Comment by refurb | Hacker News Reader

Comment by refurb | Hacker News Reader

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I always find it interesting when people think we're living in unique times. I don't know if it's just the human tendency to view the past with rose colored glasses or an opinion of younger folks who weren't around when things got crazy in the past.

The US has been through periods like (and much worse) in the last 60 years:

- 60's race riots across most major cities that resulted in the deaths of hundreds & Vietnam War where every opinion article lamented about "America's global leadership is over"

- Watergate where a sitting president was forced from office due to truly breathtaking corruption and law breaking

- The 80's when Japan was on the rise and people talked about the US falling behind and no longer being a major economic player (I remember people smashing Japan electronics on the Whitehouse lawn)

- Gulf War, LA Riots, Clinton scandals, pre-9/11 terror attacks in the 90's

- In the 2000's, 9/11, the financial crisis (aka "The End of Capitalism")

It's always been like this.

Welcome to the consequences of a world where history education has been underemphasized in favor of technology and ‘practicality.’ The world is always ending, the future is always impossible to predict, and everything is original, cutting-edge and new. Except...it isn’t. It’s all happened before, but we didn’t bother reading those books.

America will be fine.

What makes you think you live in an exceptional time of historical ignorance?

Too many things to list in a single comment, but I'll just sum them up in one sentence:

The widespread idea that somehow Modernity is a new, tabula rasa (blank slate) epoch in which the old rules and realities don't apply anymore.

That’s actually a really good summary.

“This time it’s different” comes up again and again (tech bubble, housing bubble) and it turns out, no, it’s not different.

The latest is MMT, in which people say “you can print as much money as you want without fears of inflation because this time it’s different”. And maybe it is? But there is a good chance that, no, it’s not different this time.

Or thinking that this time, a constantly growing wealth gap between the rich and the poor won't lead to a revolution if major reformation doesn't happen first.

Also, pretty sure MMT knows that printing money leads to inflation. Thats why the theory has taxes to remove money as well, if you want to tax someone other then those who hold capital evenly (which is inflation).

Sorry but I don't see that as new. Just off of the top of my head the Age of Aquarius new age nonsense, the belief that war would end with World War 1, and fascists believing that democracy was obsoleted with industrialization, heck even the French Revolution and the Enlightenment had similiar lines of thought. There have long been beliefs along those lines about how this time is different.

You could argue that it means that we aren't sufficently historically literate but I don't see how it stands out as worse given ample precedent.

"It’s all happened before" doesn't imply "will be fine". For instance, the Civil War happened but I wouldn't call that being fine. And survivorship bias being what it is, just because the country survived certain major crises in the past doesn't mean it will survive them in the future.

The comparisons to the Civil War make no sense and just illustrate my point that historical education is deeply lacking. As someone else already pointed out, the issues today are still nothing compared to the 60s.

Current domestic issues have nothing to do with the Civil War. There is no state-like military complex ready to secede. There is no geographic division that lends itself to secession. Etc. etc. The only reason this is invoked is because it's the only meme that most people are aware of, not because it's even remotely accurate. Even something like the 90s Balkan Wars is so far from the contemporary American situation, it's absurd to compare it.

The only thing that's truly new is the media's profit motive for creating a perception of chaos.

Of course, the fact that things have worked out in the past doesn't mean they will always work out in the future. But people who compare contemporary America to the Fall of the Roman Empire or the American Civil War really don't know much about either.

No, you are right, the situation is much more comparable to Weimar Germany, which is far far worse.

While there are parallels to Weimar Germany, again I don't think this is actually a useful comparison and it's mostly used as a fascist boogeyman. Major factors in Weimar that don't exist in America/the West today:

- Immediately after a massively destructive war that affected all levels of society

- Populace of young men with PTSD and military experience

- Little/no social safety nets

- No history of democracy - remember that prior to Weimar, Germany was governed by Prussia and basically had no democratic traditions

IMO the real actual historical comparison to use in 2020 is the Printing Press and Protestant Reformation; i.e. established power structure (the Catholic Church) dealing with new information-propagation technologies and factions. I'd bet that 2050 is going to look a lot like 1550.

You can name factors, but that doesn't mean those factors are the most critical ones, just the ones that support your narrative.

I mean, I don’t really have a narrative here. I just find the comparison to Weimar unconvincing. Modern culture, in its inability to generate new futures (see Baudrillard, Deleuze, etc.) constantly looks backwards. The popular trend now seems to be reframing the 2020s as a 1920s redux, but again, I think this is mostly lazy ignorance.

As a big history nerd, that’s what I love about digging into the details of these events. What is taught in school makes it seem very “clean” (I understand there is no time to really cover it in detail).

Take the Vietnam War for example - what’s taught in school is the Domino theory, support for a corrupt Southern government, quagmire, withdrawal and fall of the South. But, if you read through a bit of the Pentagon Papers you pretty quickly get a sense of how nuanced it was and how it wasn’t a single decision to support South Vietnam, it was a complex web of global geopolitics with messy arguments, fears, overconfidence, “fake news”, etc. And the people making those decisions were not dumb, in fact, they were pretty damn smart and considered a lot of different options and the risks that went with them. It just didn’t turn out how they thought it would.

And then it dawns on you just how much history is repeated over and over. Sure it’s a little different each time (and those small differences have a big impact), but the same types of things happen again and again.

It’s a form of recency bias. Some people need to believe that the place and time they occupy is the most significant.

Just because things worked out in the past doesn't mean they will always work out in the future.

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