02-04-2023, 08:49 PM
As society underwent radical transformation in the last few decades, there are many social archetypes that used to be quite common but are now vanishingly rare. I will attempt to document few of them in this thread. Note that the ones I'm talking about are in America since that's where I was born and grew up in, but anyone in any country is free to participate.
The Small Town Engineers
These are white men who grew up in a rural area and thus got acquainted with heavy tools and practical skills at a young age, due to this talent they often managed to get into a high level engineering university (Stanford, MIT, Caltech) and become ridiculously good at engineering the moment they learn calculus. Oftentimes they either joined defense companies out of patriotism and good money or they went back home to their towns and became pillars of their communities. A good chunk of them are still around and are the "whites who keep the lights on", but they are definitely a dying breed.
Politically they generally lean libertarian or conservative with a few odd views sprinkled in, perhaps best exemplified by Robert Heinlein.
As the name implies, they are commonly found in aerospace engineering, mechanical engineering, physics or any other very visuo-spatial intelligence oriented STEM field.
I suspect the main causes of their decline are:
a)the crackdown on meritocracy in the university system
b)deindustrialization
c)lack of repairability in modern tools/equipment
d)general depopulation of the American hinterland due to b and c
American Vagabonds
Probably best exemplified in Keruoac's "On the Road", this was a class of hitchhikers and wanderers that were common from the 60s to the 70s. They are similar but distinct from hippies in the sense that while they were also "social rebels" they were generally apolitical outside a dislike of "the man" and other basic social norms. Furthermore, many actually originated from the working class, unlike hippies who were primarily upper middle class students. As I believe Chud pointed out, their existence essentially relied on parasitizing the high trust American society of the 50s, so when they got too successful and social trust collapsed they no longer became a viable path. However I would like to posit a few other factors that led to their decline:
a)Digitization of records/formalization of HR and employment contracts making it more difficult to wander from job to job
b)Higher costs of living making it difficult to find cheap apartments on short term leases
c)Bureaucratization of society making "sweet talking" a less viable strategy in general
d)Drugs becoming far more fatal, brain-rotting and common, making it far harder to keep one's marbles while carrying out the lifestyle
American cultists/New Agers
Similar to American Vagabonds, this archetype was hugely common in the 60s and 70s. They often tended to be upper middle class, naive students who were taken in by cult leaders who were often tangentially related to hippies or civil rights. Due to the very heterogenus nature of these cults it's somewhat hard to specify more than that, but many had millenarian tendencies, dabbled in psychedelics and were part of the "social rebellion" of the 60s.
I think Peter Thiel in Zero to One actually gives a fairly interesting reason for their decline:
"Forty years ago, people were more open to the idea that not all knowledge was widely known. From the Communist Party to the Hare Krishnas, large numbers of people thought they could join some enlightened vanguard that would show them the Way. Very few people take unorthodox ideas seriously today, and the mainstream sees that as a sign of progress. We can be glad that there are fewer crazy cults now, yet that gain has come at great cost: we have given up our sense of wonder at secrets left to be discovered"
I think this archetype might make a comeback as culture grows more fragmented past the "normality" of the 80s-00s and the internet becomes more individual influencer personality based (think tiktok) rather than anonymous based.
The Small Town Engineers
These are white men who grew up in a rural area and thus got acquainted with heavy tools and practical skills at a young age, due to this talent they often managed to get into a high level engineering university (Stanford, MIT, Caltech) and become ridiculously good at engineering the moment they learn calculus. Oftentimes they either joined defense companies out of patriotism and good money or they went back home to their towns and became pillars of their communities. A good chunk of them are still around and are the "whites who keep the lights on", but they are definitely a dying breed.
Politically they generally lean libertarian or conservative with a few odd views sprinkled in, perhaps best exemplified by Robert Heinlein.
As the name implies, they are commonly found in aerospace engineering, mechanical engineering, physics or any other very visuo-spatial intelligence oriented STEM field.
I suspect the main causes of their decline are:
a)the crackdown on meritocracy in the university system
b)deindustrialization
c)lack of repairability in modern tools/equipment
d)general depopulation of the American hinterland due to b and c
American Vagabonds
Probably best exemplified in Keruoac's "On the Road", this was a class of hitchhikers and wanderers that were common from the 60s to the 70s. They are similar but distinct from hippies in the sense that while they were also "social rebels" they were generally apolitical outside a dislike of "the man" and other basic social norms. Furthermore, many actually originated from the working class, unlike hippies who were primarily upper middle class students. As I believe Chud pointed out, their existence essentially relied on parasitizing the high trust American society of the 50s, so when they got too successful and social trust collapsed they no longer became a viable path. However I would like to posit a few other factors that led to their decline:
a)Digitization of records/formalization of HR and employment contracts making it more difficult to wander from job to job
b)Higher costs of living making it difficult to find cheap apartments on short term leases
c)Bureaucratization of society making "sweet talking" a less viable strategy in general
d)Drugs becoming far more fatal, brain-rotting and common, making it far harder to keep one's marbles while carrying out the lifestyle
American cultists/New Agers
Similar to American Vagabonds, this archetype was hugely common in the 60s and 70s. They often tended to be upper middle class, naive students who were taken in by cult leaders who were often tangentially related to hippies or civil rights. Due to the very heterogenus nature of these cults it's somewhat hard to specify more than that, but many had millenarian tendencies, dabbled in psychedelics and were part of the "social rebellion" of the 60s.
I think Peter Thiel in Zero to One actually gives a fairly interesting reason for their decline:
"Forty years ago, people were more open to the idea that not all knowledge was widely known. From the Communist Party to the Hare Krishnas, large numbers of people thought they could join some enlightened vanguard that would show them the Way. Very few people take unorthodox ideas seriously today, and the mainstream sees that as a sign of progress. We can be glad that there are fewer crazy cults now, yet that gain has come at great cost: we have given up our sense of wonder at secrets left to be discovered"
I think this archetype might make a comeback as culture grows more fragmented past the "normality" of the 80s-00s and the internet becomes more individual influencer personality based (think tiktok) rather than anonymous based.