By Wikinana38 (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0], via Wikimedia Commons

I’ve been thinking about Influences, Styles, Trends and Oscillations.

It started when I was thinking about Nostalgia and the “death” of Disco and its subsequent morphing into “Electronic Dance Music” in the very early 80s. All fads and styles have a natural lifetime; the length varies, but at the conclusion, they are clearly recognized as “yesterday’s news”. The same is true in politics, in fashion, in social causes, you name it – so long as it can be categorized, however vaguely, as one of the humanities.

The trend or fad that follows is always, in some pivotal respect if not in multiple ways, the exact opposite; it is, perhaps, not going too far to suggest that the only way that a new trend can achieve primacy is by embracing rebellion against the outgoing fad. Music historians in Australia have coined the phrase “the fringe* becoming mainstream” to describe the phenomenon.

* by which they mean “the largely unknown and unpopular outliers relative to currently dominant styles”. Just to be clear about things.

‘waves’ courtesy freeimages.com / Paul Martlew

Yet, the trend that preceded the current one is never quite the same as the trend that will follow it, save in the most general terms. There is some underlying influence that distorts the progression in a new direction.

There are four candidates as to the identity of that underlying influence, and they take effect in strict sequence so far as I can tell; the first overrides and dominates the other three, the second only matters if there is no influence from the first, and overrides and dominates the other two, and so on (rather reminiscient of Asimov’s 3 laws of robotics, actually).

These are: Widespread Technological Adoption, External Events, Revolutionary Contamination, and Dominating Personality.

Widespread Technological Adoption

This doesn’t refer to just any technological advance. It has to be either an advance that directly affects the humanity in question, or that has a profound influence on society at large that then can have a flow-on effect on the humanity. Let’s look at music again as an example.

The twentieth century saw four dominant technological advances that had a direct effect on music: electricity, multitrack recording, synthesizers, and Pro Tools.

Electricity had two effects, both profound, but one took longer than the other. The first was making possible the recording, duplication, and playback of music, enabling a performance to be mass-distributed – the invention of the gramophone and its refinement into the turntable.

The second was amplification, especially of the guitar but eventually of drums and other instruments as well. Prior to amplification, the guitar was a rhythm instrument that was normally overwhelmed by the sound of drums and brass. Only electrification made it possible for the guitar to become a lead instrument, and rock and roll, and all the modern forms that descended from it, was the outcome. Even musical genres that existed prior to electrification, such as jazz and blues, were transformed.

Multitrack Recording, the third technological advance, made it possible to add layers of sound and mix them independently, emphasizing them at some points and burying or even eliminating them at others. This made it possible for a small group to become a huge ensemble. Amongst the first to explore the potential were the Beatles on Paperback Writer and Rain; multitrack recording arguably reached its height with Queen, whose signature sound was only possible through the exploitation of the technology to its limits.

Synthesizers started out as “tone generators”, and that’s essentially what they do. They directly led to sampling in the late twentieth century, in which a sequence of sounds was recorded and then modified and repeated electronically in different tones. As not one, but two, new instruments of incredible flexibility, they transformed what was sonicly possible. No longer was there an excuse for sounding the same, in instrumental terms, as anyone else. In the 21st century, this in turn has led to a third technology, known generally as Auto-tune.

Finally, Pro Tools turned every computer into a multitrack recorder. Every bedroom could become a recording studio, and single individuals could become entire ensembles. In addition, through digital mix-down, the number of tracks that any given performance could consist of became effectively infinite; prior to that, each time two tracks were combined to form a new hybrid track, freeing up one of the recording channels for new vocals or instrumentation, there was a sonic loss due to inherant noise and sonic blurring, and this imposed practical limitations on the technique.

Each of these technologies had a profound impact on the capabilities of musical expression. Entire genres became possible that simply did not and could not exist prior to their development. Some emerged into popularity fairly quickly and explosively; others took time to develop from prior genres, or had to wait in the underground for existing genres to vacate the stage before they could rise to prominence.

