This is a recap of a video I watched that I found kind of amusing.
I put my own comments in indented sections.
Modern society is currently going through serious problems.
This is obvious with various economic, political, environmental and other issues. These range from competition with China to massive inequality, supply chain problems, global warming, and you could list countless others. Young people today face hard lives. These are complicated issues with many factors but one big driving variable is baby boomers. Boomers are unparalleled in history for the raw amount of social damage they have caused. They have left a $***show that subsequent generations will have difficulty solving.
Notes:
I actually think that while we certainly have problems today, we live in the most peaceful and prosperous time in the history of mankind. Which makes it a little difficult to hear kids acting like they live in a hellscape of hardship. I actually do agree though that my generation did a lot wrong.
There are some boomer assumptions:
1) I want everything now with nothing for the future
2) Morally judging others is the worst thing a person can do
Notes:
I think these things are both true. Though I’m not sure how much they are native only to boomers.
The second one is probably more of a boomer and later trait than with previous generations.
In particular with the newer generations, I frequently hear the complaint that they are priced out of homes, etc. But they seem to want the best of everything right away. They feel like they should graduate college with a degree, immediately get 200k a year jobs, and live in brand new homes while driving mercedes, traveling the world with unlimited PTO and eating at the finest restaurants. Even for us selfish boomers, it took time to build up what we finally got. I was well into my 40’s before I got a new car. Until then I drove hand-me down cars and used. I didn’t buy a house until I was almost 50. The kids today feel like it’s all supposed to come so easily. So telling me boomers “want everything now” rings a little hollow.
But I will acknowledge that politically, while the spending spree started before us, boomers DID nothing to pull it back, and in fact, made it worse at every turn.
And 2) the attitude that “judging others is the worst thing a person can do” seems to be way worse these days. Maybe I’m wrong, but it seems worse right now.
Boomers were the first to grow up with tv, which has been shown to produce less IQ, more aggression, less self-control, empathy, and ‘the like’.
Notes:
I think it would tough to argue that boomers were more aggressive than the first generations of the 20th century that brought us communism, fascism, imperial japan and 2 world wars because ‘we had tv’….
There was a shift in parenting too. The role of parenting was to get children to grow up to be adults. The boomers were confronted with new theories of parenting that said parents should try to appeal to their kids and work with them. This led to a much more permissive parenting than ever before in history.
In the 60’s this manifested itself through the protests where the boomers thought they were smarter than their parents. One of the boomers biggest flaws is that they are unwilling to listen to the lessons of the previous eras because they believed themselves to be so special.
Notes:
I actually agree with this. We did screw up with parenting. We parented later, and decided that kids had to be helicoptered over. We convinced ourselves that anything that could happen to junior if he wasn’t watched over for every second would make us terrible parents. We overdid it and catered to them and tried to be their friends. Most of this was driven by more media: tv, books, increased sensational coverage of news events, and waves of pop psychologists trying to make a name for themselves with new theories.
That said, I talk to Millennial and the very first wave of GenZ parents (if they are even having kids) and they have the exact same tendencies, if not worse.
Boomers looked at the Vietnam war, the assassination of Kennedy, watergate et al as truly ‘historical events’ because those things happened to them. But those things had happened before. They weren’t special. It was boomers belief that they were the start of history that made them think those events were so special.
The sexual revolution
In 1960, to sleep with a girl you were expected to marry her. By 1970, to remain a virgin by the time you got out of high school was considered taboo. There is no record of such a large change happening in history so quickly.
Notes:
The sexual revolution was a real societal problem with far-reaching downstream consequences. As was the whole drug scene that kicked off the 60’s. This deserves condemnation.
The description the kid narrating the video gives is a little warped. I graduated in 1980 and I hadn’t slept with any girls at that time. And I don’t think I was abnormal either. But certainly, if you watched hollywood, it would seem like it was what was supposed to happen.
World War II and the Nazis
The Nazis were seen as the ultimate evil. Which meant that being anti-nazi; meaning anti-racist, trans-national, pacifist, etc. The whole trajectory of the politics was about trying to be the opposite of the nazis.
