by Suff » 10 Dec 2015, 21:52
Trying to be concise...
WW1 started to change our society but not that much.
WW2 changed it massively but really the seeds is sowed were much more damaging than the direct consequences of so much travel, views of the world and freedom for the women working on the land.
After WW2 things really started to change. America needed an outlet for it's military industrial complex created during WW2 and so it created consumerism. 2 huge developments also changed our lives forever. Injection moulded plastics and the silicon based transistor.
The plastics industry massively drove the throw away consumer society and the transistor morphed into the silicon chip and the advent of the computers we know today and infest all aspects of our lives. The pace of life became frenetic and the old barriers to hedonism, such as the church, were moving far too slowly to be accepted by the youth of the day and also far too many of the soldiers who came back from the war were extremely disillusioned with religion. After all, the German military belt buckles were all engraved with Gott mit uns. My Father in Law broke with the Catholic church after seeing the abject poverty of those who worked the Italian land and the massive wealth and power of the catholic church.
Add to the mix the threat of nuclear annihilation at any moment in time, drugs in the 60's, hard drugs flowing out of Asia on the back of the Vietnam war and we are up to my teenage years in the 70's. By now young people were in open revolt, the church was an anathema and parents were struggling to cope with a society which was rejecting the solid foundations on which they had been raised.
You don't need the church to be good or respectful or considerate. You do, however, have to have an upbringing in which your parents teach you those values, sometimes at the end of a chastisement.
In the 80's we had the fallout of the 1970's collapse of our industry, IMF loans, austerity to fix the problem. Massive unemployment, much higher work mobility and the breaking down of the family unit. Pretty horrific times, but also times where if you were on the crest of the wave you had it good. Too bad if you were not.
Then we get to the 90's. The berlin wall falls, relief is incredible, we're not going to be fried in nuclear fire after all, money is diverted to industry and leisure from defence, cheap flights happen overnight, simply put the technological change is like an express elevator and the whole world is having a huge party. Even the dot com bust didn't stop it, nor 9/11.
At the same time the PC culture's insidious tentacles entered into the mix and we're no longer able to even chastise our children, if we deny them anything we're abusing them and they go out of control.
The warning signs were there over the years. We've known about Global Warming for decades, but the evidence of the impact was growing. But the public didn't care. So what they say. We fixed Y2K, we fixed Acid Rain, we can fix this too, right?
The huge debt fuelled binge finally ends with the mother of all hangovers in 2009. Suddenly the bright colourful world is full of drab greys and browns. Not a hint of red, yellow or orange to be seen. Parenting skills are lost and parents think that their children are either toys or little adults to be "friends with". Children don't understand why they can't just have the newest and the latest "whatever" any more and become more sulky.
But we're left with the PC laws. We can't control our children any more and there are no end of businesses and government quango's going around undermining our control to either make a quick buck or to gain political power. Suddenly we realise that fixing Acid Rain actually made temperatures bubble even faster. Sulphur is a heat reflectant and we pulled as much as we could out of the atmosphere, not just power stations but fuel for cars and trucks too. Heat flooded in and was trapped by the CO2...
Major Oooops.
So there we stand. In hock to our eyeballs. Children looking like a re-run of lord of the flies with every hand turned against anyone who wants to put them back in their box. Climate basically out of control and the best the politicians can say is "we'll go on a CO2 diet but really we need to spend our way out of it". Keynsian climate control. Magic.
The headache is still there somewhere around the back of the head and at the same time those pesky Middle eastern people have started creating a whole new order over there and we let them do it. Now they're exporting their "world order" to us using the stick we have been told is bad to use.
Some day this will be written up. After the wars, after the devastation, when the world has settled down with a stable population of about 3bn, the historians will document it all. They'll get it wrong of course because it will all be hearsay and the "documented evidence" of the winners. The title will probably be something like....
"The century the world went mad"....
There are 10 types of people in the world:
Those who understand Binary and those who do not.
