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Earth, 1946: World War II is over and the Cold War looms. The result, at least for the victorious industrialized nations, is a combination of euphoria with an undercurrent of growing existential dread. And yet, in the long run these seemingly-conflicting emotions lead to the same end, economically: spend freely.

The key to this paradox is the nature of the new threat, largely unprecedented in human history: nuclear annihilation. Humanity lives under imminent threat of destruction, as often before, except now destruction is for practical purposes likely to be over in an instant. As Albert Camus wrote, in The Fall:

I could better understand that friend who had made up his mind to stop smoking and through sheer will power had succeeded. One morning he opened the paper, read that the first H-Bomb had been exploded, learned about its wonderful effects, and hastened to a tobacco shop.

What point worrying about the future, in other words?

In the past, great dangers acted as a motivation to be cautious, to save up, to hoard wealth, in order to last out a potentially-lengthy but still temporary disruption. The cause for concern was, in many ways, not the possibility of death but the possibility of survival.

Growing nuclear arsenals and Mutually Assured Destruction made all of this obsolete. For nearly a half-century, in boom or bust there was always a subtle but persistent motivation to spend it now, do whatever-it-is now, go wherever, now… because the worst case scenario, if it came to pass, would actually eliminate one’s problems rather than add to them.

Moreover, this motivation fit within a larger narrative that was simple, and consistent, for decades. Us and them, advantage gained or advantage lost, just two variables with everything else amounting to expendable details.

And in that sense, although the end of the Cold War caused the threat of instant and total annihilation to fade away, at least from general awareness, it did not directly alter the familiar Cold War narrative. That concept of the world still seemed valid: one side had won the struggle, and against all odds nearly everyone had survived, but we were all still living in the old narrative, in an ongoing “happy ending.” Wherein everyone would get along and enjoy peace and prosperity. It was as if we had all made it to heaven, and without even dying.

We had reached “the end of history,” and so there was still no reason to worry about holding anything back for the future; even if the old reasoning had been reversed 180 degrees, the outcome remained consistent.

This bought the spend-freely instinct about ten years, give or take. The golden, “victory lap” decade of the 1990s.

With the arrival of a new millennium, however, people were probably in some way mentally primed for change to the Cold War narrative and its reassuring epilogue. Not necessarily longing for change, or having any idea what it would be like, but somehow expectant that change must be in store.

Obviously, expectations were not disappointed.

Earth, now: In ten years a worldview that, for all its menace and ugliness had at least been simple and consistent for generations, has been demolished almost completely. Like a ball rolling down a long but just-barely-visible incline, the sense that there is no more predictability began slowly, but has continued to accelerate, without let-up. Terrorism, recession, military quagmires. A multipolar world. The perpetual upheavals of a 24/7 networked populace. Enron. Growing mainstream acceptance of homosexuality. White-collar offshoring and a black president.

In context, the mortgage meltdown and Great Recession have been little more than a flourish at the bottom of a very long document. For all of the proximate causes which can and should be identified for both the crisis and the slow-to-nonexistent recovery, they cannot be fully appreciated separately from the facts that the world has changed, is continually changing, dramatically, and this change has prompted and includes the return of a general sense of uncertainty and fear of the future not seen for more than half a century, if ever.

From nearly any perspective one will identify some upheavals of the past decade which were desirable. Yet one will also inevitably identify many more which have been disastrous, as well as a frustration that the beneficial seems inseparable from the purely destructive. Moreover the future seems, for all but the most dogmatic techno-utopians, likely to continue an unceasing barrage of turmoil which we, as both individuals and societies, are obviously failing to adequately manage.

The threat of the Cold War was that there would be no next generation. The threat of the 21st century seems to be that the next generation will be worse off—and that we may already be that next generation. Whether one sees a threat in climate change, “peak oil,” an omnipresent surveillance state, post-imperial decline; it doesn’t really matter.

Even if one is on balance an optimist, the overall change of the past 20 years is still undeniable because the shape of the threats, however likely or unlikely individuals may consider those threats, has changed entirely. The dangers of today do not threaten to destroy us, or at any rate to destroy us instantly, but instead threaten long, drawn-out suffering for which there is no reliable or reassuring solution, and we are not “in it together” with anyone outside of increasingly small and fragmented “tribes.”

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All just a bunch of bullshit psychobabble from an embittered misfit crank? Very possibly, very possibly, though I have to wonder whether the people at the Treasury, let alone the Wall Street Journal or cable news shows, really have a much better grasp of things.

In any event, if businesses and consumers are reluctant to spend freely because of uncertainty, I submit that neither a simplified tax code nor a new government, no matter how unambitious its agenda, is going to really restore the feeling that “things are back on track” any time soon.

People always think that if they win, then that’s the end, and everything will be okay from then on. But everything changes. And tomorrow the thing you were fighting for will just be a memory. Like everything else, it’s already happened. (Liquefaction, “Emerge.”)