Agree. In addition to creative vision and optimism, I would add a sense of agency has almost completely vanished from the Anglosphere starting with Gen X. The average person (and now a disturbing portion of those with power) believes that there is no way they can influence the trajectory of their life.
This is not good. That's where desperate, angry people come from.
Indeed. It's also the antithesis of what I understand to be the "American Dream", perhaps synonymous with "freedom" in our time. The kind of thing people will fight wars to hold on to. Really not good. So in my opinion worth courageously fighting for *now" rather than waiting for things to get that bad again.
I’m confused by this because Nietzsche died in 1900. Was it a prophecy? Or did you mean the 1800s?
Yes, silly me. He was talking about the times he saw around him (late 1800s) rather than prophesising. In Beyond Good and Evil he poses the open question "what sacred games shall we have to invent?". It was Freud and Jung who were possessed with visions of awful wars to fill the vacuum.
I didn't find much new here at the conceptual level. This is what "Zeitgeist" means, and many epochs have been characterised as joyous or depressive.
However the framing of the study is important for me, because I broadly agree with the hypothesis that we are in a depressive epoch. In fact we are in an interregnum, which themselves go through phases in the gap between "a world that is dead and one still waiting to be born".
Why might the psyche of the Anglosphere be battered more than other groups or nations? Sure, we've had industrial revolution, slavery, two world wars, decades of proxy wars, environmental and financial disasters... but is our lot any worse than the long suffering people of Russia, China or Africa who carry traumatic histories?
I would argue that what ails "the West" is a loss of sense of positive future. That is actually a symptom of clinical depression too. The Fukuyaman conceit of the "end of history" is actually a dark and troubling stuckness. For me the prevalence of words like "inevitable", "ubiquitous" and "inescapable", especially around technology, are markers of a profound loss of creative vision and optimism.