07-28-2020, 02:59 PM
(07-28-2020, 02:00 PM)Einzige Wrote:
Einzige
(07-28-2020, 01:33 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: A Mega-2T would have to feature an intense Awakening, just as you consider the mega-3T to have a longer and more characteristic 3T.
This intensity however could just as easily be an intellectual intensity as an emotive one.
The Missionary Awakening was probably our most intellectually driven Awakening in American history. There was real debate on the anti-capitalist Left in that period in a way that there simply was not in the Boom.Awakening: in other words, there was more real content on the Missionary end of things than among the Boomers.
The Boom Awakening was intellectually weak and shallow for an Awakening. Psychedelic twists are not enough to make a great Awakening in culture. Note well that what followed was a 3T that at times featured extreme anti-intellectualism. Shopping malls, prosperity-cult religion, Reagan, and reality TV. Yuk!
Quote:Quote:The socialist era is the second revolution of modern times. It began before the civil war, but expanded during the great power awakening or missionary awakening.
To the contrary, we have not yet entered a socialist period. The working-class has not abolished capitalism.
America has become one of the purest plutocracies in the world, almost rivaling what one expects under a military junta or in some oil-rich society in which the royal family owns the oil resources. Plutocracy requires a populace addled into compliance or acquiescence or scared into subservience. Creating a culture in which material gain and indulgence is the only expression available for most peopole and assuring that most fail is one way to create mass dissent.
Quote:Quote:However, an unravelling is not a period in which the people (or "we" as you put it) fight against the previous Awakening. Although I admit that among Generation X, there was a strong tendency to do that. Nevertheless, archetypally the unravelling is a period in which the ideas of the Awakening are fought over and further developed. It is not a period only of resistance to the previous turning.
The Unraveling is definitely a period in which the concepts of the Awakening are stymied and resisted. And the entire Millennial saeculum has been one massive reaction against socialism, the idea of the Great Power saeculum. Literally from the word gp, from 1946, socialism and Communism were vilified and attacked Right and Left (the individualist hippies had little time for the Old Left).
As the shopping malls face the wrecking balls, as youth turns away from fundamentalist and wealth-cult Christianity, and as numbing media leave a huge void in life that everyone knows about... the man who has brought out the worst in the American spirit becomes a scapegoat for much that has gone wrong. As an exemplar of wealth without responsibility, power without conscience, and privilege without a soul, Trump is easy to despise.
Quote:Quote:And our saeculum has not spent all its energy fighting against socialism and socialist-anarchism. In its 2T, it expanded social government to a large degree in the Great Society, and saw the birth of movements as significant as those of the previous saeculum: principally the green movement and environmentalism, upon which all of our future society must be based, but also the ideal of ending war, and a much greater dedication to respecting diversity and freedom among races, genders and religions. John Lennon's song kind of summed it up, he being a member of the visionary war-baby group that includes Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden.
(A) Welfare capitalism is not socialism. Socialism is the abolition of production for exchange and the inauguration of production for use as the generalized mode of production within society. And too the Great Society took place amidst the backdrop of the War in Vietnam- a war against socialism.
But unlike the plutocracy that we now endure, welfare capitalism has a human face. Production for use and not exchange is possible only with cottage industries serving tiny markets, and those are woefully inadequate.
Quote:(B) The Boom Awakening counterculture was ultra-individualistic and by no means had any real anti-capitalist commitments. Even Bernie Sanders is simply a social democrat - his policies would leave production for exchange untouched.
... and that is the fault of the Boom Awakening: it was more about breaking free from institutions than about reforming them.
Quote:Quote:(deleted because of irrelevance to my argument)
Quote:A mega 2T would also strongly emphasize new spiritual movements and new religions. These did occur in the missionary awakening, as they do in all awakenings. But the rest of the seaculum was very materialist and outward oriented. You can't make that into a mega-awakening just by saying a revolutionary movement occurred. Revolutionary movements define the entire modern age, not one saeculum. The Consciousness Revolution 2T brought in the spiritual and holistic new age culture, which is the basis for all the counter-cultures and cultural creatives that will continue to develop in our new world civilization.
Religion and spiritualism are now reactionary with respect to the movement against the dominant civilization. The real content of Awakenings is this movement, socialism.
The Right found ways in which to co-opt religion and spirituality. Religion can offer Pie in the Sky When You Die as a substitute for prosperity and justice in This World. Note well that the elites need do nothing to create the pie in the sky. But the Right can make life miserable and demand that people endorse their own suffering, even having to praise their exploiters.
Quote:Quote: Just because Generation X has been so unusually cynical and resentful of Boomers, does not erase what has been born. But Generation X now needs to fulfill its role as pragmatic managers of the crisis, and help the other generations put our new saeculum on a sound and sustainable basis. It can only do that by accepting and working with the Awakening ideas of the Consciousness Revolution, the Green Revolution and the Green New Deal. It can't be based on Reaganomics, nor on its Marxist opposite alone. And Generation X can also recall its own spiritual awakening in the circa 1990 period, and build its spiritual life and feeling of communion on it. No new civilization today can be based on materialism/physicalism, because it denies the source of all life. All civilizations that are sustainable must be based on spirit.
Your practical vision extends as far as Green Capitalism and no further, because you greatly overemphasize the spiritual and cultural components of historical movements while understating the material aspect
No civilization which is sustainable can be based on capitalism. It can at best mitigate its environmental destruction by selling a "Green" lifestyle- photovoltaic cars, tiny homes, &etc. This is insufficient to do more than slow down environmental degradation.
The world will be quite different when people recognize that they do not need status symbols. People will still need dwellings of some sort, transportation, food, medical care, a narrow range of temperature, and of course some fun and enlightenment. People who hate their lives either obliterate themselves or turn to revolutionary and destructive revolts.
Quote:Quote:We are now in a post-industrial, ecologically-based civilization. This began in the sixties, and so did the Information Age.
This is the prevailing dogma, but it's incorrect. There was no massive change in the mode of production since the 1960s; it is still based on the exploitation of surplus value and the money-commodity-money chain. Capitalism exists as it has existed. The "Information Age" has at best introduced new methods of social control and increased the tempo of productivity within capitalism. And this is all.
Man cannot live on the Word alone, but on bread grown from the ground. I find your spiritualism Idealistic and your emphasis on the Information Age misinformed.
Donald Trump is a throwback who offers the worst of unbridled capitalism, social elitism, and short-sighted devouring of resources and destruction of the environment. He is failure in many ways and success in none.
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.