10-07-2016, 08:47 PM
Quote:Quote:But why the start of those issues, and not a few years earlier, with Sputnik and the Cuban missile crisis, which were viewed as equally major events by Silents and older generations but seem to have had minimal to no impact on Boomers? Or why not a few years later, since the Vietnam War was the real big issue of the 1960s. Also, a tangent, but do you really remember the Vietnam war ending in the 1960s? My memory is that it didn't end until the peace treaty of 1973, or maybe the boat lift of 1975. Of course it ended with a loss, so that was also disempowering, but I wouldn't have thought its course in the 1960s would seem empowering either. I'm interested in how it could be seen that way.
Where did I say the war ended in the 1960’s? The empowering aspect of the war was on the part of protestors, who perceived that they had succeed in ending a war, which is empowering.
You said this:
Quote:Early wave Boomers (like Eric and Dave) were imprinted in the sixties. The events of this time: blacks gaining their long-denied 15th Amendment rights plus the right to live wherever they could afford, the Vietnam war ending, more sex, pollution getting cleaned up were seen as good things. It was an empowering time. [emphasis mine]
I interpreted that as saying all those things happened in the 1960s. Perhaps you intended it differently? Can you clarify?
Quote:Imprinting requires a continuous or near continuous stream of events (a social moment) that gives rise to youth-involved movements or projects (e.g. fighting in wars) that keep imprinting new cohorts reaching the vicinity of age 22. When the activity peters out (the social moment ends) imprinted stops., a dominant generation gives way to a recessive one.
That just begs the question of how the social moment gets started and ends. If it shapes the idealist generation, it can't be determined by the idealist generation, or at least the beginning of it can't.
Quote:Quote:For my theory - that the shift from Adaptive to Idealist is defined at an early age by the fact that Adaptives actually remember the crisis war and Idealists do not - this particular era transition doesn't need to be sharp, and can be caused by, rather than be the cause of, the transition from Adaptives to Idealists.
Well actually John’s theory J
I'll let him speak for himself; that particular conclusion I reached long before I heard of his theories.
Quote:Quote:But as I understand it, you reject that theory.
Yes, because of the Idealistic/Reactive split. One cannot invoke the crisis war here. Instead a fair bit of hand-waving is required.
You're rejecting this theory on the Adaptive/Idealist split because one of the people who suggested it doesn't also have a good explanation for the Idealist/Reactive split? It strikes me that generational transitions don't all have to work the same way, and people can be right about one thing without being right about everything.
Quote:Quote:The establishment getting its act together could definitely cause a sharp delineation, since leadership changes tend to be relatively sudden; this would also apply to nondemocratic states, which I consider important to the theory. This generates a testable hypothesis: the length of the Awakening period should be highly variable since it's somewhat random when a competent leader comes to power.
No the marker is not competent leadership, it is activity involving that informs ones opinions of the world works (paradigm).
Then you lose an otherwise cogent explanation for a clean Idealist/Reactive split either, as far as I can tell.
Quote:I would hardly think those who managed WW II were incompetent.
The GIs were the footsoldiers in WWII, not the managers. As long as the managers were in charge - Truman, then Eisenhower, from the Lost generation - leadership seemed to keep things under control; it was only when GIs took charge in the 1960s that, as your previous post put it, "momentous events" such as "domestic turmoil on a scale far larger than anything seen since" started happening.
