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Notes -
What does the light at the end of the tunnel look like?
Look, every now and then I stop watching my footfalls and get pensive. And one of the things I've gotten pensive about the past few days is this: the Western culture war is not going to last forever, which means it's going to end. And when it does, how will we look back on this mad time?
Two of the answers are obvious:
But what I can't really put together is the third option, the narrative that will be told if SJ is indeed just a passing phase, either because Red/Grey defeated it or because it wins and then turns out to be unsustainable. Frankly, the Blue Tribe's been writing all the history books since before I was born, so it's hard for me to even picture it. And that troubles me; it's the scenario I think is most likely, and the one I'm to at least some extent trying to bring about, so if I don't have a good idea of what it even looks like that's kind of an HCF. "It is not enough to say that you do not like the way things are. You must say how you will change them, and to what."
So, how will the people in that scenario think of this time? What story will they tell?
(To the SJers here: feel free to answer, if you think you understand your opposition, or feel free to correct me if you think my #2 is uncharitable.)
Like the end of the 70s, going into the 80s, which were a complete change in social emphasis. Now greed was good, loadsamoney, etc.
The 70s, if you weren't around for them, were wild. All the 60s idealism had curdled and the hippies had been displaced by the Me Generation. Selfishness was now rebranded as self-determination, you were trying to find yourself, you needed to be that authentic person you were, and society had no right to bind you or hold you down with rules and expectations. Hence the boom in feminism, divorce (often initiated by women), therapies of all sorts, self-help books, things like EST and Transcendental Meditation, New Age and pseudo-science of all sorts - lost Atlantis, ancient astronauts, advanced civilisations of the past which had been lost shoulder-to-shoulder with past life regression and the Age of Aquarius: all to do with the infinitely fascinating topic of Me, Me, Me and my own rich inner life and concerns and I was a queen of Egypt in a past life, I deserve more in this one. The hippy kids of the 60s were now older and middle-class and well-off enough to indulge in these concerns.
American cities looked to be in flames, or heading that way. Riots, bombings, groups like the Weathermen and Symbionese Liberation Army and other radical socialist/Marxist/Maoist/who the fuck knows, we're copying Europe groups springing up to rob banks and kidnap heiresses and bring about The Revolution.
Mainland Europe had its own share of those, from Baader-Meinhof to the Red Brigade.
For a moment there, it looked like the American Civil Rights Movement might go the same way as the Northern Irish Civil Rights Movement, with paramilitary groups of its own (e.g. the Black Panthers). The main difference there seems to have been that we had the IRA lingering on in some form to take up the armed struggle, and the US government wasn't quite as sang-froid as the Brits about killing its own citizens, even black citizens. You guys really dodged a bullet on that one.
And yet all that ferment and fervour and Revolutionary Energy petered out, and along comes Gordon Gekko in due time as the inheritor of the age.
So yeah, I think we'll look back on the period 2020-202? and go "wow, that was a crazy time, wasn't it?" and the kids who were too young to understand what was going on, or who didn't live through it, won't even know what it was like.
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