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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.
It's funny how much of 20th century history hinges on oil.
Why did Japan attack Pearl Harbor? Oil.
Why did Germany's invasion of the USSR fail? Oil.
Why was the USSR thriving in the the 1970s while the US struggled? Oil.
Why did the USSR collapse in the 1980s while the US boomed? Oil.
Why has the U.S. economy doubled in size (fiat currency) relative to the Europe economy since 2007? Many reasons, but also... oil.
It's one critical item on the causal chain in most events, but it's an effect as much as it is a cause. For example, if your economy collapses and you are dependent on foreign oil, you probably won't have enough money or resources to buy enough foreign oil. This will cause problems, but the lack of oil was not the precipitating cause.
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