As Europe crawled out of the ruins of World War II and America mourned its dead, the public mood in the Western world was one of a desire for peace and prosperity. People wanted to forget the horrors of the war, and there was a strong urge in the Greatest Generation for normalcy, wholesomeness and economic growth. This very conservative and ultra-normal world of the late 1940s and 1950s was the one that the Baby Boomer generation grew up in.
In the late 1960s, as this post-war generation became politically aware, the hippie movement emerged as a counterweight to what was increasingly viewed as an oppressive form of normalcy. This movement disseminated ideas of individualism, peace, antimaterialism and self-reliance throughout Western culture, and old conformist attitudes began to be expelled in what looked to be the dawn of a new age.
Since the 1930s however, a sophisticated marketing communications industry had emerged, which had adopted techniques of applied psychology in order to influence the public. Meanwhile, politicians had come to the realisation that they, too, could use applied psychology in order to push their agendas. Using these techniques, business and government worked to reign in the threat to prosperity and public order that they perceived the hippie movement as posing.
Businesses soon realised that they could sell products and services with the appropriate theming to unwitting consumers that had jumped on the hippie bandwagon, while politicians realised that the engineering of consent meant they were no longer bound to public opinion, because they now had the tools to shape it. The unruly masses could be pacified and controlled by convincing them that one could find inner peace through a self-help book, become a rebel by owning a Che Guevara T-shirt, or feel liberated as a woman by wearing a miniskirt. Politicians began to package their agendas and decisions in ways that appealed to a society of self-indulgent independence-seeking narcissists. In this way, the hippie movement was neutered and absorbed into the establishment in a kind of “embrace, extend and extinguish” manoeuvre.
The spiritual aspects of the hippie movement, such as zen buddhism as an alternative to christianity, were glossed over and the zanier elements of new age spiritualism instead came to dominate what had effectively become a marketplace of belief systems. “Buy Two Worldviews and Get a Third One for Free! — Money-back Guarantee!”
Meanwhile, in the humanities, postmodernism reached its peak. Faith in absolutes began to evaporate. Notions of a single kind of beauty or truth were abandoned in favour of relativism. Paintings that were nothing but canvases with splotches of paint on them sold for millions, because only a reactionary authoritarian would insist that art should have standards.
In East Asia, countries like Japan, Taiwan and China began to industrialise and sought to export their goods. Western businesses, looking to maximise profits, began to import products from these countries on a massive scale. The domestic manufacturing base was increasingly made redundant and was gradually dismantled as a result of this.
With a reduced manufacturing base came a reduced demand for factory workers. The West, having collectively left the factory floor and promoted itself to the administrative office, began to promote the idea that every citizen should receive a higher education in order to prepare him for the white collar career it would be necessary for him to have in order to be happy and successful in this new post-industrial world.
Predictably, then, when the Baby Boomer generation had children of their own, they unwittingly indoctrinated them in this consumerist neo-hippie ideology of happiness, which had begun to settle in by the 1980s, and sent them off to college.
Universities weren’t prepared for this influx of students from all walks of life. Universities had been accustomed to teaching the intelligentsia and the wealthy, not the masses. Unlike public schools, which are essentially factories that manufacture people with a basic education, universities were structured as places of learning through independent study. Schools teach you to read and write. Universities taught you to think, lead and create.
But you cannot have an entire population of thinkers, leaders and creators. Not only is this absurd, but the majority of people aren’t cut out for it. So what did universities do? They did what they had to do: They turned themselves into schools — factories that manufacture people with college diplomas.
School was never designed for the genuinely curious, however. In the process of educating the masses, the souls of people who actually want to learn are crushed. If you wish to learn about the world and contribute things of substance to it in the 21st century, schools and colleges are places to avoid. You would be better off going to a library at this point.
During the past 50 years, Western culture has thus descended into a certain decadence. We are no longer building our countries as we did in the 20th century. Instead, we have become post-industrial and we lack a mission as a society, leaving us aimlessly wandering, looking for a purpose among the supermarket aisles.
I feel some envy when I look at countries that still have something to gain — that still have problems to overcome. As humans, we need problems to overcome. That’s what life is about, after all. China is hard at work building itself up. Meanwhile, we are looking at this with some concern, but we aren’t mobilising. We aren’t building morale like they are. We aren’t building much of anything.
Perhaps we are not hungry enough anymore. We are lions who built a comfortable zoo for ourselves, and now we don’t care to hunt anymore, because we’re fine. You reach a point of saturation of sorts, in which the animal has no work to do in order to survive, so it begins to play instead. When adults play, they tend to buy expensive toys. We are in a world where billionaires go to space and sell stocks for the fun of it. We have a large class of white collar workers, like bourgeois or patricians, while Chinese people and immigrants are doing all the actual labour.
Very few of our companies are truly innovating. The tech industry has transitioned from engineering and manufacturing to sales and marketing. There are hardly any companies left doing serious research and development, because it’s far easier to just make a piece of software.
You search the Internet for concepts and ideas because you want to learn, but brand names come up instead because that’s what people are looking for. Things to buy and consume. It’s not like that everywhere. In a random bookshop in a mall in Manila you will find books on engineering. People are educating themselves there because they are curious and hungry. The East is developing countries. The West is developing obesity.
The mass media has also devolved. Every news outlet is turning into a tabloid because that’s what gets the most clicks and drives in the revenue, and as in marketing communications, truth is no longer a concern, because there’s no good money in that in a society that is increasingly too impatient and too anxious for the next stimulus to sit down and read a long piece of text and think about it afterwards. There is no time for that.
If the aim of democracy is to allow the public to decide on its collective fate, this aim has failed, because the public has about as much influence on its future as a wave has on the ocean currents. If, however, the aim of democracy is to create an illusion of autonomy in the masses for the purposes of pacifying them, it’s doing quite a good job of that.
It’s as if the West is losing its head, slowly, and is falling into decadence, both culturally and administratively. Our politicians aren’t grounded anymore. They seem to be losing touch with reality. It doesn’t bode well for the free world that this seems to be happening everywhere. Authoritarian powers are on the rise and the West is wilting.
Fish caught in the North Sea by Norwegian fishermen is sent to the Baltic for processing and packing, before being sent back to Norway again for consumption because it’s cheaper. When you tell an entire people to go to college and get white collar jobs, you get a people who won’t perform manual labour or trade work.
We may not like everything China is doing, but they just pulled the rug on a large number of tech companies. Why? Because they aren’t really tech companies at all. They’re just companies that use technology to implement consumerism on the Internet. By contrast, what China wants is engineering and industry. We should probably want that too. You don’t build a country on top of Amazon and Netflix.
All this outsourcing is also causing us to lose the practical knowledge and even the tooling that we built our civilisation with. We risk ending up in a situation in the West where we no longer know how to build and repair the machinery we use for living because we’re all too busy shopping, shuffling papers and cutting each other’s hair to notice that we forgot how to actually make and repair things.
We no longer build things to last after the idea of cheap disposable items took off. If it doesn’t work anymore, just throw it away. We generate massive amounts of waste because we have no idea what living frugally and sustainably means. This wastefulness has lead to an environmental problem — we are living beyond our means, and we are refusing to give it up. We continue to suckle the teat of oil and consumerism because it’s comfortable, and we are spoiled.
We have had too much of a good thing and have become over-civilised. We are in a process of decline and demise. Human civilisation will continue, but it will be the East, not the West, that carries that torch onward, because Western civilisation is most certainly going to fall.