Astral Codex Ten

1950s

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1950s

Article

1950s is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between February 24, 2021 and December 07, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as “class structure Fussell points to … hyperconformist monoculture typically associated with the 1950s”; “the US in the 1950s”; “The 1950s gave us moon missions, the interstate highway system”. It most often appears alongside Twitter, 1700s, 1950s American consensus.

Metadata

  • Category: Concepts
  • Mention count: 3
  • Issue count: 3
  • First seen: February 24, 2021
  • Last seen: December 07, 2023

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Book Review: Fussell On Class
February 24, 2021 · Original source
Maybe my negative reaction comes from being a 2020er reading a 1983 book. Here's my theory: the class structure Fussell points to and lambasts is that of the hyperconformist monoculture typically associated with the 1950s. By the 1980s, that monoculture was starting to fray. Its enemy was the counterculture, the people Fussell describes as Class X. The counterculture were the only people with remotely modern norms. Compared to the hyperconformist society Fussell talks about, they really were as superior as he thinks they were.
Theses On The Current Moment
May 12, 2021 · Original source
If we zoom out a little, we find that most of human history involved enforced ideological conformity, censorship, and repression. Maybe the most available reference point for this sort of thing is the US in the 1950s. There were certain ideas everyone knew were off limits - atheism, communism, marijuana legalization, gay rights. If you supported those things, you might not go to jail, but you'd be excluded from most good careers and most of polite society. This system was very stable - everyone knew the limits, and people generally didn't push against them unless they really wanted to and knew what they were getting into.
This isn't to say the 1950s US was good! I think atheism, marijuana legalization, and gay rights were correct! It was an ethical disaster that their progress was held back for decades, and immensely unjust that the few people who spoke out for them got punished! My point is that the 1950s cultural regime was good at censoring things quietly and through general social pressure, with a minimum of Red Guards breaking people's kneecaps. This is good, insofar as getting your kneecaps broken sounds painful, but bad insofar as the repression was so subtle that it was hard to convince anyone that anything was wrong.
Instead of thinking of ourselves in the middle of a new Salem Witch Hunt, we should think of ourselves as just coming out of a rare period of unusually high freedom of thought - a weird 1990s moment that gave us South Park, the phrase "if you don't like it then don't watch it", and most of the early Internet. That period wasn't part of an inexorable trend toward rising freedom, it was a weird anomaly that has to be actively defended lest we sink back into the normal regime that typified the 1950s and pretty much every other time period ever.
What Ever Happened To Neoreaction?
December 07, 2023 · Original source
Progress Studies: Part of the appeal of neoreaction was that the past seemed better at a lot of practical and important things than the present. The 1950s gave us moon missions, the interstate highway system, cheap housing, amazing public infrastructure, and ambitious government programs to end poverty. Nowadays NASA struggles to launch anything without help from SpaceX, the government is too gridlocked for Congress to pass even small tweaks, and the tiniest amount of new infrastructure costs billions and suffers decades-long delays.