Cultural Reset
This started as notes on the parallels between 2020-2030 and the 1970s, but morphed into yet another big-picture analysis on the culture of the West, or rather lack of culture. Since ‘the planners’ think in terms of decades and centuries, it is hard for any one generation to think they are not unique. Planners know that they can change entire cultures in just a generation or two, especially if the culture is already weakened to begin with. This is why this current ‘great reset’ is mainly aimed at the youth, under 30’s, who by 2030 will have almost half their life in this new normal.
After the World Wars, the culture of the Western nations was still largely intact based on Judeo-Christian values, the family unit, communities, etc. This held through to the 1960s and early 1970s, until the ‘The Great Inflation’ shifted the culture into a new paradigm. (I like how each generation has to be given a ‘Great’ disaster to define a source of blame to something. ‘The Great Financial Crisis’, ‘The Great Depression’. Each one gives a generation the ‘well I lived through the Great xyz, and so…’ anchor in life).
Resetting to the 1970s
“Inflation is a policy" according to Ludwig von Mises, not some sort of biproduct of policy. Governments always blame inflation on some outside source so that the masses will direct their frustrations away and on to some thing they cannot control. The high-inflation period after the 1960s saw most of the Western nations pushed in to a culture of debt and energy (oil) dependency, just before the Third Industrial Revolution was to take place.
By their own description: “While economists debate the relative importance of the factors that motivated and perpetuated inflation for more than a decade, there is little debate about its source. The origins of the ‘The Great Inflation’ were policies that allowed for an excessive growth in the supply of money—Federal Reserve policies”. At least they didn’t overtly blame some boogie-man like today.
The narrative was dominated by the “Phillips Curve”, that the government was dutifully trying to balance unemployment against inflation. Federal Reserve historians have provided a brief excuse that the abandoning of the Bretton-Woods system post WWII was partly to blame. With Bretton-Woods, the WWII ‘winner’ nations and others agreed to a fixed exchange rate fixed to the USD, with the USD backed by gold. As inflation and US debt started going higher late 1960s, foreign governments began converting their dollars to gold as a sign of distrust, until Nixon halted this for foreign central banks, essentially permanently removing the US from the gold standard. The narrative continued that, with the abandonment of the gold standard, most of the world’s currencies were ‘unanchored’. To me, this was a way to start the entire Western debt-based economy, with the US strong-arming all oil-producing nations to use the USD for transactions – the ‘petrodollar’. The following decade, 1973 to 1983, saw record spikes in inflation and oil prices.
If we use the same 1980’s method for calculation (as ‘Shadowstats’ does), then now in 2022, we are already at the 15% peak seen similarly in the 1973-1974 and in the 1981/1982 peaks.
Aside from ‘never seen in our generation’ inflation of 10 to 15%, other 1973/1983 and 2020/2030 parallels are seen:
The narrative that our money system was in crisis, ‘what can we do?’ In the 1970s, the major shift in monetary supply was removing gold standard, shifting the population to dependency on the debt-system of the petrodollar (energy and debt, one in the same). In the 2020s, printing trillions to ‘save us from COVID’, shifting the population to dependency on the CBDC and (possibly) UBI (note again the prediction that (digital) money ‘printing’ will continue rising rapidly after 2030).
In the 1970s, multiple oil embargos, as Arab nations, seeing the USD devalued after leaving the gold standard, demanded higher real prices and created energy shocks via embargos. In 2022, Russia – oil already inflated before this, but sanctions supposedly meant to punish Russia accelerated domestic prices. Joe Sixpack is told to hate Putin as the cause. In the 1970’s Westerners flocked to tiny little Japanese import cars with 4-cylinder engines to ‘do their part’ and conserve. In the 2020’s Tesla virtue-signaling is through the roof.
In the 1970s, double recessions, 1973 and 1981, talk of ‘stagflation’. In the 2020’s, talk of a ‘full blown crisis which is even more disorderly’. (NY Times April 24 ‘Full Blown Crisis’). I still predict we have yet to see both a major market crash (real estate and stock) before 2024, followed by a second, even larger collapse after 2025, which will have the masses begging for the CBDC solution.
Mortality in the 1970s was approximately at a rate of 1.1%. The UN prediction is to return to these levels (a 30% increase from the low of 0.8%) by the mid-century.
In the 1970s, the World Economic Forum was founded, and in the 2020s, they overtly showed us they pretty much run the show.
By the time the 1970s were over, Western nations were on the path to a debt-based culture, borrowing forever (like their governments), and piling debt into the future. The religion of consumption and affluence rose as the real religions of spirituality, family, and community fell. The discipline of the self, autonomy derived from hard work, ritual, and sacrifice (going without – delayed gratification), were easily-replace with quick satisfaction, empty consumption, and shallow materialism.
Dependency on oil and energy had now created an entire Western economy and way of living that saw (or helped) the price of oil go from a steady, sub- $2 range, to quadrupling in 1973, then tripling in 1980, then spent the next decade or so at $20 per barrel.
