41–45 of 45 posts
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It's what they've always done. > Mastery of 1 set of texts > Dogmatic adherence to a single school > Promotion of those who regurgitate the above the best It's yet to work for more than a few hundred years.
Has any power managed to rule for more than a few hundred years?
They briefly mention literature and I think that provides a good counterexample. Books are highly individual, and always have been long before streaming existing. Yet, there still manage to be runaway hits that everyone reads and talks about. The same could be true of streaming shows. Stranger Things managed it in the streaming era.
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Especially if you include the Eastern Roman Empire which fell in 1453.
That's a bit of a broad generalization. As with all history it doesn't hold up under scrutiny. In the 1200s, the empire split into 3 warring countries. The one that took Constantinople was considered the continuation of the Byzantine empire, but maybe it's more correct to think of it as a spiritual successor, than an actual unbroken reign of a single nation. Which would put it at less than 1000 years of rule. So "a f…
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You can see China trying to create a hegemonic Han monoculture: that's what the suppression of Tibet and Uighurs is directed towards.
I really don’t know much about it, but I think the Han identity is similar to whiteness in the US, right? A coalition of groups that not that long ago would not have considered themselves the “same.” The Chinese govt seems to consider constructing a unified Chinese identity pretty important, maybe anticipating that once they start failing to make the standard of living gains they’ve made over the past decades ethnic…
Sometimes, call a kettle a kettle.
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One could say that Stranger Things piggy-backed on a feeling of nostalgia for the shared monoculture of the '80s
The 80s is an interesting funnel for shared monoculture. Modern enough to be relatable today, distant enough to serve as a canvas to project all sorts of personal bias onto. Personally I love the 80s lore and I think I loved the 80s as it happened as much as anyone can love something while still being inside it. It was just so palpably on the verge of so many things, the Cold War ending, (violently or peacefully, it…
Can you imagine Disney producing Animaniacs?