The personal trauma is not much talked about, actually
The height of modernism was 1850–1950. It was characterized by a naive optimism in regard to technological and social progress. The times now are post-modern and the optimism is gone.
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2021/09/michels-oligarchy-spd-social-democracy-parties
The days when what Frankfurt School disciple Otto Kirchheimer called “mass-class” parties galvanized millions with bold visions of a better future are long past. The powerful sense of community once attached to party politics has given way to a sterile ritual, its mass organizations reduced to patronage networks and social clubs for a dwindling cohort of true believers. In the 1960s, Kirchheimer watched with apprehension as the mass-class parties of the early twentieth century gave way to “catchall” parties whose only mission was to maximize votes by any means necessary. While the old parties’ ties to coherent social milieus and competing worldviews had ensured a degree of democratic accountability, in the postwar welfare states they threatened to become little more than ideologically malleable “consensus purveyors.” Rather than empower the masses, political agency would be reduced to the isolated act of casting a ballot every few years for campaign machines with little to offer in the way of concrete alternatives. Fifty years on, mainstream parties are more indistinguishable than ever. In democracies both old and new, they are overwhelmingly the domain of political operators who regard the involvement of “the masses” as a nuisance to be avoided. Party membership has dropped precipitously, while voter turnout is reaching all-time lows in many parts of the world. The Left, whose political strength rested on mass-class parties for decades, has been particularly hard hit by their decline, creating a deepening “crisis of representation” in which public disillusionment proliferates.
Ambient now are forebodings of collapse, ecocide, dystopia.
My generation got caught right in the middle of the transition from optimism to pessimism. It was traumatic. Most people I knew spent time in either rehab or a mental hospital at some point during the sixties or during the seventies. It’s not much talked about, sometimes hardly even remembered.
“The Big Chill captures a generation’s growing ennui.”
“Its characters have all the right clothes, expressions, fears, lusts, and ambitions. But there’s no payoff and it doesn’t lead anywhere. I thought at first that was a weakness of the movie. There also is the possibility that it’s the movie’s message.”
That’s right. Nowhere to go. At least, not in concordance with the old directions.
