1968: The Year the System Lost Its Grip, Part 5 — The Feedback Loop of Power and Protest

[Luis Gonzalez]

1968: The Year the System Lost Its Grip — Part 5: The Feedback Loop of Power and Protest

The Last Wire

There is a tendency, especially from a distance in time, to treat 1968 as history that belongs to someone else. A year of protests, assassinations, flags, smoke, and television grain. A contained artifact. Something studied, summarized, and filed away.

That is not what it is.

1968 matters because it reveals something uncomfortable about systems that consider themselves stable. They do not collapse first. They adapt. They learn. They begin to respond to pressure in predictable ways. And once both sides of a conflict learn each other’s reflexes, the conflict stops being about decisions and becomes about patterns.

That is the core of what this series has tried to trace. Not chaos. Not ideology alone. But feedback. A loop where protest shapes authority and authority shapes protest, until neither is acting freshly anymore. Both are reacting.

Once that happens, control becomes appearance rather than substance.

I did not come to this subject as someone studying a distant chapter of American history from within its comfort zone. I came to it as someone newly arrived, trying to understand how a country narrates itself when it is under strain. The United States does not present itself as fragile. It presents itself as self correcting, self stabilizing, always capable of absorbing stress and continuing forward.

1968 complicates that story.

It shows a moment when absorption still existed, but so did visible strain. When institutions still functioned, but the confidence in their function was breaking down in public view. When the language of legitimacy and the experience of legitimacy began to drift apart.

For someone arriving from outside that narrative, that gap is hard to ignore.

What stood out to me was not just the events themselves, but the speed at which interpretation became part of the event. The camera was already inside the loop. Protest anticipated response. Authority anticipated protest. Each side began acting with the other already in mind. That is not just political history. It is behavioral history. It is what happens when observation becomes immediate and total.

You do not just have actors anymore. You have mirrors.

And mirrors do not resolve tension. They multiply it.

As a new arrival, what struck me most was how much of modern American political life still feels shaped by that year, not in content, but in reflex. The suspicion that escalation is always just one step away. The assumption that institutions will respond, not decide. The sense that public conflict is never isolated, but always part of a repeating pattern.

1968 did not end those dynamics. It revealed them.

That is why it remains important. Not because it is the origin of everything that followed, but because it is one of the clearest moments when a system showed its internal wiring under stress. It is easier to believe in stability when pressure is hidden. It is harder when pressure is televised, photographed, and repeated back to itself in real time.

There is a final, quieter lesson in all of this.

Systems do not usually fail in dramatic single moments. They drift into habits. They repeat responses that once made sense. They build expectations around those responses. And eventually, those expectations become stronger than the original intent.

By the time anyone notices, they are no longer choosing behavior. They are inheriting it.

1968 was the year that inheritance became visible.

And for me, coming into this country from the outside, that visibility was the most important part. It reminded me that stability is not a permanent condition. It is a maintained one. It depends not only on institutions, but on whether people can still tell the difference between action and reaction.

That difference is where systems either stay conscious or begin to run on their own memory.

The series ends here, but the loop it describes does not. It continues wherever pressure meets pattern, and pattern replaces thought.

That is the real legacy of 1968.

Not rupture.

Recursion.

— Gonzo

Read the closing Chapter of 1968: The Year the System Lost Its Grip at The Last Wire

[Free Vulcan]

Agree that '68 was a seminal year - it was like the culmination and flowering of all the Fabian manipulations built on the actions of FDR, Wilson, and even farther back. I was born that you, and I can tell you that even as a child I could see them massive shift in society that pivoted around that year.

With the full force of the huge woke leftist Boomers they began in earnest the long march thru the institutions. They thought they could entangle everything in their web of tentacles, and in many ways they did, but they didn't anticipate three things:

1. The rise of the interwebs and alternative media that would break their information monopoly.

2. That there would be enough patriotic people to outvote them and countermove their artificial construct.

3. They increasingly relied on taxpayer money funneled through shady organizations and practices to fund Rat campaigns.

As it stands now, the Rats are in serious jeopardy. Thanks to the courts blowing up one of their artifices of VRA racial districts, they are at a serious disadvantage. If they lose on birthright citizenship and citizens only census counting, they are doomed.

The other pinch point is they now rely almost completely on taxpayer funding for their schemes. and kickbacks to Rat campaigns. Cutting that off would critically wound them. As @Hoodat says, balance the budget and the silliness ends.

All it takes at this point is political will.

[andy58-in-nh]

@Luis Gonzalez

Luis: what an excellent and revelatory series.

Thank you for sharing it with us.