External Events & Reactions

Social movements rarely have one cause. Instead, they are the product of a confluence of many different factors, all pushing social development this way and that; if you were able to “map” these trends, you could derive a vector sum in N dimensions that would perfectly describe the resulting social movement.

Another way to think of them is as masses in orbit, while society is a spaceship traveling between them; as each mass is approached, it perceptibly changes the course of the ship, so that some masses will be avoided and have minimal impact while others now lie far closer to the trajectory of the vessel and will have a profound impact.

Let’s move beyond the abstract analogues and consider a real world example. The cold war assumed the shape it did because of the impact of outcome of World War II on Eastern Europe (including Russia), which in turn resulted from the attack on Russia by the Nazis, and the objectives of Japan, which enabled Russia to shift vast numbers of mechanized units from their Eastern provinces. That in turn would not have occurred in the way that it did had Hitler and Russia not formed the Pact Of Steel, permitting Russia to build up those forces without immediate concern for German hostility. Those factors, and a host of smaller variables, culminated in the Cold War as we know it. Another key factor, for example, were the presence of Russian spies within the Manhattan Project, smuggling technical reports and information to Moscow; without that information in his back pocket, Stalin would have adopted a very different stance in the Yalta conference, where the shape of post-War Europe was determined by the Allies. While there might still have been a cold war, it would have been a very different one in its early years.

Then, too, the Manhattan Project would have far less potency, received far less funding and resources and been given far lower priority, had Germany not declared war on the US in support of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Ironically, it has been shown through the post-war study of relevant documents that the Japanese were closer to achieving Nuclear Weapons independently of the US than the Germans were, but they gave up, considering some of the technical problems insoluble Which is why it is reasonable to suggest that the USSR would have found it difficult to become a nuclear power without the intelligence-based leg-up that they received..

What impact did the cold war have? Well, it was characterized as a struggle between freedom and repression, and that encouraged all sorts of developments in social freedom. While opposing Civil Rights was not, to my knowledge, characterized as un-American, the cause was certainly portrayed as being in keeping with American principles. Ditto Women’s Liberation. Ditto, more recently, Gay Rights (which morphed into LGBT rights).

Other forms of freedom were also encouraged – not directly, but indirectly – by the struggle. The pursuit of Self-expression manifested in Teen Rebellion, which engendered Rock’n’roll – compare the music of the late 1940s and 50s with that of the 1960s.

Of course, as explained earlier, every movement inevitably generates a counter-movement. As these various social developments gathered strength, so opposition began to mount. Social progress in any given cause is always two steps forward, one or two steps back. The “danger” of rock’n’roll engendered the “safe”, “soft” musical movement of “pop”, which in turn engendered the counter-counter-reaction of “rock”. The Rolling Stones would not have been the band they were without the Beatles, the Beatles would not have become what they were in the second half of their existence without the Beach Boys, and so on.

Revolutionary Contamination

There are times where some revolutionary social change occurs that spreads cultural ripples throughout every field, whether directly connected or not. In the 90s, the internet enabled such a social change, but that’s a complicated subject and the knock-on social effects are still playing out, making analysis difficult. A key social change in the 1920s, which will therefore be more easily analyzed briefly, was the sense of optimism that enveloped the world following the end of the First World War. The war, and the restrictions that came with it, left the country in need of celebration at its end. The direct result were the Jazz and Swing eras of musical dominance.

During the war, everyone had worked together for the common good, defined as the goal of winning the war. After the war, the expectation was that this would continue, and that any disagreements that arose would be honest ones. In particular, the expectation was that financial companies would do what was best for their clients and the public at large, and heavy-handed regulations were not necessary. Those financial companies did not honor that trust; with the upward trend of the stock market that resulted initially from the sense of euphoria post-war, they began selling shares to ordinary people, and with every transaction, the brokers made a percentage; ultimately, this persuaded them to broker deals that no reasonably cautious individual, no-one with any sense of overriding public responsibility, would countenance. At best, they drunk too deeply of the kool-aid; at worst, they put their own interests ahead of everyone else’s. But it happened little by little over a period of time, as they became corrupted by greed into ignoring the inherent social responsibilities their positions entailed.

