[jaqalopes]

A friend and I were at the WW2 museum in New Orleans a couple years ago and he said something that really stuck with me. Amazed at an exhibit on wartime manufacturing, he turned to me and said, "This is so unbelievable to me. To think what we accomplished when everyone in the country was pulling in the same direction. There's no way that could happen anymore." I hardly want to glorify warfare, but he has a point. As a young person in our chaotic and ambiguous present day looking back into the haze of the past, there really is something incredibly romantic about the era of war mobilization. Ordinary people had a purpose simply assigned to them, and if nothing else I think it's still the case that people in all eras crave purpose.

[roenxi]

The attitude is a dangerously rose-tinted view of war, the US was operating internment camps for US citizens of Japanese descent you know. In a war, dissent is quashed. That doesn't mean that it isn't there, just that there is a high tolerance for sub-optimal decisions because there isn't time to ruminate.

The US isn't getting poor outcomes from their manufacturing sector because people are divided, but because the US has policies tending towards deindustrialisation and there is a broad political consensus to keep them. Ban the smokestacks, ban the smokestack economy and enjoy the clean air.

[rayiner]

> the US was operating internment camps for US citizens of Japanese descent you know

That is non-responsive to the point raised by OP. That had little effect on Americans unless they were the small minority of Japanese. The point OP raised is much more salient. If we end up in another World War, what lessons do you want to have from the past? “Don’t put racial minorities in internment camps” is well and good, but it won’t help you build a giant navy and win a war.

I learned con law from a social studies PhD who had little interest in the constitution, and focused the entire class on this or that minoritized or oppressed group. It’s a terrible way to learn constitutional law—or anything else—because you over-focus on the 20% of the story while missing the big picture about how the country was actually designed to work.

[divbzero]

I only learned recently that several Japanese Americans were killed in those camps.

[1]: https://www.history.com/articles/japanese-american-relocatio...

[2]: https://encyclopedia.densho.org/Homicide_in_camp/

[GuardianCaveman]

You don't think people with victory gardens, and buying warbonds, scraping together spare silk and aluminum and other metals to donate to the war effort, manufacturing of vehicles and other factories converted to output munitions and tanks and other materials is impressive?

You can be amazed at the output and the point of the article without turning this into yet another guilt post about how bad America is. What we did was wrong. But also, we stopped the nazis and the japanese and the italians. the war in the pacific killed 15-20 million chinese civilians, and I won't even go into the other theaters or the war crimes of the japanese or the axis powers (nothing to do with the internment). But maybe whatever the opposite of rose tinted glasses is the way you're viewing the wars.

And no, no amount of good by US forces justifies or absolves us of the sin of the japanese internment but maybe some credit is due at least.

[bluGill]

The us is getting great manufacturing results - but because of automation only a few people labor and so it is invisible

[khuey]

I don't know how young you are but I was around the last time the American society nearly universally agreed on what direction to pull and it led to invading two countries (one on a notorious lie), around 60,000 casualties and god only knows how many civilian casualties, and five trillion dollars spent. Be careful what you wish for.

[amanaplanacanal]

And then at the next election we re-elected the same people! It still boggles my mind.

[jonstewart]

There was a fair bit of this after 9/11–and much of the military/intelligence apparatus expanded and figured out how to disrupt terrorist organizations—but it was shortlived as the Iraq War was divisive (and rightfully so).

[0xDEAFBEAD]

Same for very early on in COVID

[beAbU]

The Apollo programme is another example of this for me. You need an existential threat, or the threat of eternal embarrassment and suddenly everyone is pulling in the same direction.

IMO most of the world's woes these days are persisting because of a lack of political will to fix them.

I sometimes feel that China is able to achieve the things it's achieving because the government's near-absolute control over the population. The political power is absolute, and it's wielded in a very very effective way. If China decides tomorrow that they want to colonize Mars, they will probably get it done within a decade.

[mrguyorama]

That same near-absolute control is what drove the 4 pests campaign and cultural revolution so... Maybe don't emulate the cult of personality part?

Too late.

[FpUser]

>"there really is something incredibly romantic about the era of war mobilization. Ordinary people had a purpose simply assigned to them, and if nothing else I think it's still the case that people in all eras crave purpose."

Sure. Food rationing, mass poverty, inability to do anything but prescribed work, mass hysteria. All things to look forward to.

[GuardianCaveman]

Yeah next time we can just sit it out and let the enemy bayonet babies and slaughter 20 million Chinese people. Ever read rape of nanking?

[cadamsdotcom]

Yep, purpose.

Societies today have immense latent potential. So many people are doing bullshit jobs that tick things over, sitting there wishing to be put to use for some intrinsically motivating purpose. An existential threat - war - is a well known way to bring that out. But war is too destructive for modern tastes.

We've seen developing countries get great results by government directing private industry in stronger ways than we're used to in the West. For example China's regularly published national development priorities for the next 5 years. If you hew to these you'll be helped in various ways. Singapore's and South Korea's rises to global powers were helped along by government getting everyone to row in the same direction - among other things, I'm greatly simplifying. But to focus on this one idea, I hope you can agree that providing purpose through top-down leadership is a great way to harness societies' latent potential and mobilize in a given direction..

Rudderless, laissez-faire governance got the US a surprisingly long way. But we are seeing the resultant directionlessness leave leaders unable to agree on whether to tear up what's been built, leave it in place, or go some completely random direction.

It's not the ships that were built, it's what they represented. That was what got them built.

[southernplaces7]

The latent authoritarianism in in opinions like yours makes it easier to understand why authoritarians keep rising to the top of different societies, so they can destroy lives, squander wealth and crush individual peoples' own perfectly productive capacities for finding their own cooperative purposes in life.

[refulgentis]

> So many people are doing bullshit jobs that tick things over, sitting there wishing to be put to use for some intrinsically motivating purpose

We're a generation of men raised by Fight Club—I'm wondering if a self-induced mass-culling event is really the answer we need.

[southernplaces7]

I don't see anything romantic about this. The mass mobilization of a society so well over 400,000 members of its youngest and brightest can die grotesquely overseas while industry, society and culture are forcefully synchronized to a single government issued purpose is not usually something to desire.

I do understand the needs of that particular war, The Nazis and Imperial Japan were truly invasive evils, big and globally dangerous enough to be worth fighting, even if it meant mass mobilization, but generally, there's no nostalgic beauty to such vast butchery, destruction and creation for the sake of destruction. I prefer finding my own purpose in life, and knowing that my children won't be ripped apart by artillery in some blood-soaked field of mud due to government decree.

[stevenwoo]

Studs Terkel's collection of interviews with various populations of the USA in The Good War is a good antidote to overromanticization of World War 2 conditions.

[zelphirkalt]

I think what the GP is relating to is that we could achieve so so sooo much more, if we didn't have all the opportunistic selfish people in our midst, who will go against any worthy goal, if it means they can enrich themselves. It is about the distribution of resources to reach goals. It would be quite easy for example to ensure, that every school meets some standards, enabling children to learn well. But there are always some lobbyists lobbying against it, and some politicians working against it, because there is no short term gain to be had for their business or for themselves. Also an educated population is maybe not what every politician wants in the first place, even though we all know, that raising the general education level would be beneficial in the long run.

Or what we could achieve in terms of renewable energy, if we all were behind the goal. There are many examples that benefit society, but anti-social forces and influences are everywhere, delaying, stopping, and sabotaging our future.

[Spooky23]

Honestly, I felt the same way during the pandemic. People moved mountains to help each other and everyone in different ways.

Of course, the poison of social media took care of that in short order. FDR cracked down hard on misuse of the airwaves and the extremists for a reason.