The story that boomers are all just rich and lucky doesn't ring true for me. Perhaps they are statistically more likely to be so, but there are plenty of Boomers who aren't doing great economically.
It's not that the boomers are all doing great financially, it's that they are the generation that presided over a general decline in morals and familial responsibility, as well as continuing to hold back necessary political reforms via their economically self-interested voting patterns.
general decline of morals and familial responsibility
from the Great War generation? or do you a pre-existing higher morality that existed further back than this?
I used to spend quite a lot of time reading histories (journals, first hand accounts from the 18th and 19th centuries). I'm not convinced that there was some widespread morality back then that can be objectively considered better than what we have now.
It's not that I see human morality as some unchanging baseline (see Ch 9 of C S Lewis's Preface to Paradise Lost) but I do think humans often act like animals, responding most to what they perceive as hard physical realities.
The boomers may be a decadent generation, and the weak men make weak times meme probably applies. But isn't the moral of that meme that you can't really get to the great men without the weak men?
Every generation has its moral foibles. The silent generation (or the one before them) might have been worse, since their contemporaries are the ones that gave us fascism. They may have glorified the state over the individual, the strong over the weak. Eugenics was more fashionable at that time, for example.
That doesn't absolve the boomers of their own moral failings, which I would say is an elevation of the pursuit of self gratification as the only duty of life, and a casting off of social and familial responsibilities.
But isn't the moral of that meme that you can't really get to the great men without the weak men?
The meme is descriptive, not moral. Even if the cycle feels inevitable, that doesn't necessarily mean we should desire it. And the cycle can be postponed if weak men somehow learn to be strong. I don't know what would trigger that besides a crisis, but if the generation who inherits post-crisis wealth (i.e. boomers) had been less decadent and more careful about preserving the social institutions that created that wealth, then they wouldn't be receiving so much scorn right now.
Maybe the moral principle that doesn't get enough attention is calibration.
If glorification of the state over the individual gave us fascism and world war 2, then it makes sense that the next generation will run away from that and turn to radical individualism. But radical individualism has problems too, and I would argue is not consistent with biblical morality (which I subscribe to).
So part of the responsibility of each generation is not to overreact to the failings of the previous generation, but rather to have a calibrated response.
I don't think the boomers did well in that. And now we also see extreme responses, with the rise of the alt-right, Christian nationalism, white supremacist groups... again, probably as an overreaction to the liberal excesses that the boomers gave us.
I actually wrote about this in a book review here: #933342
You might be onto something. What I'm seeing is that the generation that really had the money built up was the generation before them, those born in the 1930s. They stacked a ton of worth in banking, real estate and family money. Many boomers ended up with those resources, augmenting their own retirements considerably through inheritance. A good amount of the boomers I know didn't land their wealth 100 percent on their own. However, they do like to say that a lot and then look down on generations after why they can't "do the same."
The story that boomers are all just rich and lucky doesn't ring true for me. Perhaps they are statistically more likely to be so, but there are plenty of Boomers who aren't doing great economically.
It's not that the boomers are all doing great financially, it's that they are the generation that presided over a general decline in morals and familial responsibility, as well as continuing to hold back necessary political reforms via their economically self-interested voting patterns.
from the Great War generation? or do you a pre-existing higher morality that existed further back than this?
I used to spend quite a lot of time reading histories (journals, first hand accounts from the 18th and 19th centuries). I'm not convinced that there was some widespread morality back then that can be objectively considered better than what we have now.
It's not that I see human morality as some unchanging baseline (see Ch 9 of C S Lewis's Preface to Paradise Lost) but I do think humans often act like animals, responding most to what they perceive as hard physical realities.
The boomers may be a decadent generation, and the weak men make weak times meme probably applies. But isn't the moral of that meme that you can't really get to the great men without the weak men?
Every generation has its moral foibles. The silent generation (or the one before them) might have been worse, since their contemporaries are the ones that gave us fascism. They may have glorified the state over the individual, the strong over the weak. Eugenics was more fashionable at that time, for example.
That doesn't absolve the boomers of their own moral failings, which I would say is an elevation of the pursuit of self gratification as the only duty of life, and a casting off of social and familial responsibilities.
The meme is descriptive, not moral. Even if the cycle feels inevitable, that doesn't necessarily mean we should desire it. And the cycle can be postponed if weak men somehow learn to be strong. I don't know what would trigger that besides a crisis, but if the generation who inherits post-crisis wealth (i.e. boomers) had been less decadent and more careful about preserving the social institutions that created that wealth, then they wouldn't be receiving so much scorn right now.
Maybe the moral principle that doesn't get enough attention is calibration.
If glorification of the state over the individual gave us fascism and world war 2, then it makes sense that the next generation will run away from that and turn to radical individualism. But radical individualism has problems too, and I would argue is not consistent with biblical morality (which I subscribe to).
So part of the responsibility of each generation is not to overreact to the failings of the previous generation, but rather to have a calibrated response.
I don't think the boomers did well in that. And now we also see extreme responses, with the rise of the alt-right, Christian nationalism, white supremacist groups... again, probably as an overreaction to the liberal excesses that the boomers gave us.
I actually wrote about this in a book review here: #933342
All my ranting, all my posts and writing... and SimpleStacker just NAILS it in one, neat, sentence.
Fuck the boomers
You might be onto something. What I'm seeing is that the generation that really had the money built up was the generation before them, those born in the 1930s. They stacked a ton of worth in banking, real estate and family money. Many boomers ended up with those resources, augmenting their own retirements considerably through inheritance. A good amount of the boomers I know didn't land their wealth 100 percent on their own. However, they do like to say that a lot and then look down on generations after why they can't "do the same."
GOT what they deserve.
Muhaaa-ahaaaaa!
Also, stop leeching on the public coffers, bloody boomers.