Sunday 3 September 2023

"Boomers" are just as bad as their worst critics say; but the following generations are even-worse

I'm afraid I regard the bulk of the "anti-Boomer" genre as strictly delusional; not because I disagree with all the nasty things they say about the post-1945 generation* - indeed in this respect, I don't think most anti-Boomers go anything like far enough, because they focus on physical-material flaws, whereas it is the spiritual sins of the Boomers that are most serious. 


Where I totally disagree with the genre is the inbuilt assumption - sometimes implicit, often explicit - that the later generations are superior to Boomers; including that later generations have learned from Boomer excesses and errors. 

This seems so utterly mistaken and truth-inverted that I must regard it as delusional. The fact is that that, generationally, things have Very Obviously gotten worse and worse; although not in exactly the same ways that Boomers went so wrong. 

Because leftist-materialism is an oppositional ideology, it contains many contradictory and incoherent strands. So, while Boomers were keen on divorce and "heterosexual" promiscuity then feminism; later generations are much keener on other sexual sins and lies. Whereas Boomers were mad for socialism/ communism, later generations are keen on Climate Change and Diversity... Boomers are selfish and cling to life, but later generations are more prone to suicide and despair. 

And so on. 

But - changing the theme of evil is not a move-towards Good!

If later generations really were better than the Boomers, then we would be seeing a pendulum-swing back towards sanity - whereas we are seeing the opposite: the pendulum swings further-and-further away-from common sense and basic decency. 


I think the problem arises from the great sin of our era, which is resentment. While it is fine and factually-correct to hate Boomers and get angry at what they/we have done as a generation; once resentment enters-in, then we are into the realms of the master sin of Christianity: which is Pride. 

Delusional Anti-Boomerism is a form of Pride, which is why it feeds-upon-itself, is so insatiable, and so corrupting to those who hold it. 

Resentment doesn't just oppose, it assumes self-superiority; such that every criticism of Boomers becomes an implied self-aggrandizement. The worse the Boomers are painted - the better (tacitly suggested) seem later generations. 


In other words, resentment-driven Anti-Boomerism becomes just another Poor-Me/ Evil-You leftist victimology; unless contained within a realistic understanding that the worst legacy of the Boomers was the corruption of later generations. Which means that later generations need to accept that they are even-worse than the worst they can say about Boomers.  

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*"Boomers" (an American term, never used in Britain until recently) are presumably those born up to about 1970, on the biological basis of the length of a generation being the average date of childbirth. For most of history (among demographers); "one generation" used conventionally to be 25 years (with, therefore, four generations per century) - on the basis that about half the surviving children were born to the average woman before that age, half afterwards. More recent generations in The West/ developed world are therefore more than 30 years, since currently the average date of first child is greater than 30 years.