The 1970s also saw the opening and support of China via Kissinger, Nixon, and Brzezinski (“He envisioned the emergence of a globalized society in which cultural values, knowledge, and economic interdependence would be tightly interlinked”) The decades that followed saw the West grow rich through the debt-based petrodollar system of consumption while they gave away all their manufacturing middle class jobs. Starting in the 1980s, the West began its rapid transfer of middle-class-generating manufacturing to Asia, enabling Deng_Xiaoping to insert ‘Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics’ to raise their peasantry to just above the poverty line. That peasantry in 2017 was then subjected to the ‘health pass’ via QR code system for mobility and financial control.
The 1970s ‘reset’ shifted Western societies further away from self-dependency based on community, religion, and family, on to the path of consumerism, materialism, and debt. Many in the 1980s and later would highlight how damaging this was for society and humans, but the majority embraced the new ‘religion’ of affluence. I feel the 2020-2030 ‘reset’ is similar – way worse of course, but similar. Way worse due to the likelihood that we may all be on a regiment of perpetual vaccine subscription updates. This reset is to remove, as much as possible, the remaining human aspects that drove us in the past. Again, controlling our consumption, behavior, and movement for our own good.
One last parallel to the 1970s and this ‘great reset’ (there are many more not listed here). After each major upheaval of society (again, Western societies specifically), some small percentage of people feel an emptiness or that something is wrong or missing. Throughout the 1900’s, these shifts have caused varying degrees of ‘Back to the Land’ resurgences. These occur after major changes to humanity, such as after the two world wars, where some small percentage of people recognize the emptiness of modern life and seek to go back to basics of life. The back to the land movement of the 1970s was one of the most significant in size (proportion of youth at that time).
“…many people had recognized that, leaving their city or suburban lives, they completely lacked any familiarity with such basics of life as food sources..” “…the movement could also have been fueled by the negatives of modern life: rampant consumerism, the failings of government and society, including the Vietnam War, and a perceived general urban deterioration.”
People at this time were just in the beginning stages of consumerism and debt as their new religion. Entire generations for the past 50 years have lived under the petrodollar society of debt accumulation for happiness, made worse decade by decade by advertising, television, and then by the internet and finally social media. By the 1980’s many social analysts recognized the effects of this modern way of life. For example, Neil Postman’s “Amusing Ourselves to Death” highlighted in the 1980s how television was degrading culture:
“Postman introduces his basic ‘hook" right away – dystopia and cultural degradation can come either through state tyranny, or through more insidious means that the public does not even identify. He suggests that television works according to this second model, and that our public is losing its autonomy, maturity and history without even realizing it.’
That was one analysis just based on television, and now with the internet and even moreso with social media, via two-way algorithms, the degradation and control is even further honed.
Each major industrial revolution shifts societies and moves them on to a new way of life without their say. The first one moved societies out of their agrarian, rural lifestyles into the cities and factories. The second revolution moved societies on to lives based on electricity, mobility, and factory life. The third revolution brought in digitization and automation with computers and the internet. I assume the third revolution ended with the perfection of social media and mass-uptake of platforms such as facebook, twitter, etc.
The Fourth Industrial Revolution promises even more ‘great’ advances for humanity based on technology. The World Economic Forum’s own description states “These advances are merging the physical, digital and biological worlds in ways that create both huge promise and potential peril. The speed, breadth and depth of this revolution is forcing us to rethink how countries develop, how organisations create value and even what it means to be human.” In other words, they are going to merge humanity and technology and they are the ones to make sure it’s done in a ‘safe’ way. We are not asked if we want this fourth revolution, but as with other ones, they build the system around you, get you hooked on it for its conveniences (read: laziness), then you cannot live without it. Think of each generation: “what did we do before electricity?”, “how did we live before the computer?”, “what was life like without social media?”. And in another decade, “how did people live before 2020?”
(Keep in mind that platforms such as facebook started out as government programs post-9/11 for human surveillance. The two programs ‘TIA – Total Information Awareness’, and ‘LifeLog’ were DARPA and CIA programs for tracking citizens, and were only ‘shut down’ after public outcry mainly from the ACLU. They were simply re-branded ‘facebook’ at it’s launch time, where the masses gladly gave up all privacy for the convenience).
I’m not saying everyone should drop their lives and return to the land and reject all modern conveniences and technologies. But at least recognize with each major cultural reset, we are and have been trading away our autonomy of body, mind, and spirit for a little bit of convenience, fun, and laziness. You know you see it all around, dumbed down schools, less competitive sports, lack of focus, lack of spirituality, ever-increasing ‘bullshit jobs’ lacking real meaning, increased anxiety, increased obesity, young kids on pharmaceuticals, etc. We are only offered quick-fixes to numb the pain – a drug to snap oneself back to ‘normal’. How many times over the past 20 years have you gone to a restaurant, and seen adults both with their heads down in their phones? Humans are the only animals that desire to eat meals in front of each other while making eye contact, and it’s no coincidence that each and every modern change they throw at us ends up killing aspects of humanity such as this example.
I wonder what percentage of people will reject this next reset, and, it doesn’t need rejecting so much for us (the adults), but as an example for our kids’ and their future. Many of them already see and believe that having your entire life online is more important than real life (don’t they call that “IRL” now?) Aspects of the fourth industrial revolution are openly-stated as ‘transhuman’ – merging of biology and technology. As Whitney Webb points out, why, again, are former and current Google and Facebook leaders, and government groups such as DARPA, involved with these programs, together with groups working on mRNA gene-editing technologies and the World Economic Forum? What are they building for our kids to live in?
Great article!