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Right now, we are at a place of polarization, yet all of our art sucks (my opinion obviously but it seems to be shared). If you look back at the last time our country was this divided in the 1960's, we saw some of the greatest output of music and literature we have ever seen. We had incredible artists like the Beatles among others. Then of course that was probably the peak of black culture with incredible artistic output that they will probably never reach again. This was probably the last time you saw many black musicians and guitarists be better than their white counterparts. If you take it back to the French Revolution, you saw some of the best political philosophy ever created such as with Rousseau. Political discord creates art and philosophy that has usually never been seen before, but today we don't see any of that. Even Monty Python is more subversive than anything we see today. Clockwork Orange was more subversive than anything we see today. Why aren't we seeing a peak in art again like the time should predict?
The West just isn’t close to seeing the same level of social and political chaos that it did in the 1960s and 1970s.
Part of that is extremely banal, it’s because young people are a much smaller proportion of the population than they were in generations where the fertility rate was 3.5. Old people in 2023 are much more powerful than old people were in 1968, and young people are much less powerful.
Secondly, there’s a collective social forgetting of that middle stage of the Cold War. People remember the beginning stages, from Yalta through nuclear testing through Korea and the Berlin Wall. And they remember the 80s to some extent, Reagan’s brinkmanship, a booming America facing a dying Soviet economy, the final collapse a few years later.
But the middle is forgotten. During the oil crisis there were influential Western thought leaders - and not communists - who publicly argued that the Cold War was unwinnable, and that the inevitable long term solution was some kind of synthesis between the Soviet and Western systems. Western economies were wracked by inflation and the oil crisis. The long aftermath of 1968 led to domestic political violence and chaos not seen in decades, crime shot up to previously unfathomable levels (when crime in the US spiked in 2020 and 2021, it was still much lower than the 80s and 90s peak; when crime started rising in the late 60s it kept going up and up without precedent, people thought it would rise forever).
The whole vibe was different, if you watch iconic movies from this era like Taxi Driver and Logan’s Run you can kind of get a glimpse of it. People really thought the world was ending. People today say they think the world is ending, but they don’t act like it the way they did in the ‘70s.
I've been watching a number of films from the 70's and it's remarkable how many end with the protagonist failing to accomplish their goals in a meaningful way.
I think there is a lot to the theory that the JFK/RFK assassinations deeply traumatized the Boomer generation in a way we may only be slowly recovering from.
I agree. And again, I think it's telling that the way young people today act if you look at things like zoomer/millennial 'hustle' culture, girlbossing, even lifting culture it's kind of a long-termist thing, it's about setting yourself up for some kind of future. It takes for granted that society is going to exist in much the same way 5, 10, 20 years from now without getting worse, such that personal improvement matters, and I don't think the 70s had that in the same way.
My parents knew people they'd grown up with (in comfortable, PMC families) who just dropped out of life, became hippies, joined communes, drug addicts, peaceniks, greenwich village layabouts/artists, wanderers through India or along the hippie trail, abandoned any putting down of roots because they just thought everyone was going to die. A far cry from the 21st century 'digital nomad' running a drop-shipping business and a 'travel hacking' instagram page from Bali who makes money by credit card referrals. Even many people who did choose the 'normal' path, went to medical school or law school and took well-paying jobs still thought the world was going to end, they just felt the weight of responsibility or didn't want to be poor until it happened.
I like the point that you're making, but I think that this is only a partial explanation. There are a lot of people who are now preaching self-reliance/getting the bag/lifting not because they believe society is still going to exist in the same way in the future, but because of the opposite. They think that a lot of the existing support structures are going to go away, and in that context you absolutely want to be independently sustainable and as physically formidable as possible. The idea that society is going through the ragged steps of decline and fall that mark the end of every empire is an incredibly compelling argument for self-improvement.
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