What decade did Western Civilization peak?

[Roop Holstry]

I’d say the 90’s but I’m biased and was just a kid at the time. All fun and no responsibilities and no awareness. Ignorance is bliss

 

[Yehudim]

Depends where you were at but the 90s was a prosperous decade riding on the high of victory in the Cold War.

 

[Yehudim]

There is an element of truth to this from a material/technological standpoint.
We have it CRAZY good in terms of material prosperity, access to the widest possible array of foods, entertainment that wouldn't have even been available to kings, 4 generations ago... Things like Cancer aren't an insta-death sentence, etc...

Socially and culturally, different story.

I have central AC instead of an AC unit attached to your window, so I guess I’m better off than my father was in the metrics of “I have more and more trinkets than he did” but he was a married homeowner with 2 kids, and I am not.

I do have all this money that I can use to buy soy milk and video games, so again, I’m better off than he was.

 

[kahiljabroni]

Man dropping the truthfire in this post.
1950s is the correct answer, as is everything else said here.

The "long march" through our educational institutions took three generations to demoralize us as a people and massively reduce the threat we once posed to that order, when we were a coherent, high spirited, optimistic civilization who focused on the right things.

Now that we're all fentanyl addicted trannies who can't read or do math since we spend 13 years in primary school studying wall to wall Rosa Parks, it shouldn't come as any surprise that our civilization is crumbling, cartoonishly anti-social acts on the fringes (people shooting up small children in schools, etc). The one advantage the degenerate left has always held over the moralist right is their deep, deep, cunning understanding of human psychology and motivations and their ability to tactically manipulate a population from the vantage of that understanding.

Damn dude that was very illustrative and well said.

I agree that the 50s were America and western ideas pinnacle on the world stage.. But if we're just talking quality of life I gotta go the last 10 years. Technology, health care, and borrowing on an unimaginable scale have allowed us to live an incredibly high standard despite producing very little.

 

[kahiljabroni]

Definitely the 80's.

Music and movies were the best ever.

Economy was great. Everyone was partying and doing coke.

We destroyed the Soviet union without violence.

Women were peak hotness, and cosmetic surgery wasn't very good nor prevalent.

Bullying was part of life and you had to learn to deal with it, rather than expecting the world to change for you.

Great decade for sports too, especially basketball.

The political divide was less severe. Fewer echo chambers.

Meth was not even a big problem yet. Homelessness barely exist outside of a few big cities.

From a cultural perspective I agree

 

[kahiljabroni]

I've had this book for years, one of these days I may actually read it. What are your thoughts on it?

Book sucked ass. To summarize 500 pages...nobody really accomplished anything. Geography is everything.

 

[So Fresh]

1920s till 1970

You think a world war and cold war and genocide were peak western civ lol?

 

[So Fresh]

The lack of historical knowledge is bizarre in this thread and very telling for the lack of quality education in the US.
No, the western civ doesn’t consist of only the US. If anything the US is a fraction of the whole western civ.

pick up a fucking book or something

I don’t have direct answer for this question, because it depends on a lot of factors and should warrant some deep historical research. My guess is it would be somewhere very recent

 

[Blayt7hh]

1950's

What we have today is a hogwash of technology, degeneracy and depression

Depression was rampant in the 50s. The difference was people tended to pretend it wasn’t a thing due to the stigma of it. So we’re things like alcoholism and domestic abuse.

 

[MicroBrew]

Since we're nearing the decline, Im wondering.. Say youre a civilization 1000 years in the future looking at a graph of prosperity and peace in western civilization. Sure, at no point in time was it ever a utopia, and certain groups of people were suffering & being oppressed... But , compared to the rest of human history (Filled with war, suffering, tyranny premature death and misfortune) it was statistically the most peaceful/prosperous point in human history.

What decade would you consider to be the most prosperous/peaceful?

We are not in decline. People have been saying similar things for many generations. They (Euros) probably said the same thing when WW1 and WW2 broke out.

 

[Blayt7hh]

In the '50s, a huge portion of the population didn't even have a shower in their homes, and the median income for men was around $37K in today's dollars. Infant mortality was like 5 times higher than now. Etc. Way better time to be alive now. And as for degeneracy, note that interracial marriage was illegal in a lot of places in the '50s (and few among the public even disagreed with that), domestic violence was much more common, a large portion of the population was totally OK with forced segregation, etc. You couldn't even suggest that married couples had sex in popular entertainment. Censorship was off the charts by modern standards. I think it takes a pretty twisted view of morality to say things were better morally then, and a lot of ignorance to think we were more prosperous.

This. People remember the 50s different from what they actually were. We have this super white washed version of it that exists from videos of the time. What you see left from that era on film you can trust about as much as you can trust propaganda from the Kremlin.

There were actually massive problems in the 50s. We just don’t see it represented because people were only allowed to show this clean, super moral and overly curated image of what people and life were like. It’s not true though and a lot of people were unhappy back then.

 

[Snowblindlove]

You think a world war and cold war and genocide were peak western civ lol?

Culturally 1920s till 1970 was the best. Also the Wars and all bad that happens is Gods will anyways

 

[So Fresh]

Culturally 1920s till 1970 was the best. Also the Wars and all bad that happens is Gods will anyways

 

[Arashikage4Life]

Any time period which contains the most destructive conflict in the history of the planet should not be considered

 

[MicroBrew]

Isn't this a bit like someone saying the 80s was the best or the 90s was the best or the 70s was the best ... and coincidentally these decades just happen to be when said person was a teenager or young.

 

[Blayt7hh]

Isn't this a bit like someone saying the 80s was the best or the 90s was the best or the 70s was the best ... and coincidentally these decades just happen to be when said person was a teenager or young.

A lot of the posts in this thread are more personal grievances with culture war issues than anything else. From an American perspective, we are obviously at the highest point we have ever been. People are also blinded by recent problems like COVID and high gas prices. These kinds of things are transient issues that cause some pain in the short run but we will rebound.

 

[Denter]

170s.

 

[jk7707]

I'm just gonna take a wild guess that none of the posters answering with "the 50s" are black.

 

[The Penetrator]

mid 60s to mid 90s, if thats not too big of a timespan.

 

[Deleted member 110072]

This. People remember the 50s different from what they actually were. We have this super white washed version of it that exists from videos of the time. What you see left from that era on film you can trust about as much as you can trust propaganda from the Kremlin.

There were actually massive problems in the 50s. We just don’t see it represented because people were only allowed to show this clean, super moral and overly curated image of what people and life were like. It’s not true though and a lot of people were unhappy back then.

In terms of a great many social issues it was basically hush hush in the 50's BUT I would say on the flipside I think a lot of people tend to have a view of the economics of the era that is also very warped.

It seems like modern conservatives look back to the 50's as some golden age of capitalism but in reality it was a far more socialist era than today, strong unionisation with high blue collar wages, cheap housing via government assistance, etc. It was an era of much higher social mobility than exists today as socialism has been rolled back, now were in a situation much closer to the 1920's or before.