Hi Carranza. I've noticed it since 1975 when we lived in Canada. Like most things American, it arrives here a couple of decades later. West Side Story seemed horrific to me, way back in the 1960s - the idea of knife fights and even guns!! Now, such stuff is played out in my back yard on a daily basis.
We are also going into that soporific compliant state.
It's like a miasma of Zombie-like adherence to the norm.
My favourite example remains the many 'ethnic' women on the Oprah show, primping over how special their wonderful individual cultures were, but they all looked like clones of each other. Of course in actual facial features they did have their ethnicity, but in all other respects, they seemed from the same mold. The big hair, the mannerisms, and cultural adaptations. Maybe some had 'traditional' clothes [I forget now - but clothes don't make the man, or in this case, woman].
It's what happens around the world. Japanese all look Japanese and behave Japanese and are conformist and compliant. They haven't had the fragmentation of the wild west. They remain culturally homogenous.
But the added factor in the USA which is somewhat unnerving is the teutonic effect. There is a religious fundamentalist self-belief along the lines of the wackoes and Waco, the Hale-Bopp sect and the Jim Jones followers. It's the Columbine-style ego madness which tolerates no opposition. Those are extreme and out of proportion, deranged outcomes. Hitler's Third Reich was an outcome within 'normal' bounds but exemplified a state-sized case.
It's one of those things which is hard to put one's finger on and is more of a bubbling under the surface driving force than an out-there-in-the-streets obvious thing. But right there in the streets, an example of behaviour is the excellent driving in the USA.
The car-chase on tv or movie has resonance in the USA that is like the Manga comics in Japan - fantasy crazy sexual, violent, breakaway from the normal reality of daily life where life is totally safe, unviolent and there is not sex in the streets. Normal driving is very civilized in the USA compared with the mad, individualistic, often aggressive hurly burly in so many places.
I know the road deaths and gestures and out-the-window shootings suggest otherwise, but overall, it's how-de-do organized compliant, conformist driving. There are police to pull one over pretty quickly if there's a wrong move.
The conventional wisdom of powerful individuality in the USA more a thing of the past than of the present. Now, life is best represented by the freeway, the mall, the couch, the remote and the cubicle.
My concern and Thomas Sowell's passing remark - one of random thoughts, is more of potential than present. I mentioned it to my buddy last night over a wine after golf. He said "Good!" He thought it a not a bad idea. Well, being the crazed individualistic wildman he is, I was taken aback, but he explained that it would deal with the bloody [literally] Islamic Jihadists, the criminals, and a lot more besides. We'd still be okay. I'll discuss it again.
I've noticed the effect for quarter of a century and so far, so good. No problem. But when Thomas Sowell rang a little bell, it was like when Gwynne Dyer rang a little bell a month ago over Sar Wars before it was on anyone's radar, including mine, though I'd noticed it hiding there in southern China. I highly respect both Dyer's and Sowell's rantings - because they agree with me of course. When they write, I read!
Maybe it's incipient old-age cynicism in Thomas Sowell, but that's clutching at straws on my part.
The bigger and tougher and more organized a society, I think the more orderly it has to become. It's an idea I'm puzzling over. How to get and maintain civilization, without suffocation and Zombi-ization of people. Ritalin is a warning! Children for millennia have functioned pretty well without Ritalin. I wonder whether that's not saying more about how they are handled and the cloistered but safe environment in which they live than the actual physiological need for brain chemistry. Similarly with Prozac. Is there a correlation with hours spent on freeways, in malls and cubicles and Prozac consumption?
Repression has an eons-long history in humans. Tribal adherence to rules with strong alpha males is built into our genes. Submission, compliance and conformity are never far from the surface.
The price of freedom is eternal vigilance and as Ghandi said, the line between good and evil runs through the middle of each person [or words to that effect]. So does the line between freedom and compliance. Looking for an external enemy to freedom is normal, but the greater enemy might be growing right there in each new generation.
One thing we know for certain is that tomorrow will not be like today. The question is how will the USA change? Being the sole hyperpower and with 300 million people and all that jazz, it matters to everyone.
If the bull in the China Shop is starting to snort and paw the ground instead of smelling the flowers, it's worrying.
The manifestation of collective will is a peculiar thing. It's the logic of mobs. They are notoriously hard to predict and impossible to control.
Maybe there's nothing to worry about at all. Certainly, right now, I'm more worried about It and think that that'll be the bigger issue.
FredonEverything has remarked on the phenomenon too, and has shot through [left town].
Of course there will always be plenty of malcontents even in the most rigidly enforced Homeland Security realm, but the overall effect is what matters. Germans weren't any different from 1900 to 1950, but look what happened there in that time. There were surges of ideas expressed in politial will. Hordes of Sieg Heils in rallies were the Zeitgeist at one time. Now it seems like a bad dream.
It's surprising what humans come up with at times. Not all of it is good. Lenin, Mao, Pol Pot, Marx all had excellent ideas but somehow the good intentions worked out not so clever after all. I stayed on one of the 1970s hippie communes last weekend and the drive for what seemed an excellent idea at the time has fizzled into individualism in a commonly-owned context, each with their own houses.
Watching this space,
Mqurice |
