(05-24-2016, 08:25 PM)X_4AD_84 Wrote:(05-19-2016, 10:13 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: Boomer economic elites are the worst exploiters in American history since the antebellum planters who had the audacity to claim that they were the best thing that ever happened to their slaves. Gilded elites? They had so little polish that they were easy to lampoon -- but at least they were the pioneers of Big Business that allowed economic modernization. Boomer elites have the polish -- and the power. Boomer elites are experts at treating other people badly while insisting that they be seen as benefactors to those that they exploit and abuse.
It's narcissism, folks. Someone who makes his living as a subordinate to the economic elites gets slave-like humility enforced upon him early. I can't imagine a waitress or checker-cashier of even the Boomer generation holding onto any conceit. What younger people hate in Boomers is what they see in Boomer elites -- men my age with wives less than half their age, two-ex-wives, and a raft of spoiled-brat kids who are never going to amount to anything. They went to college and had a fun official major with a minor in living beyond the means of most working people before they have ever held a job.
Well you and other Boomers will be the force that results in modernization of how we deal with aging. The current paradigm is a 19th Century hand-me-down. You may not benefit from this coming Revolution in the early stages of your serious aging however I predict you will benefit from it at some point.
The one thing that America cannot support is a ruling elite that believes that the rest of the world exists solely for its enrichment and pampering. "We take what we want and leave you with what we think you meed just to survive and procreate" is the ethos of the slave-master. The extreme narcissist could even take Marx' dictum "From each according to his ability and to each according to his need" as a rationale for slavery. After all, slaves were worked as hard as possible and given what the masters saw fit for them -- an animal level of survival. Just think of how absolute plutocracy would serve them.
If Boomers seem short of the classic virtues of education, culture, and religion that Howe and Strauss ascribe to them in Generations, they are strong on the classic vices of arrogance, selfishness, and ruthlessness. What can people achieve with that? Calamity. If such succeeds in America it will make America an Evil Empire arguably rivaling the Third Reich and Stalin's Soviet Union in the perception of vileness outside America.
It could be late-wave Boomers who have the last, and benign act. We need a vision of a just world worthy of preserving. I think of a world in which people have more leisure and know how to put it to good use. It will be without scarcity designed to control and exploit, the contrived scarcity of sustenance that compels people to suffer for economic and administrative elites. It will take X pragmatism and creativity (X can be just as creative as Boomers, as I can attest), and the rational planning of Millennial adults.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.