[pphysch]

> fundamental phenomenon of societies

It's dangerous to assert that this is a "fundamental" behavior, because it's not always true. Certainly, in USA and the broader West there is an almost total lack of vision right now, from leaders to cultural fabric. We obsess over Nth-derivative Disney films: where is Ursula Le Guin?

Visionaries are rejected (or killed, in the 60s) for rocking the boat, innovation has been gutted by worn as a skin suit by Wall St. We are totally uncurious about our foreign peers, some of whom are outpacing us in substantial ways.

[mlyle]

> We obsess over Nth-derivative Disney films

Pop culture is pop culture and only really gets interesting in brief flashes.

> where is Ursula Le Guin?

We've got a whole lot of great speculative fiction these days, but there's no one dominant. It's a curse and benefit of the long tail.

> there is an almost total lack of vision right now

I think the big thing we're missing is some shared set of optimism and an idea of what kinds of things we should want for ourselves. We're divided; we're feeling ennui from being at a bit of a local maximum in a whole lot of ways; looming doom of various kinds (climate, geopolitical, economic) suppresses us.

> innovation has been gutted by worn as a skin suit by Wall St.

That whole financial, administrative, and managerial class has to shrink. Look, finance is a superpower and a key export of the West and it would be a mistake to gut it, but to continue to allow it to grow without bound is an equally big mistake.

[dmreedy]

Agreed! I'm testing a hypothesis here through the dialectic, not asserting one!

There are definitely visionaries and prophets and doom-seers in each society; when I talk about societal consensus I'm talking about averages.

Though I'd hesitate to agree that vision === imagination of successors. To my mind, there's a difference between improving the extant, and having a new one. Maybe you can get to the latter by way of the former over time, and that way you get into "Gentle Seduction"[0] territory. But that also kind of amounts to a lack of imagination, and a rejection of endings.

> Where is Ursula Le Guin?

Where indeed! Though I haven't given enough of the newer generations of sci fi authors a chance myself, to be fair.

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[0] http://www.skyhunter.com/marcs/GentleSeduction.html

[throwway120385]

Visionaries continue to be around, but it's so much easier to make noise that you have to really work to sift the wheat from the chaff. It's in Wall Street's best interest to have you thinking that when they stop innovating innovation is dead. But I really think this is what our culture looks like when it's becoming.

[CatWChainsaw]

The Slow Cancellation of the Future