Difference between revisions of "The Big Nap"
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''What puzzles me as we shelter in place with no credible plan to regain control of our planet, our lives, and our economy, is what explains our anomalous selection process? I myself am not entirely certain, but I would venture a guess: I would posit that this group is characterized roughly as people who have at least some meaningful formative memory of the time before the mysterious economic transition in the early 1970s. All of the finalists could remember the Cuban Missile Crisis or the moment that they heard of the Kennedy and King assassinations, and where they watched the first moon landing. Yet they also came of age with childhoods untouched by the diversity that followed from the 1965 Immigration Act in the United States or the trauma of service in Vietnam. In short, what they appear to have in common to me is that they both prospered under all three phases of the Big Nap and remained intellectually coherent, at least among themselves.'' | ''What puzzles me as we shelter in place with no credible plan to regain control of our planet, our lives, and our economy, is what explains our anomalous selection process? I myself am not entirely certain, but I would venture a guess: I would posit that this group is characterized roughly as people who have at least some meaningful formative memory of the time before the mysterious economic transition in the early 1970s. All of the finalists could remember the Cuban Missile Crisis or the moment that they heard of the Kennedy and King assassinations, and where they watched the first moon landing. Yet they also came of age with childhoods untouched by the diversity that followed from the 1965 Immigration Act in the United States or the trauma of service in Vietnam. In short, what they appear to have in common to me is that they both prospered under all three phases of the Big Nap and remained intellectually coherent, at least among themselves.'' | ||
''If you think of a wealthy and reasonably equal country as akin to a family that got wealthy together from a successful family business, these are the people who saw the business prosper in their youth from their parents’ efforts and, when the business began to fail in the early 1970s, began to collectively sell-off and mortgage the business's remaining valuable assets to disguise the new losses as adults. So long as this class repeated the mantras as a choir that originally came from the academic experts and think tanks that were speaking through the leading newspapers, none of them had to take an excess of responsibility for ideas that could never bear full scrutiny if subjected to serious interrogation. These mantras—of deregulation, globalization financialization, education, authoritative news sources, central banking, immigration, and consolidation—were constructed so that this group could believe that the growth and prosperity that they had experienced as young people were continuing for everyone. That is, so long as they didn't notice the homeless encampments, the mounting student debt, the inequality, rising foreign power, and diminution of national sovereignty.'' | ''If you think of a wealthy and reasonably equal country as akin to a family that got wealthy together from a successful family business, these are the people who saw the business prosper in their youth from their parents’ efforts and, when the business began to fail in the early 1970s, began to collectively sell-off and mortgage the business's remaining valuable assets to disguise the new losses as adults. So long as this class repeated the mantras as a choir that originally came from the academic experts and think tanks that were speaking through the leading newspapers, none of them had to take an excess of responsibility for ideas that could never bear full scrutiny if subjected to serious interrogation. These mantras—of deregulation, globalization, financialization, education, authoritative news sources, central banking, immigration, and consolidation—were constructed so that this group could believe that the growth and prosperity that they had experienced as young people were continuing for everyone. That is, so long as they didn't notice the homeless encampments, the mounting student debt, the inequality, rising foreign power, and diminution of national sovereignty.'' | ||
''The problem that this now leaves us with in the United States (and which I believe is echoed abroad) is that this class is all that is left of our national coherence, and they are continuing to hold on to power well past their retirement dates—because in a democracy, any shared group beliefs in nonsense, and particularly self-serving nonsense, will still beat an incoherent haystack of noise that nevertheless contains the missing needles of truth.'' | ''The problem that this now leaves us with in the United States (and which I believe is echoed abroad) is that this class is all that is left of our national coherence, and they are continuing to hold on to power well past their retirement dates—because in a democracy, any shared group beliefs in nonsense, and particularly self-serving nonsense, will still beat an incoherent haystack of noise that nevertheless contains the missing needles of truth.'' | ||