The 50th Law (with 50 Cent)

particularly among the young. They are like Louis’s carriage. When you
detect enough such disenchantment, you can be sure something strong
is cresting.
Once you have an adequate feel for what is really going on, you
must be bold in how you respond, giving voice to what other people are
feeling but not understanding. Be careful to not get too far out ahead
and be misunderstood. Ever alert, always letting go of your prior
interpretations, you can seize the opportunities in the moment that
others cannot even begin to detect. Think of yourself as an enemy of
the status quo, whose proponents must view you in turn as dangerous.
See this task as absolutely necessary for the revitalization of the human
spirit and the culture at large, and master it.
Our era is a birth-time, and a period of transition. The spirit of man has
broken with the old order of things . . . and with the old ways of thinking,
and is of the mind to let them all sink into the depths of the past and to set
about its own transformation. . . . The frivolity and boredom which unsettle
the established order, the vague foreboding of something unknown, these
are the heralds of approaching change.
—G. W. F. Hegel
Keys to Human Nature

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In human culture, we can see a phenomenon—changes in fashions and
styles—that at first glance might appear trivial, but that in fact is quite
profound, revealing a deep and fascinating part of human nature. Look
at clothing styles, for instance. In the stores or in fashion shows we can
perhaps detect some trends and changes from a few months before,
but they are usually subtle. Go back to styles ten years ago and,
compared with the present, the differences are quite apparent. Go back
twenty years and it is even clearer. With such a distance in time, we
can even notice a particular style of twenty years ago that now
probably looks a bit amusing and passé.
These changes in fashion styles that are so detectable in increments
of decades can be characterized as creating something looser and more
romantic than the previous style, or more overtly sexual and body
conscious, or more classic and elegant, or gaudier and with more frills.
We could name several other categories of changes in style, but in the
end they are limited in number, and they seem to come in waves or
patterns that are detectable over the course of several decades or
centuries. For example, the interest in sparser and more classic
clothing will recur at various intervals of time, not at precisely the
same intervals, but with a degree of regularity.
This phenomenon raises some interesting questions: Do these shifts
relate to something more than just the desire for what is new and
different? Do they reflect deeper changes in people’s psychology and
moods? And how do these changes occur, so that over enough time we
can detect them? Do they come from a top-down dynamic in which
certain individuals and tastemakers initiate a change, which is then
slowly picked up by the masses and spread virally? Or are these
tastemakers themselves responding to signs of change from within the
society as a whole, from that social force described in chapter 14,
giving it a bottom-up dynamic?
We can ask these questions about styles in music or any other
cultural form. But we can also ask them about changing styles in
thinking and theorizing, in how arguments in books are constructed.
Fifty years ago, many arguments were rooted in psychoanalysis and
sociology, writers often seeing the environment as the primary
influence on human behavior. The style was loose, literary, and given
to much speculation.

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Now arguments tend to revolve around genetics and the human
brain, with everything having to be backed up by studies and statistics.
The mere appearance of numbers on a page can lend a certain air of
credibility to the argument. Speculation is frowned upon. Sentences
are shorter, designed to communicate information. But this change in
theorizing style is not anything new. We can notice a similar back-and-
forth—from the literary and speculative to the sober and data driven—
beginning in the eighteenth century and up to the present.
What is fascinating in these shifts in style is the limited range of
changes, their recurrence, and the increasing speed we now see in the
shifts, as if we are witnessing a quickening in human restlessness and
nervous energy. And if we examine this phenomenon closely enough,
we can see quite clearly that these seemingly superficial changes do in
fact reflect deeper alterations in people’s mood and values, emerging
from the bottom up. Something as simple as a desire for looser styles
of clothing, as happened in the 1780s, reflects an overall psychological
shift. Nothing is innocent in this realm. An interest in brighter colors,
or a harder sound in music, have something else to say about what is
stirring in the collective minds of the people of that time.
And in examining this phenomenon even more deeply, we can also
make the following discovery: what drives these changes is the
continual succession of new generations of young people, who are
trying to create something more relevant to their experience of the
world, something that reflects more their values and spirit and that
goes in a different direction from that of the previous generation. (We
can generally describe a generation as comprising around twenty-two
years, with those born at the earliest and latest parts of that period
often identifying more with the previous or succeeding generation.)
And this pattern of change from one generation to the next is itself