Vassal of the Boomer Regime

American Gerontocracy

It's an Aesop's Fables moment. The Boomers were born with it all, and not content with their riches, they squandered their parents' achievements. Not content with that, they destroyed their children's and grand-children's inheritance too. Once the land had been laid to waste, they turned to Narcissus' pool and preened: "wow, we were a golden age!"

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Johanna

As a civilization, we have some issues with self-indulgence, entitlement, safetyism… fragility. These are unusual qualities, historically-speaking. Where did they come from? What are the long-term effects of a social value system which prizes the individual (his wealth and comfort and choices) above all else, in a self-centered and aging society?

The federal government has other priorities, apart from and above military readiness or assisting natural disaster victims or feeding children. The primary activity of the federal government (FAR greater than anything else) lies in transferring trillions of dollars from younger to older people in order to enrich the old and protect them from the consequences of their choices, or from having to rely on family or pay for their own needs. This priority is literally bankrupting our country.

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America is increasingly ruled by a cohort of older elites and their allies, who derive their authority and support from a much larger pool of upper middle class professionals and retirees. Not having any war to fight (almost none of these people served in Vietnam, and few of them touched the great land campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan) they were born into relative prosperity and safety, and immediately set about remaking the world in their image. They created a culture in which the individual is paramount, in which “tolerance” (which is strongly tilted in a progressive direction and does not include tolerance for those who think differently, or for those who oppose their values) is among the most important political qualities, in which youth and the young are fetishized and aging and death are feared, in which concepts like duty, and norms, and tradition, are treated with a cynical dismissal-curious relics from older and dumber ages, and certainly not active constructs in our lives today. In making these cultural changes (which were already, like all metacultural shifts, underway but which were perfected and brought to fruition by the Boomer generation) they created the most shallow, selfish, vacuous, dynamic, and lonely civilization in human history. Speak to the people of this generation; see for yourself. Have them think of their own lives, and how they’ve lived, and ask them:

Is it right and proper for young men to die for their country? Is marriage and family a fundamental norm for our society which should be aspired to by the vast majority of citizens? Should children be disciplined and given difficult tasks in order to make them stronger and to mold them into useful members of society? Are disparate sex roles important for society? What is the purpose of life?

Ask them, and you may find that many of their answers are completely different than the answers of previous generations. Many more will say one thing, but their actions have outlined a very different social vision. Cultural values shifted after World War II, and the shift wasn’t due to war (not really) or economic privation or religious schism. It was due to an increasingly powerful consumer culture, which prized being cool, and valued being fulfilled and comfortable, above all else.

Boomers possess a mindset of relentless individualism and self-indulgence. The only God-given right and duty of each person is to find and express their ‘authentic selves’, and to buy as many things and vacations and accumulate as much privilege as they possibly can, without acknowledging the costs of these things on the wider society, or the loss for younger generations (which, as we’ll see, are enormous). If capitalist discipline helps the Boomer, the Boomer will be for it. If massively expensive medical programs and unsustainable retirement offerings will help the Boomer, the Boomer will be for that (but generally leery of giving these things to the poor). This is a kind of selfishness which is now unremarkable in the United States, but it originated with this generation and now it’s almost universal. Of course, it must be masked behind platitudes and smokescreens. Stating these priorities aloud would not be cool. This is what happens when the whims and impulses of individuals are taken to be deadly serious, and each person is left to make a life for himself or herself, fairly disconnected from family and community. It’s doubtful whether any generation has a “choice” between alternatives, but each certainly has values and priorities, and the priorities of the Boomers were and are clear and historically unprecedented: personal fulfillment. All else fades into the background in this sollipsistic vision.

When asked about politics or culture or war, the Boomer will often run their responses and their attitudes through a kind of memetic filter: is my answer ‘tolerant’ (in keeping with leftist orthodoxy)? Does it prioritize the individual? Could it be considered mean? Does it make me appear kind, or fair, or enlightened (cool)? I would argue that this filter (which I have spent a long time dismantling in myself, after concluding it was invalid and socially harmful) is the operative mechanism in the Boomer worldview. This might seem doubtful at first, but think about it: how many older middle-aged people do you know who will give opinions or make statements that seem uncool? How many of them care nothing for the opinions of peers or the young? How many aren’t actively trying to be and to seem younger themselves? Very few, you’ll find. This is why Boomers have proven to be incapable or unwilling of restraining or discipling disorderly students in elite universities. This is why gender ideology was so attractive to some and so difficult to resist for many of these people. “Not affirming someone’s gender identity is mean.” This is why anti-racism has seemed so attractive to them (what could appear more enlightened than public self-abnegation… in front of black people? jackpot) and why NIMBY and the ruthless protection of their property values and communitarian privileges and political power have been rarely advertised (although they’re heavily subscribed to). Acknowledging that your home price is your paramount concern, and that you’re willing to support policies which will contribute to civic stagnation and homelessness and income inequality simply doesn’t seem nice. It’s massively beneficial, of course, and so it’s ardently promoted, but only in the name of safety or ecological concern or some other absurd cover. It’s important to appear nice. It’s important to seem cool. ‘Cool’ is the Boomer burden, which they created and have placed onto all younger generations. ‘Cool’ drives political attitudes and voting and social media behavior and shopping patterns and speech.

