Sea Change PT 2
by Brett Stevens on December 3, 2020
http://www.amerika.org/politics/sea-change/
About a thousand years ago, we began rediscovering the technology of the ancients from the first few iterations of this cycle, and started both growing in power and decaying. Groups of humans tend toward pacifism and compromise, which further obscures the why behind what we do, and the mixed terror and freedom of approaching the unknown, having to derive elemental principles, and figuring out how to master it.
Within a few centuries, a new system appeared: government by compromise. This had been tried before and had a deservedly bad reputation, but by 1789, it was poised to take over Europe and the New World. This new system, democracy, made us all equal or uniformly entitled to city-style jobs, contracts, and earnings.
With the advent of the first world war, this system completed its conquest of aristocracy, or hereditary rule by our most competent with a social hierarchy of the same. With the advent of the second world war, the notion of personal freedom won out over civilizational freedom, and the world united on liberal democracy.
On the surface, it seemed like we were not in decay. We had more technology and wealth than ever before, and could explore the skies, seas, and space. After that, the digital world and that of the microscope expanded as well. It seemed that nothing could stop humanity.
Cynics like myself noted that this cannot have been the first time that this happened. Artifacts of technology, delicate as they are, would not survive the ravages of time that blunted the pyramids and eroded the faces of statues of the ancient gods. There is more to history than we recognize today.
If you want to see the decay, the literature of the 1920s through 1970s shows it to us most clearly: on the surface, we had chrome and gold, but underneath, dark existential doubt. We might even call it existential entropy, the anomie that arises from no choice being significant.
The first signs appeared in subtlety. Fewer of the very intelligent had children or even bothered to get married; people became self-destructive, and the βcoolβ (apathetic, selfish, individualistic) anti-hero replaced the heroes of old on our aspirational scale.
After 1945, the world system became standardized, as Francis Fukuyama noted, only undergoing its final stage in 1991 when the USSR exited history, leaving a hybrid of liberal democracy, socialist-style entitlements, civil rights, and an ideology of narcissistic individualism behind.
This system showed even more cracks. Culture died and was replaced with commerce, which was easy because βfreedomβ means that each person is accountable to nothing but his bank account, making him into a financial unit in a fungible sea of others. Equality means uniformity and replaceability, like the interchangeable parts in our machines or the laws that rule us instead of exceptional men (and Margaret Thatcher).
At this point, the die-off accelerated, finally getting really ugly in the 1960s when society decided that its ideology needed to outlive its people. Borders opened; social barriers fell; standards dropped like a stone. A new pop culture of prole ideals and entertainment swept aside classical culture.
After the Soviet Union died, it seemed like a golden age had dawned. You could do anything with your life, so people wanted a hybrid between making money and doing βmeaningfulβ things in the eyes of others, in other words, social success. Technology made anything appear impressive with enough cash.
At this point we were living in a surface age. Movies no longer told stories because all that mattered was the booming THX soundtrack, the special effects, and the unique visual appearance and contrived setting and personality affections of their characters. Vapidity became the new profundity.
Some called this postmodernism, after the movement that said that there were multiple ways to view any event, none of which was an absolute, shared, and universal truth, value, or communication. This was replaced by postmodernism lite, the idea that individual perception was such a truth.
That made life largely pointless. Perception and appearance mattered above all else, and actually doing something significant or powerful was forgotten. Even technology devolved into repetitions of the same basic ideas, always improving but never leveling up.