Amerika

Civilization begins in a transcendental goal — “be excellent” — and ends as individualism intrudes, since individualism means cherry-picking what you care about in reality to include only what affects you personally. It rejects the idea of civilization itself!

Not surprisingly, as individualism rises, so does a complete disregard for things like the passage of generations. The individualists retain as much of their money for as long as possible:

Boomers are holding on to their money for as long as they can, rather than handing them down as inheritance to their children, according to a new report.

Boomers, born between 1946 and 1964, are famed for benefiting from great social mobility when house prices were low and labor conditions strong.

Boomers currently possess around $83.5 trillion in wealth, according to the 2024 UBS Global Wealth Report.

We can re-write the history of the Boomers simply: they saw that diversity was taking over, and as a result, they never bonded with their society and came to distrust it, which made it easy for them to take everything they wanted without worrying about consequences.

In the 1960s when they came of age, diversity was thriving in the form of Irish, Italians, Jews, Poles, and American Indians being accepted into American life. Gradually the Negroes and Hispanics were included too.

By the time Boomers were in their twenties, we had an Irish president who was preaching a gentler form of market-based socialism for all. Schools were integrated at gunpoint when boomers were preteens, and the Civil Rights movement grew up around them.

What this means to anyone capable of thought is that Boomers were born into a strong culture, but as it fell apart, they realized that their society was hostile to them and did not have their best interests at heart. It was more interested in the diversity.

Consequently, they withdrew from it. Instead of spending time on civic life, they dedicated themselves to work and accumulating wealth. Since they could not trust society, they trusted in money and their own libertarian-style bourgeois ability to secede from society at large.

As it turns out, binary choices are hardwired in our minds to be cherry-picked from a wide field of data that is then discarded:

“An action potential only looks like a ‘spike’ when you are zoomed out, but when you zoom in on it, and look at its full waveform, which is only about a millisecond long, the shape of that voltage trace tells you something about what’s happened recently to that neuron,” Voytek said.

“When we turn an action potential into a binary event, we throw away information about its recent input.”

When a human makes a polarity-oriented decision like deciding that the world is against them, they begin filtering out all contrary information, and gradually reach a type of corkscrew tunnel vision where they confirm and intensify their own bias as time goes on.

The less society shares a purpose, the more individualistic it becomes, which shows us why the Oriental “collectivism” people like to describe is in fact the opposite; people have no relationship and therefore are hard individualistic:

An international research team showed that the responsibilities people hold in close relationships reliably differentiate Eastern and Western cultures and form the foundation of collectivism. The researchers developed a survey to measure this phenomenon, which they termed responsibilism.

Talhelm spent seven years living in China, which inspired and shaped this work. While living in Beijing, he experienced competitive jostling on the subway and received suspicious frowns when he smiled at people he passed on the street.

At first, these behaviors seemed inconsistent with China having a collectivist culture—until he realized the common thread running through all these interactions was that they were between people who did not have close relationships with each other. Talhelm thought this thread might be contributing to contradictory findings about collectivism.

This Asiatic phenomenon, like democracy, may not be Asiatic per se but something that the Orientals, by growing rapidly as societies, encountered before anyone else. Insert sad Denisovan faces here.

We can view it as a kind of decay. A healthy society shares a transcendental goal, like excellence (arete) in the West. A sick society has given up on such goals, tossed aside culture, and now it is “every man for himself.”

Boomers are the products of this shattered culture. Diversity replaced WASP culture; Irish-rule replaced White rule. As a result, people no longer had any obligation to work together, and so they turned into goyish versions of stereotypical Jews, every man for himself and “go along to get along” so that everyone could get their money pile and escape civilization.

Tags: baby boomers, collectivism, individualism, me generation