They began issuing loans based on the expected continued growth in value of those shares (rather than their actual current value), which were then used to purchase still more shares, fueling the very growth that they had predicated the investment loan upon. This influx of invested wealth inflated the share market, artificially expanding and extending the boom – and rendering it perpetually more fragile. People had mortgaged their homes to buy shares, businesses had invested their operating capital and mortgaged their property and premises to buy shares, people had taken out loans using their shares as security in order to buy still more shares. Worse still, the share brokers had issued loans to each other based on these transactions, and the brokers were themselves as heavily-invested in the market as their ill-advised clientele.

It only took one overextended customer who could not meet their repayments too many and the whole house of cards began to unravel, the collapse spreading from one institution to another like wildfire; even then, the damage might have been containable, but for one additional factor: the whole episode so badly shook the confidence of key investors that they began trying to sell to get out from under. Because no-one was interested in buying these shares at their purported market value, the sellers were forced to sell cheap, and that caused the stock market to dip again, and that scared still more investors. The stock market went into free-fall, and the Great Depression began.

Now, if ever, the people were in need of pleasant, uplifting, social activities. But the wild excesses immediately following the war had led to a puritanical counter-reaction, and people couldn’t afford the good times anyway. Many had lost everything and were on the streets. A simpler, more direct, style of music – by turns optimistic and melancholy in nature – took hold: Ragtime became the most popular style, because it expressed the way people were feeling: alternately depressed and defiantly optimistic about the future. This was the soundtrack of Prohibition.

Looking back, the sequence of cause-and-effect (slightly simplified in this description) is hard to deny, but at the time, it was anything but obvious. Perhaps that explains why the lessons of the past were ignored, leading to an almost-identical event, the GFC. It even had the same cause; FDR had placed strict regulatory rules in place after the Wall Street Crash to prevent any recurrence from ever happening, but over successive administrations (starting with Nixon), those had been watered down and eaten away in response to claims in financial circles that they were stifling the economy, until President Bush (I forget which one) lifted them altogether. And exactly the same thing happened – this time in property markets, and with exactly the same inevitable result.

The Global economy has still only partially recovered in many respects. It is interesting to observe that Australia, whose government plunged deeply into a new-deal style protection of the economy (over the continuing objections of our conservative political elements), weathered the storm far better than the US, where the Republicans delayed and watered down a similar response – something the Australian opposition of the time would definitely have done if they had possessed the numbers in Parliament to do so. When they eventually regained power, they described the measures as creating a “Debt and Deficit Disaster”, and attempted to promulgate repressive cuts to government spending in response, cuts that were savagely attacked and rejected wholesale by the Australian Senate and the many of the Australian Citizenry.

Learning from past experience – and this is why it is relevant – is another form of Revolutionary Contamination, this time deriving from the past events that engendered the lesson being cited. Only when that past experience becomes no longer relevant because of changed context (technological change) or social change (external events and reactions to same) do they cease to matter.

Of course, it’s not that easy, except perhaps in hindsight. To learn and apply a lesson from the past to a contemporary situation, you have to (1) observe the similarities; (2) recognize the pattern; (3) identify the lesson(s) that derive from the past events which share that pattern; (4) analyze the past solutions – what worked, what didn’t, and why; (5) identify the differences in context and how they will impact both the problem and the potential solutions; (6) update the proposed solutions; (7) convince enough others of your findings that the solutions are implemented; and (8) make no mistakes and experience no nasty surprises. All this while a presumptive crisis is unfolding and deepening, requiring irrevocable decisions to be made at breakneck speed – which is hardly an environment conducive to calm analysis and remaining error-free.

