Comment by RcouF1uZ4gsC
5 years ago
Also world events. WWI, The Great Depression, WWII, the Holocaust, the Atomic Bomb, and then the following Cold War where everyone lived in fear of nuclear annihilation dashed the dream the human intellect would inevitably lead to a utopia.
Maybe. On the other hand, that period saw incredible technological and societal progress. Thiel called it the period of "definite [technological] optimism." https://archive.org/details/ZeroToOneByPeterThiel/page/n47
And that period up to at least the 70s was highly productive in fields such as cybernetics and organisational psychology. Some of that way ahead of its time culturally, and some genius-level deep thinking behind it. The best of that work (Stafford Beer’s Viable System Model stands out for me) seems to represent some kind of golden age, work that would be hard to do today I suspect.