Temporary Insanity: A World in Transition-Philip Slater

[Jade Fox]

This is long, but well worth the read.

http://www.philipslater.com/

Our entire globe is convulsed with change. All over the world there's confusion over values, a loss of ethical certainty, a bewildering lack of consensus about almost everything.

-snip-

I’ve been impressed lately with how poorly people today understand the sixties. To the media, of course, the decade was just about wearing funny clothes and long hair, taking drugs and protesting. It came and went, like all fashions. Because that’s what the media are about—fashions, surfaces, fads. They can’t deal with long-term trends—they’re too busy with the moment. Long-term to them is a few months.

Many of my friends, on the other hand, absurdly idealize the sixties and compare it favorably with the present. They seem to have forgotten that in the sixties what we think of as a red state mentality characterized virtually the entire nation. The sixties innovators were long on visibility but short on numbers. It’s important to remember that after all the huge marches and protests between 1969 and 1971, Nixon won the 1972 election in a landslide. Not in a close, probably stolen election, but in a landslide. It’s important to keep things in perspective.

-snip-

The fact is, all those trends that began in the sixties have flowered and multiplied in the ensuing decades. If this weren’t so—if it had all just blown over, the neo-cons wouldn’t exist. The fundamentalist backlash that has swept the United States during the past two decades was a frightened reaction to the radical changes that began in the sixties. It was the overthrowing of a whole cluster of fundamental cultural assumptions at once that struck terror in the hearts of traditionalists the world over.

[cspanlovr]

1. Thanks, It does look interesting. I've bookmarked to read later.

[The Wielding Truth]

2. A movement of peace and mutual respect must be perpetuated to

resolve the greed, fear, and selfishness that underscores the strange conscience of the western world today.

Thanks for posting this revealing point of view, Jade Fox.

[tech3149]

3. Fantastic read really gets to the true culture war n/t

[juno jones]

4. Good article ,Thanks! n/t

[Demeter]

5. There's Nothing Temporary About the Insanity

There's an epidemic of mental illness worldwide, and it's contagious. To break the spread of the insanity, there would have to be quarrantining and preventative public health measures. Since in this country, and several other strategic others, the lunatics are running the asylum, I for one see little hope of a speedy recovery.

The only forces working to overcome this insanity to date are the perilous state of the world and local economies, which will stymie the insane, and the Internet, which permits the semi-sane to reinforce their mental health through validation and information sharing. The women's movement worldwide is another force for sanity. Those are mighty slim reeds on which hang the fate of humanity. While I was a born optimist, times now are daunting the strongest spirit.

[bemildred]

6. Nice piece.

If we survive, it's going to be a lot different. The 60s was just the first few rocks slipping loose. The landslide is still to come.

[Recursion]

7. Rmmm... the neocons were as much a part and product of the 60s as the neoprogs

And we shouldn't forget that neoconservatism formed as a conservative backlash against Nixon for being too "soft" on China and the USSR. I also don't know if it's fair to compare the "mainstream" mentality of 1960's America to the "Red-state" mentality today: today's Red State mentality is foundationalist and anti-structuralist, while the 1960's mentality from what I can see was not (though I wasn't alive then).

[Dyanci]

9. Lots of WWII vets voted for Nixon. They are mostly gone now. eom

[Jade Fox]

10. If you read the whole article, you'll find it covers a lot of territory...

I was alive in the 60s, and Red-state mentality was indeed the norm. It wasn't identical to now, of course. That was forty years ago.

I'd be interested to know where you got the assumption in your first sentence. I'm not disagreeing with it, I'd just like to know it's source. Certainly Nixon was very much a centrists compared to today's Neocons.

[LuckyLib]

8. Slater wrote a stunning book in the 60's called "The Pursuit of Loneliness" on

American culture. Wise man.