
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(03-16-2021, 06:10 AM)Captain Genet Wrote: ... During the 1T everybody who tries to debate cultural or moral issues will be seen as a laggard who has yet to recognize the truth of Inclusivism and wants to bring back the culture wars.
That may be a bit optimistic, since is hasn't happened to any great extent in the past. Yes, the 1T will be more communal, but 'more' is about it.
Intelligence is not knowledge and knowledge is not wisdom, but they all play well together.
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(03-16-2021, 02:59 PM)David Horn Wrote: (03-16-2021, 06:10 AM)Captain Genet Wrote: ... During the 1T everybody who tries to debate cultural or moral issues will be seen as a laggard who has yet to recognize the truth of Inclusivism and wants to bring back the culture wars.
That may be a bit optimistic, since is hasn't happened to any great extent in the past. Yes, the 1T will be more communal, but 'more' is about it.
Isn't cultural conformity another hallmark of a 1T?
But you're right that "more" is guaranteed. In the 2030s we'll make it to Mars and start the colonization process. We will also probably a proof of primitive life on the Red Planet, and of more complex lifeforms in another solar systems. This is what will make people excited when politics calms down.
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(03-19-2021, 04:45 AM)Captain Genet Wrote: (03-16-2021, 02:59 PM)David Horn Wrote: (03-16-2021, 06:10 AM)Captain Genet Wrote: ... During the 1T everybody who tries to debate cultural or moral issues will be seen as a laggard who has yet to recognize the truth of Inclusivism and wants to bring back the culture wars.
That may be a bit optimistic, since it hasn't happened to any great extent in the past. Yes, the 1T will be more communal, but 'more' is about it.
Isn't cultural conformity another hallmark of a 1T?
But you're right that "more" is guaranteed. In the 2030s we'll make it to Mars and start the colonization process. We will also probably a proof of primitive life on the Red Planet, and of more complex lifeforms in another solar systems. This is what will make people excited when politics calms down.
Conformity is not universality. Even as a child, I recognized that the popular culture was not the whole culture. Most of the opposition to plain-vanilla sameness came from the artsy types, who felt chained by lack of imagination in the grand community. They were the ones who lit the fire that became the 2T. I knew many of local examples, and, as I learned later, they were only a small sample at that. The Bohemian Underground, for lack of a better name for it, was actually a substantial percentage of the whole -- hidden in plain sight.
Intelligence is not knowledge and knowledge is not wisdom, but they all play well together.
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(03-19-2021, 04:45 AM)Captain Genet Wrote: (03-16-2021, 02:59 PM)David Horn Wrote: (03-16-2021, 06:10 AM)Captain Genet Wrote: ... During the 1T everybody who tries to debate cultural or moral issues will be seen as a laggard who has yet to recognize the truth of Inclusivism and wants to bring back the culture wars.
That may be a bit optimistic, since is hasn't happened to any great extent in the past. Yes, the 1T will be more communal, but 'more' is about it.
Isn't cultural conformity another hallmark of a 1T?
But you're right that "more" is guaranteed. In the 2030s we'll make it to Mars and start the colonization process. We will also probably a proof of primitive life on the Red Planet, and of more complex lifeforms in another solar systems. This is what will make people excited when politics calms down.
Very much. This time I see more certainty that Americans will be unable to avoid the cultural influence of America's model minorities -- people not straight, white, and Christian. In all likelihood the "lewd and lascivious" will be taken out with the other detritus. Things recently shady will be obliged to clean up their acts if they do not want oblivion as examples of how not to do things. There will be traces of regional differences and ethnicity in mass culture but anything 'ethnic' will likely be sanitized for mass consumption -- like much of the "Latin" or "Hawaiian" music once in vogue in the last 1T.
Community values this time will not include anything like "Jim Crow" ... unless directed at dopers, drunks, deadbeats, and sexual deviants* that most of us will treat as unacceptable influences or presences in mainstream life. I expect pornography to be reduced severely in availability, as "swinger" lifestyles are shown to be harmful to children. Even political extremism might go on the fade. Even the Communist Party on the Left has sought to go mainstream.
There will still be religion, including fundamentalist Christianity, but all of it will have to go through a difficult lens of judgment. If it is crazy, cruel, or callous it will be suspect. Donald Trump's antics as President will be a bad memory to be left as a warning for the next few generations. Conservatism will need to redefine itself as something other than the defense of elite Power, Indulgence, and Gain (get it? P.I.G!). Educational opportunity will expand, and it will not have the cost of gigantic debt as a burden that puts off child-raising and home ownership. It will be more rigidly defined in its objectives of improving the expectations of moral standards and making people less vulnerable to hucksters in commerce and politics. It will be at least two years of liberal arts education, and I expect it to include the well-known Freshman Composition (one learns that volume of writing is not a substitute for structure and content), comparative political systems (yes, fascism, Communism, Ku Kluxism, Baathism, and theocracy suck!), philosophy (where one learns the rules of logic and that there really isn't much new thought and that one's 'discovery' already exists), economics (there is no free lunch), psychology (to know the hustles when they are made), comparative religion (so that one knows the differences and common features... and doesn't get stuck with the idea that and a foreign language (example: learn a Slavic language -- any Slavic language -- and your world will widen).
One thing that will be more conformist will be economic results. Americans will be less tolerant of economic disparities, as poverty will be seen as a harm to children. The neoliberal era is over, and the idea that economic elites can be trusted to use severe poverty as a cudgel to get people to create the means of creating capital but instead turned into the means of promoting sybaritic indulgence among the Master Class will be repudiated in high taxes on "easy money". Availability and access to what are now overpriced events will become more important than profit.
*LGBT rights will not be impaired. Messing with children, though, will be even more horrifying. The advocates of LGBT rights made clear to straight people that we had to accept that men unable to love women but men instead, and women incapable of loving men but capable of loving women might as well get to live in marital relationships equal in recognition with those of straight adult couples.
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.
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03-20-2021, 04:28 AM
(This post was last modified: 03-20-2021, 04:31 AM by Captain Genet.)
Maybe activism is just another form of democratic participation? Elections are another, and we have elections in all turnings.
It does show some signs of generational trends: the "human be-in" with its typically Boomer meditative quality, Xers' tactical frivolity in the 90s and early 2000s, Millennials' environmentalist demos which are just fashionable social events. In the 1T activist events might go family-friendly and parents will bring their children to teach them to revere Mother Earth and abhor war, racism and predatory capitalism. These events will probably make on the neo-Missionaries similar impression to the one made by mainline Protestant services on Boomers. Thus they will abandon activism altogether or start new activist communities.
But if activist communities survive the next 2T, it will mean they have proven their usefulness and become an integral part of Information Age democracy.
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