Dominating Personality

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The final influence, and one that can sometimes even elevate itself relative to the others, is for events to be shaped by one dominating personality. That is usually the ongoing character profile of a ruler or monarch, which is the strongest argument going around for Australia remaining a constitutional Monarchy, but it can also be a national character, a common trait or attitude shared by the population, or by a significant majority. The best example I can point to is the stoic resilience of Britain during the darkest days of World War II, when invasion was considered imminent and the Luftwaffe were pounding the nation day after day, night after night. One can also argue, as a second example, that it was Hitler’s dominating personality that rose up to shape Germany during the 1930s. Or one could point, as a third example, to the impact of Band-Aid, followed by Live Aid, and the impact that it had for a while on music, all of which spilled from Bob Geldof’s personality and his reaction to the events in Africa. If memory serves, he became aware of the situation through the chance viewing of a documentary on the subject, but however it happened, it was his personality and a nearly-obsessive level of drive that he had never exhibited before that led to the social movements in question. He quite literally bullied the biggest names in music into participating, often over the strong objections of the record labels to which they were signed, and with each such success, it became that much harder for the next to say ‘no’.

As any long-term reader of Campaign Mastery or long-time player of RPGs knows, personalities don’t come out of nowhere. They are built on personal experiences, occurring in a social context, and structured by individual capabilities and capacities, the opportunities for development that derive from them in that social context, and the influences of parental figures and peers, a set of complex responses to the world as experienced by the individual as a result of the behavior of both him or herself and those around that individual.

While it is obvious that in the absence of other factors, the personality of the most dominant individual becomes the strongest element in progressing or shaping the next trend, either in a positive way or as a counter-reaction, what is not so obvious is when and how this factor rises in prominence beyond this default position in the sequence. All that can be said is that the stars must align just right, and the personality in question must be responding naturally to extraordinary external events. The times maketh the man, in other words. Winston Churchill was able to hold the course so staunchly because of his natural reaction to Fascism, which in turn was based on his own experiences in his earlier posts within Government, which in turn taught him exactly the skills that were needed in Britain’s hour of need, or at least that’s the impression that I have taken away from a Documentary entitled “Churchill: A Giant In The Century,” which I recently viewed.

Synthesizing a theory of social development

Let’s put it all together. Any trend in any human activity that gains prominence or even dominance generates an inevitable counter-reaction, which generates a new trend. That new trend will generate a new counter-reaction, producing an oscillation between two general states of that human activity. Shaping and altering that oscillation are influences that ensure that subsequent trends are different and distinct in detail and context relative to the previous matching point in the cycle.

Right now, Australia is coming to the end of a conservative cycle, one that has seen populist causes and a repressive administration attack the core values held by the Australian people as a collective. In response, almost all of those repressive measures have been blocked despite strenuous efforts by the government to impose its agenda; and so strong has been the counter-reaction to the hubris displayed that the demand for change has become a tsunami that threatens to overwhelm that administration in one key social metric while it continues to build in many others. It will be a profound shock to the country if this does not result in a decisive change of government at the next election.

The US, in comparison, has just recently entered such a conservative cycle, and from a distance, it appears that populist causes and a repressive administration are attacking the core values and ideals held by the American people as a collective. The resulting counter-reaction is only slowly beginning to build up, but already has been enough that almost all of those repressive measures have been blocked despite strenuous and repeated efforts by the government to impose its agenda. Even where there was no avenue to block the changes, such as with climate policy, states are operating independently of the Federal Agenda to maintain what progress has been achieved and the mechanisms set in place to progress them. The administration has displayed more than its fair share of Hubris; the counter-reaction is both inevitable and will gain strength from that. Will the demand for change become so great as to be profound and undeniable come the midterm elections, or will it have to wait? That’s the question right now, as I see it (from the outside).

In it’s own way, this article is very much a sequel to last week’s article on nostalgia, to which I have linked below. So I’m tagging this as part of the Blog Carnival.

RPG Relevance

So often, we think of societies in an RPG as a static entity, unchanging and elegant in their simplicity. I’ve argued against this on a number of occasions, most recently in Nostalgia in RPG Characters, but most RPG backgrounds are set-and-forget. The analysis in this article shows just how unrealistic that is.

