What happens when a pandemic causes a population to quarantine, save, suffer and stifle pangs of loneliness? We found out after the 2018 Spanish Flu..
The Roaring 20’s. Outburst.
Landry’s, casino owner and Rockets boss Tilman Fertitta tells CNBC in late January he sees an inevitability to it. “This is going to be the Roaring 20’s. You can just see it.”
Yale professor Dr. Nikolas Christakis wrote a book titled “Apollo’s Arrow” when he saw it coming. Pandemics have been a repeating element of human history, and is the opening setting for Homer’s Iliad, from which the title draws its name.
It’s like a pressure cooker on the human psyche, and when liberated, he says, it explodes. Inclinations of religiosity, conservation, and withholding are discarded.
The factors fueling the post Covid-pandemic will be different than those following World War Two, but the inclination to gather in groups will be similar. In the 1920’s jazz burst onto the cultural scene while the KKK’s membership was counted in the millions, prohibition limiting bar patronage but not the drinking of bootleg wares, gangs led by mafia chieftains running cities and unions, science and education challenged in the Scopes trial in Tennessee.
Christakis expects we are still a couple years from outright exuberance. 2024 should bring the confidence could cut loose. Where the pent-up energy will find expression will be unique to the times, but once it takes off, fasten your seat belt.
It’ll be a wild ride.