Readers of science fiction will know the topic -- for the rest of you, Robert A. Heinlein was the dean of SF writers, and in the 1940s he plotted out what he called his "Future History." In that future history timeline was a section Heinlein identified as "the Crazy Years." He characterized it as "a gradual deterioration of mores, orientation and social institutions, terminating in mass psychoses in the sixth decade." This is what he wrote about it in his 1987 novel To Sail Beyond the Sunset:
So many casual killings in public streets and public parks and public transports that most lawful citizens avoided going out after dark…
Public school teachers and state university professors who taught that patriotism was an obsolete concept, that marriage was an obsolete concept, that sin was an obsolete concept, that politeness was an obsolete concept – that the United States itself was an obsolete concept…
Cocaine and heroin called “recreational drugs”, felony theft called “joyriding” … felonious assault by gangs called “muggings”, and the reaction to all these crimes was “boys will be boys”, so scold them and put them on probation but don’t ruin their lives by treating them as criminals…
Millions of women who found it more rewarding to have babies out of wedlock than it would be to get married or to go to work…
Is there anything about that doesn't apply to right now? Anyone who has read Heinlein's work knows that we are living in his Crazy Years. It is my belief that we are in his "sixth decade" -- and if you place the start of the Crazy Years at the end of the 1960s, then the sixth decade is the 2020s.
Heinlein's Crazy Years ends with the theocratic dictatorship of the Reverend Nehemiah Scudder. I suspect that a strongly enforced return to strict Christian moral principles is about the only way we can get out of the Crazy Years. Or it may be that we will be subjected to strict Muslim principles. The other ways involve annihilation.
Readers of science fiction will know the topic -- for the rest of you, Robert A. Heinlein was the dean of SF writers, and in the 1940s he plotted out what he called his "Future History." In that future history timeline was a section Heinlein identified as "the Crazy Years." He characterized it as "a gradual deterioration of mores, orientation and social institutions, terminating in mass psychoses in the sixth decade." This is what he wrote about it in his 1987 novel *To Sail Beyond the Sunset*:
>So many casual killings in public streets and public parks and public transports that most lawful citizens avoided going out after dark…
>Public school teachers and state university professors who taught that patriotism was an obsolete concept, that marriage was an obsolete concept, that sin was an obsolete concept, that politeness was an obsolete concept – that the United States itself was an obsolete concept…
>Cocaine and heroin called “recreational drugs”, felony theft called “joyriding” … felonious assault by gangs called “muggings”, and the reaction to all these crimes was “boys will be boys”, so scold them and put them on probation but don’t ruin their lives by treating them as criminals…
>Millions of women who found it more rewarding to have babies out of wedlock than it would be to get married or to go to work…
Is there anything about that doesn't apply to right now? Anyone who has read Heinlein's work knows that we are living in his Crazy Years. It is my belief that we are in his "sixth decade" -- and if you place the start of the Crazy Years at the end of the 1960s, then the sixth decade is the 2020s.
Heinlein's Crazy Years ends with the theocratic dictatorship of the Reverend Nehemiah Scudder. I suspect that a strongly enforced return to strict Christian moral principles is about the only way we can get out of the Crazy Years. Or it may be that we will be subjected to strict Muslim principles. The other ways involve annihilation.
(post is archived)