Was 911 & the Cultural Aftermath/Change in National Mood Part of This Crisis Period?

[Hintergrund]

(11-20-2018, 02:32 PM)Bill the Piper Wrote: IMO it was the hedonism promoted by pop culture that encouraged people to run up a debt.

It certainly "helped", but the "spending = good" ideology started in the 2nd Turning, when the last Nomads were dead / out of power, and the hubristic Heroes took over, and nobody held them back.

[Galen]

(02-06-2019, 11:17 AM)Hintergrund Wrote:

(11-20-2018, 02:32 PM)Bill the Piper Wrote: IMO it was the hedonism promoted by pop culture that encouraged people to run up a debt.

It certainly "helped", but the "spending = good" ideology started in the 2nd Turning, when the last Nomads were dead / out of power, and the hubristic Heroes took over, and nobody held them back.

The Nomads were gone before that and the GIs were leaving the scene as well.  By the late sixties and early seventies you started seeing Silent and Boomers starting to take power.  The Silent generation were not very assertive and tended to try to appease and because the Boomers were likely to be around longer it doesn't take a genius to figure out what happened.

My GI and the few Lost still around knew exactly what was going to happen and were grateful that they would be dead by that point.  The women on my mothers side of the family tend hang around and so got to see much more of that future than they wanted to.

[Eric the Green]

(02-06-2019, 11:17 AM)Hintergrund Wrote:

(11-20-2018, 02:32 PM)Bill the Piper Wrote: IMO it was the hedonism promoted by pop culture that encouraged people to run up a debt.

It certainly "helped", but the "spending = good" ideology started in the 2nd Turning, when the last Nomads were dead / out of power, and the hubristic Heroes took over, and nobody held them back.

The spending = good ideology certainly started in the 1T, the 1950s and early 1960s, and it took off from a similar ethic promoted in the 1920s. These are the sources of consumer commercial culture. The Awakening pushed back against this, and offered different ways of life from that culture.

Hedonism certainly expanded during the Awakening as well, but at first this did not require a lot of spending or commercialism. That came later when the boomer hippies became yuppies and went back to the ways of the 1T during the 3T, along with everyone else including the new nomads.

If you mean government spending, though, that goes back to the previous 4T, when Keynesian economics came to power. Austerity came back in the late 2T under Reagan, although government spending continued despite the preaching about fiscal conservatism; it just became spending on things we didn't need (a huge military buildup), and not paying for it. Reagan thus created the enormous national debt which his successors and ideological followers Bush and Trump expanded further. That was a bit different from the Great Society spending of the early 2T, which was for both things we needed and for a war we didn't.

[Eric the Green]

(11-14-2018, 10:34 AM)Hintergrund Wrote: The Boomers have most of the money and the power, but one day they're gonna die anyway, and they can't control people beyond the grave. We should remind them that they'll become the most hated generation ever if they don't clean their shit up. They're narcissists, but exactly for that reason they should be interested that people will remember them in a good way.

I still have hopes, maybe vain hopes.

Of course, the "shit" of today has its sources in more than one generation.

[Bill the Piper]

(02-07-2019, 02:05 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: Of course, the "shit" of today has its sources in more than one generation.

The Lost have done a lot of bad things in the 1920, the hedonism and nihilism really started with them. Many of them lost their Christian faith after WW1, and they had no sound philosophy to replace it.

[Hintergrund]

And whose fault was it the Lost lost their faith? The idiots who commanded them - Progressives and Missionaries. The Lost spent one year (doughboys) to four years (Europeans) in the trenches and mud, were gassed, died in barbed wire (which could take hours or longer), were sent to "blood mills" by idiot generals, and after all that shit, they were "welcomed" at home by vice squads who also knew jack about the horrors of the war, but objected if those Lost boys suddenly cussed and drank and collected postcards. And after all that shit, their superiors made not peace, but an armistice for twenty years.