I was 10 years old in 1968, and thus far too young to fully comprehend the meaning of momentous public events, much less to be swept up in the fervor they generated. 

But I was quite aware that important things were happening and that change was in the air, which I experienced memorably through pictures and sound: TV news and music.  I distinctly recall the mood and the sense of the time, with news of assassinations, civil unrest and war, and quite naturally absorbed my parents' responses to all of it.

I believe that you are correct in your understanding of what happened to our once-stable American systems in that having had their validity challenged  - often in language that was utterly unfamiliar to them - they became reactive, feeding on such challenges to their authority. Each iteration of conflict (call-and-response) formed behavioral loops which grew concentrically, expanding and interacting like raindrops in a still pond. 

Why that all happened is a different discussion, which I have addressed in related posts about the nature and project of Progressivism, specifically how that movement set about to undermine and alter the fundamental purposes of our cultural, social and political institutions. 

But having studied (and instructed others in) organizational and stable systems theory, I think you got the dynamics exactly right.

Newton's laws of motion and to some extent, the laws of thermodynamics also apply in analyzing social institutions. Which may be fascinating as a matter of academic inquiry, but can be sobering when one applies such principles to human behavior.

Thanks again for your work. 

[Bigun]

Agree that '68 was a seminal year - it was like the culmination and flowering of all the Fabian manipulations built on the actions of FDR, Wilson, and even farther back. I was born that you, and I can tell you that even as a child I could see them massive shift in society that pivoted around that year.

With the full force of the huge woke leftist Boomers they began in earnest the long march thru the institutions. They thought they could entangle everything in their web of tentacles, and in many ways they did, but they didn't anticipate three things:

1. The rise of the interwebs and alternative media that would break their information monopoly.

2. That there would be enough patriotic people to outvote them and countermove their artificial construct.

3. They increasingly relied on taxpayer money funneled through shady organizations and practices to fund Rat campaigns.

As it stands now, the Rats are in serious jeopardy. Thanks to the courts blowing up one of their artifices of VRA racial districts, they are at a serious disadvantage. If they lose on birthright citizenship and citizens only census counting, they are doomed.

The other pinch point is they now rely almost completely on taxpayer funding for their schemes. and kickbacks to Rat campaigns. Cutting that off would critically wound them. As @Hoodat says, balance the budget and the silliness ends.

All it takes at this point is political will.

Correct on all counts @Free Vulcan the one I highlighted in particular. And that itself is very tenuous now.

[Bigun]

@Luis Gonzalez

Luis: what an excellent and revelatory series.

Thank you for sharing it with us.

I was 10 years old in 1968, and thus far too young to fully comprehend the meaning of momentous public events, much less to be swept up in the fervor they generated. 

But I was quite aware that important things were happening and that change was in the air, which I experienced memorably through pictures and sound: TV news and music.  I distinctly recall the mood and the sense of the time, with news of assassinations, civil unrest and war, and quite naturally absorbed my parents' responses to all of it.

I believe that you are correct in your understanding of what happened to our once-stable American systems in that having had their validity challenged  - often in language that was utterly unfamiliar to them - they became reactive, feeding on such challenges to their authority. Each iteration of conflict (call-and-response) formed behavioral loops which grew concentrically, expanding and interacting like raindrops in a still pond. 

Why that all happened is a different discussion, which I have addressed in related posts about the nature and project of Progressivism, specifically how that movement set about to undermine and alter the fundamental purposes of our cultural, social and political institutions. 

But having studied (and instructed others in) organizational and stable systems theory, I think you got the dynamics exactly right.

Newton's laws of motion and to some extent, the laws of thermodynamics also apply in analyzing social institutions. Which may be fascinating as a matter of academic inquiry, but can be sobering when one applies such principles to human behavior.

Thanks again for your work.

I was 12 years old in 1960, walked in from school one fall afternoon to find our TV on (unheard of at that hour) displaying pictures of a bald headed fellow standing in the well of the United Nations banging on a table with his shoe and telling us how they would bury us from within without firing a shot. Not one (sober) day has passed from that day to this without that image repeating in my head.

Four years later Barry Goldwater was defeated by LBJ and I knew. I don't know HOW I knew but I did.

Three years after that, I had just days before returned from Vietnam and sat down with my dad to watch Walter Cronkite deliver the evening news. After he finished, I arose and told my dad that Cronkite is full of beans! (Probably not using that exact language.)

That day my quest began. I wanted to know why Cronkite was lying to us about Vietnam and what else were they lying to us about. What did Mr. Khrushchev know that I didn't. That quest has taken me far and, at age 77, I now think I have a pretty good idea as to how we got to this place we currently find ourselves in. @andy58-in-nh