Notes:
It has struck me as odd that the Nazi’s have been singled out as the ‘worst thing ever’ when the communists killed way more people with the original collective mentality that the Nazi’s were a deviant of. But that’s probably because the commies were turned on by the Nazis, so they ended up on the winning side, combined with the amount of Marxists that continued to breed in higher academia.
But today we have Antifa…. and the left in general using the term Nazi for anyone they disagree with. So if the ‘nazis as the ultimate evil’ is questionable, aren’t the younger generations doubling down on this?
Part 2: Boomer Culture
Boomers liked movies with clear-cut good and evil and clean victories of good over evil…witness Star Wars. It is a mythic retelling of how they wish WWII would have gone.
While boomers do seem to care about oppressed groups, this is part of their belief against moral judgment. The rapid social change that has happened under boomers is based on their fundamental belief of non-judgment.
The nineteenth century saw a primarily christian morality, whereas boomers see pleasure as the ultimate point.
Boomers have generally lower regard for intellectualism. They don’t like thinking about abstract concepts. Boomers place their value in pleasure.
Notes:
Clear-cut notions of good and evil and pleasure as the ultimate point of life, are not boomer inventions. The second is a philosophical position that we can see in the ancient Greeks.
Part 3: Boomer Politics
The boomer lack of any inner self-discipline while viewing the world as an easy to fix match of good v evil.
The Vietnam war was seen as bad while the Korean war was seen as good, largely because the boomers themselves were the ones drafted, and they didn’t want to go.
The Iraq war was another boomer misconception based on their belief in strict good v evil thinking. They overthrew the regimes and then expected they were going to be treated like heroes. Rather than reading history or Xenophon, as previous generations would have, the boomers have ruled with no subtlety at all in foreign policy.
Notes:
I think we have gotten a lot wrong. We’ll see how the subsequent generations do when they have their time. It’s easy to find problems and then act like that would never have happened if I were in charge, but decisions are made in the heat of the moment, not with 20/20 hindsight. That only comes later. Maybe Millennials and Gen Z will do better. We’ll see.
Part 4: Boomer Economics
Boomers have pushed for their own short-term self-interests at the expense of the long-term. Boomers grew up with the highest standards of living the world had ever seen. But they don’t understand these were unique conditions, not the normal.
Baby boomers maximized their own capital then shut out younger generations from being able to build any of their own.
They oversaw the largest printing of money in history. Modern monetary policy is the predominant economic principle these days and is the perfect encapsulation of the boomer mindset.
Boomers bought houses when they were cheaper and now younger generations can’t afford to buy them. They passed legislation that restricts home building which makes it even more difficult for those without homes to buy.
With the climate, boomers have refused to deal with the issue until too late, and even now they won’t consider nuclear as a reasonable alternative.
Notes:
There are some legitimate complaints about economics. Boomers didn’t start this, however. The country began to run consistent debts with the advent of social security back in the 30’s. The lack of concern over the debt will take us down at some point. But there has not been, and I don’t believe there will be any real political will to change this. We all want someone else to cut back, we don’t want to cut back on anything we’re getting. But unfortunately, we have accepted more and more shift of the burden of responsibility on to the government’s shoulders and off our own, which means if we were to cut off the spending now, it would impact our lives too much. So we’ll continue to drive the bus off the cliff.
It’s true that the desire to go back to 50’s economic boom is not tenable since that was a unique set of circumstances. It’s nostalgia, not realism. And I also agree that there is a lot of legislation that restricts home building. I also agree that the refusal to accept nuclear as a legitimate alternative to carbon fuels is puzzling, but I don’t see the new generations pushing for this either.
Finale:
The author also notes that many of the boomers’ worst traits manifest themselves even more in their children. But boomers invented those traits and pushed them on society.
Notes:
The author of the video at least acknowledges that Millennials and GenZ are infected with the same ideas. This is what I find most puzzling about the complaints I hear about the boomers: the current generation has, in my opinion, accurately assessed many of the problems. But rather than take the opposite, or even just a different, approach, they’ve turned it up to 11.
I amended this last note because I wrote that if the later generations accurately assess the boomers’ problems and then double down on the same policies, then it would be evidence of stupidity. But while there is something to the thought process, I certainly don’t think the later generations are idiots by any standard. For what it’s worth, I actually like the younger generation and usually find them thoughtful enough.