Of course, probably every culture has had some notion of de mode (although far less expansive and intricate than ours) but people beyond a certain age weren’t concerned with it. They were aging contentedly, and it would never occur to them to ape the values of the young, or to filter their thoughts as Boomers do. The entire concept of ‘aging contentedly’ has disappeared, though, subsumed beneath the tides of selfishness and vanity and consumerism. Old people used to be relics and guides, around to offer wisdom and perspective and to quietly enjoy their sunset years (or not). No one was concerned with old people as a class when it came to transfer payments or housing policy or lifestyles. They usually lived with family, and everyone understood that their time had passed, and that the resources and focus of the society was best devoted to the young. In our current, individualistic age, old people want everything that young people have, for the idea of being cast aside or slowly forgotten is repugnant to a self-centered era like ours. Ironically, their ardent wish for independence and self-fulfillment have created a society in which many of these people will die away from family and community or be forgotten for the last few decades of their lives.

If they’re lucky (wealthy) they’ll have expansive care and European vacations and cruises. If they’re not, they’ll exist in a kind of hellish interstitial realm of Medicare-funded aging facilities, until they mercifully die. The old created a civilization that loves spending and beauty and individualism when they were young. They regarded the old with disdain and disgust… and now they are old. In both cases they are probably absorbing massive amounts of unpaid resources from society and saddling the young with an impossible debt burden. If old people have political power and money and interest and energy (which they disproportionately do) then they will fight for their interests above all else, and not those of their children or grandchildren. They love their kids and grandkids, of course, but their first priority is themselves. Everyone’s first priority is themselves. The Boomers made it so.

This is not an abstraction, or a hypothetical. Our civilization is the first one in history in which the young are being saddled with obscene levels of government debt in order to enrich the old. This has been going on for decades, and every new citizen probably regards the social entitlements for the aged to be theirs, too, when the time comes, but this is an illusion which everyone who understands public policy knows is an illusion. Programs that were established, from the 1930’s up through the 1960’s, have systemically extracted vast sums of wealth from productive parts of our societies, in order to give it to older people (who were already richer than average) so that those old people could take vacations and buy beach houses and fast cars. The programs will need to be reformed soon (and that means cut, deeply) or the federal budget will topple over like a Jenga tower. Basically, everyone knows this fact but it’s politically unspeakable (like so many other things).

In a very real sense, millions of already prosperous citizens have zealously supported the taking of the money of the young and the accumulation of debt on the younger and on the yet unborn (far worse), in order to avoid paying for their own retirements and medical care. They avoided paying in anything like a sufficient amount when they were working, and now they’re taking out FAR more than they put in, and they will be among the last recipients of these benefits. (I will dive into the exact numbers and causal factors of this in Part II). How many houses for young couples and jobs for teenagers and childbirths and careers which might have been were crushed under this heavy redistributive tax? It’s impossible to know, but it’s probably well into the tens of millions. It is, as I say, the largest redistribution of wealth from the young to the old in human history, and it has nearly all been spent on the maintenance of personal comfort and independence-two qualities which barely used to exist in human societies, but which are now of ultimate importance in our selfish era.

Don’t hide from the reality: this money wasn’t spent to keep needy people from penury or to treat the very ill and dying. It was (nearly all) spent so that a very few generations could buy the electronics and cars and vacation homes and clothes and baubles, at the expense of everyone else. The Boomers had a uniquely self-centered view of existence, and they had a great deal of political power, and so they used their power in order to enrich themselves. Past generations would’ve been more heedful of military requirements and the border and the young, but-as I say-the Boomers are unique. They’re uniquely selfish, uniquely comfortable, and uniquely concerned with appearing cool to others. These traits, which barely existed a century ago, have risen to assume center stage in our civilization and they have changed everything.

Thanks for reading.

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Coming Next:

The Boomer Debt Burden

The details and dynamics of social programs and prerogatives which have leeched trillions of dollars of wealth away from others, in order to enrich an already prosperous generation, at the expense of young people and people yet unborn. It’s uncertain whether this problem will bankrupt us or just take many, many decades of extreme belt-tightening to solve but it’s one of the two.