30: Ross Douthat - The Rave Before the Fall: Difference between revisions

So, hopefully, that catches you up to where we are at least procedurally. We will be sure to let you know if there are any changes if you will kindly navigate to our new website at ericweinstein.org and leave us your email address for our mailing list so that we can keep connected to you in the weeks ahead.

As to what is on my mind, it is mostly this: The Awakening. On Joe's show, I talked about the end of what I termed “The Big Nap”—which I defined as the period beginning on September 2, 1945, and ending 75 years later on February 19, 2020—which signaled the end of World War II and the beginning of the slide from the peak of the stock market when the world began to accept that the Coronavirus was indeed a serious pandemic, respectively. The Big Nap, in this theory, is itself divided into three sections. First, the “power sleep” between 1945 and 1970, when economic growth was extraordinary, and the memory of World War II was still fresh. This was followed by the “mysterious transition” (for three years between 1971 and 1973, when the post-war magic suddenly evaporated) and the “deep sleep” (from 1974 up until the present day in 2020 at the time of this recording, characterized by what I've termed elsewhere, the “new gimmick economy” in which leaders at first look to restart growth but, sometime in the 1980s, actually gave up and began selling claims against the future so that a small leadership class could continue to pretend the growth was indeed continuing by transferring wealth from their descendants futures, and from workers who could not politically protect themselves from predation. The Big Nap—at least in the developed free world—was essentially characterized as a run of extraordinary relative good luck and serenity (at least by the historical standards set by previous world wars, pandemics, depressions and depressions), where the new gathering storm clouds of the Cold War threatened and menaced in the distance, but the skies directly above remained unprecedentedly clear. This created a bizarre developmental environment where the serenity of the Big Nap led to a worldwide epidemic of magical thinking among the expert and leadership classes that were raised during this time.