Thought for the day: "Who really established the idea that a society could benefit hugely just by lying to itself, or simply pretending?"

From James Kunstler's Clusterfuck Nation, "The Free and the Dead"
{Click the thumbnails for full size images):

The American victory over manifest evil in World War Two was so total that there was no one else left on earth to compete with in making and selling useful articles...
...at least for a while. And it produced a middle class so well-paid that it could express itself in a vast spewage of plastic and leisure across the land.

The human race will look back on this society with wonder and nausea for whatever remains of its time on Earth. For at least twenty years, though, this way of life has been running on fumes, inertia, and promissory notes.




The amazing thing is that these life-extension strategies worked, especially the past ten years when there was really nothing left besides a Ponzi structure of interlocked swindles and rackets.






When the time comes when we do look back to understand what went wrong, I think we'll see that the Woodstock generation went off the rails in 1980, with the election of the actor, Ronald Reagan, who really established the idea that a society could benefit hugely just by lying to itself, or simply pretending...

[In Full at Clusterfuck Nation]