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2015: The War on Our Intuition That Something Is Fundamentally Amiss

January 9, 2015

2015: The War on Our Intuition That Something Is Fundamentally Amiss

In 1967, the rock group Buffalo Springfield recorded a song titled For What It’s Worthwhich speaks not just to the late 1960s but to the present.

Consider the opening lines:

There’s something happening here
What it is ain’t exactly clear

The ambiguity is not coincidental.When the song was recorded in December 1966, America was in the beginning throes of a full-blown national nervous breakdown that would endure for 15 years until 1981.

The fundamental narratives that had sustained the previous 20 years of apparently limitless prosperity and moral certitude were breaking down.The primary narrative of American foreign policy–that the U.S. defended liberty and always won its foreign wars over evil totalitarianism/ fascism/ colonialism was being destroyed on a daily basis in Vietnam, an intrinsically political (and thus unwinnable by military means) war defending a hopelessly corrupt state created by quasi-colonial Great Powers fiat.

The primary political narrative–that democracy and the rule of law were sacrosanct–were undermined by the Watergate affair a few years later.

 

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