The 1980’s

There were a succession of generations before the present one who lived through the Cold War and the perennial fear of nuclear war, and who were also much more conscious, seemingly, of the banality and alienation of the present age.  Looking back, there seems to have been a large explosion of exploration and ideas in the 1960’s and 1970’s, and ever since things have gotten slower and duller.  Me, I came of age in the Reagan era.

I just watched Koyaanisqatsi again last night, and it brought back a flood of memories. It made me think too of “End of the World”, which I see was 1991.  That movie had a mood which captured that time well.  Even though we are far advanced in all the things which were feared back then, people seem trapped in banalities and distractions.  Perhaps they feel they have no choice.  It seems more likely that cowardice is becoming more and more common, even as our sense of the ability to control our collective destiny seems to shrink.

The people who might once have preoccupied themselves with the nuclear arms race–and frankly who ought to be equally or more concerned with nuclear proliferation, although of course that would fly in the face of their prejudices–now enforce speech codes and make college kids take classes whose essence is that you can’t have sex with drunk women, even if they ask for it, and even if they decide 9 months later–as at Columbia–that consensual drunk sex they both enjoyed was rape.  Rape, we learn, is a construct just like your gender.  Because nothing makes sense.  And why should it?  Sense is a construct, but the notion that sense is a construct is not.  That is true.  Really, really fucking true.

Even if one finds fault with the notion of unilateral, or even unverifiable bilateral nuclear disarmament, these were at least important issues, of existential importance to the continuance of global civilization.

Reagan’s success, and the continuing partial success of our partial free market system, has removed that issue, and largely those of profound, real poverty in the United States.

Globally, there are many important issues remaining, such as the status of Dalits in India, Islamic oppression of women, the oppressive Communist tyrannies in Cuba and North Korea, and the less oppressive tyrannies in China and Indochina, Zimbabwe, Venezuela and elsewhere, but the box leftist thinking puts around people–really the noose, which tightens slowly, suffocating first the capacity for independent thinking, and then the capacity for the consistent use of principle based reasoning–has made these issues invisible, and effective, reason based action impossible.

What mediocrity, and how dull, that young people’s minds can only be fired up by issues like gay marriage, transgenderism, and the right to bully anyone who fails to wear the emblem of political correctness on their left arm.

There are large worlds waiting to be discovered.  Even in the sciences, we have yet to become intelligent and reintegrate field theories.  We have yet to plausibly explain evolution.  We have yet to bring into mainstream science the ample and empirically impeccably well validated research in things like Remote Viewing, and precognition, and telekinesis.

I understand, but I do not accept, the reasons people offer for why they are forced to live in cages.  This need not be the end of time and freedom.  It may turn out that way, but we all had and to the point HAVE choices.