Amerika

Somewhere in the dark heart of Generation X lurks the desire to cram all of the Boomers into ovens, or at least to choke them to death with pillows. We know this is true, but will not admit it not so much to spare Generation X, but to avoid seeing how bad things have become.

What made the Boomers? An abundant generation born into the postwar world of either abundance (USA) or poverty (Europe), they were homo economicus defined, but paired that with a strong ideological bent toward civil rights.

The answer is that they were the first generation of System People, defined by the political and economic system in which they grew up instead of by culture and history, and this system was a KcPs based on a constant flow of warm bodies keeping the tax system afloat.

As a result, Boomers were an ideological generation. Where previous generations had to grow crops or fix engines, Boomers went to office jobs, where popularity and saying the right thing was more important than making anything function, not that many office jobs involve that anyway.

If a Boomer wanted something, they had to rationalize it according to popular principles like freedom, equality, and individualism. This made the system work for them, since they were accomplishing its goals, and forced others out of their way.

Boomers figured out how to rationalize anything they wanted as being good for democracy or civil rights, and doors magically opened and money came their way. They did this by claiming to bring “new” ideas when in fact supporting established ideas.

This made them like most brats a product of both being spoiled and being unable to actually influence their future. They could do whatever worked for The System, but not break free and have their own thoughts, so they were trapped in luxury and directionless living.

To them, life fit the family model: government was the parent and citizens were the children. Biology like real family life or culture offended them; if parents and culture said that cake came after dinner, Boomers wanted to make sure to have cake for dinner.

And, in order to get the herd to accept that, they made it free and mandatory. Instead of nutritious but unfun dinners, everyone gets cake and is forced to eat it, that way no one feels bad for having cake for dinner.

This way the rebels could hold control and even more, define what it was to be rebellious, so that no one else could usurp them with a new revolution. They also had at their disposal a doctrine based on individualism, which allowed them to rationalize any desires.

This is why the “Me Generation” of the Baby Boomers were the “if it feels good, do it” generation. To them, doing what felt good was not just a desire, but an ideological commandment, and it made the economy succeed, too!

Like all ideologues, they had to anchor their philosophy in ironist contrarianism, which is a rejection of reality, history, common sense, logic, and most of all, life as a structure larger than the individual, so that they could embrace ideology.

The story of the Boomers shows us the danger of civilization. When civilization creates order, it switches people from ends-over-means thinking to means-over-ends thinking because the process of managing people becomes more important than making stuff happen directly.

In addition, the existence of this order means that success becomes boring and to stand out socially, people embrace the opposite. Only nonsense, randomness, and gibberish are valuable in social markets because they are “different” to the accepted norm.

Boomers rebelled against those norms using ideology as their weapon, and with civil rights as their blank slate, tore down most of what existed in the Anglo-Saxon order. Not surprisingly, most LeftBoomers seem to be Irish, Italian, Spanish, Jews, Lebanese, Puerto Rican, or Polish.

Now we find ourselves in a historical bend where the inverted order is inverting again as the cycle completes. The life we know now is going away regardless of what we do, but to survive the next order, we cannot be System People who rationalize from symbols.

Instead, ends-over-means order returns, which requires us to embrace reality and goals more than methods and emotions. The Boomer revolution is over, but they only care about retirement and dying painlessly with as much drama as possible, individualists to the end.

Tags: baby boomers, me generation, system people, the system