Readers may also remember that similar patterns were identified and discussed in A Political insight for RPGs & Life earlier this year, but this analysis runs deeper than that one did, and offers a slightly different perspective, looking more deeply into the forces that are at play and the effects that they have.

Societies within RPGs

In most RPG societies, there are three significant layers where counter-reactions have the capacity to manifest.

There is the overall leader of the government, whether that be a monarch-for-life or an elected official of some kind. Even where a son is perceived as a “chip off the old block”, the need to distinguish himself from the previous leadership demands that at least some of the counter-reactions to policies manifest in changes in social direction.

There is the local ruler or leader. In a democracy, that’s the leader of the state within which the campaign is set; in most fantasy games, that’s a lesser Noble. These tend to become polarized with respect to the positions of the overall leader, either supporting them even when they disagree, or becoming opposition that tries to work around the ruler in those areas where they can – while doing nothing overt that could lead to loss of position, of course. If the central authority is centrist, they become more independent and diverse in any areas not dictated by the central government. If the central authority is radical in a policy area, the local leaders tend to become more conservative. And so on.

And finally, and most responsive of all to change, there is the broader society itself.

I would argue that in each of these, the last complete cycle of change needs to be defined, together with the trends that are now beginning to manifest. This provides sufficient depth to be reasonably realistic while imposing the minimum additional burden on the GM.

In any given area of society, once this is known, you can identify (1) which of the three layers has dominance; (2) how the current trends in the positions of the dominant leader integrate with individual areas to shape the society around the PCs; and hence (3) the state of play in all sorts of areas, with the most important being the RPG applications listed in the articles linked to above, plus any other areas suggested in the course of this article.

Understanding the principles outlined in this article and applying them to your RPG societies both in broad and in any specific areas of interest gives the GM a tool to make the politics and societies within their game more realistic and more vibrant at relatively low prep-overhead. It also helps the GM understand the world around them. Both are worthwhile objectives.

Postscript: Radicalism and Certainty always need an outlet

No society is ever completely progressive/radical or completely conservative. There will always be some unregulated aspect of life, and agitation for change will always emerge somewhere. This could be anything from a new musical or dance style that becomes popular, a new art movement, a new hobby being embraced, or whatever. In a government which is radical and progressive, law-enforcement tends to become more strictly by-the-book, for example, unless forced into a different direction explicitly by the government, in which case the populace will trend towards conservatism and conservative values. Always identify the outlet for radicalism that is currently in use within your game society. A conservative government might result in more freewheeling barter for goods at the local level, while a more progressive government could result in a trend towards fixed pricing with little willingness to negotiate.

At the same time, people crave a measure of certainty in their lives. The more innovative policies are, the more strongly traditional entertainment forms like sport will be popular. In your societies, where do the population get their fix of certainty, where are their lives grounded, where is conformity demanded and deviation frowned upon? Food for thought when developing your society.

In one of his stories, Robert A Heinlein wrote (through the mouth of one of his characters, and I’m misquoting it for sure, though the broad strokes are correct): In an age of Romance, you need practical men who won’t get swept up in the Romance. In an age where life is dour and plodding, you need romantics to give the people hope and to eventually change life for the better.

A romantic leader in an age of romance would therefore be a recipe for disaster. Now, I’m not convinced by Heinlein’s rhetoric, but there’s an undeniable grain of truth, there. Again, the trend is for the opposite to become dominant. And societies change more easily and readily than leaders change their personalities.

Is the ruler of your RPG society well-liked and/or well-respected? Or does resentment and dissatisfaction bubble away in all the underground nooks and crannies? It’s a simplistic solution to derive an answer from the alignment of the Ruler, which is what GMs usually do. This article points the way to open a deeper level of interaction between a society and its style of authority and that’s not only good for verisimilitude, it makes a place a heck of a lot more interesting!