03-25-2017, 06:21 PM
(This post was last modified: 03-25-2017, 07:02 PM by Eric the Green.)
(03-25-2017, 01:51 PM)disasterzone Wrote: I think different things cause sociopathy in different generations. For some reason with Boomers the more upper class they are the more sociopathic they are but with Xers it's the opposite with the poorer Xers having more sociopathic traits. With Millennials the bullied outcasts or people on the fringes seem to become more sociopathic such as Adam Lanza or Elliot Rodger. Why do you think there's such a difference between which parts of each generation become sociopathic? In Boomers permissiveness and good times produce it but in Xers poverty and neglect produce it and in Millennials bullying, being different, being outcast, and alienation produce it. Or in contrast being very popular and well-liked. Social capital is important to Millennials so lack of social capital can drive someone off the edge and too much social capital can create a monster.
That's a good summary.
The accusations against boomers in the opening post have some merit. Obviously, our two most sociopathic presidents ever were boomers. Boomers favored Drump at the polls by a decent margin.
It wasn't always so, though. It wasn't boomers who voted in the largest numbers for Ronald Reagan, who started us down the path that the writer in the OP complains about. It was GIs, Silents and Lost, and soon the Gen Xers joined them and became the Republicans' strongest supporters. Actually the strongest supporters of the Republican "neo-liberal" counter-revolution were the Jonesers: the last boomers and first Xers. But that has changed over time; some Xers and Jones Boomers have thought better of it by now, and as a whole Boomers recently became slightly, and now strongly, more Republican. The early 50s cohorts remained the most idealistic Boomers the longest, according to the info and charts posted here earlier.
So, were boomers idealistic in youth, and sociopathic now?
The author Gibney may have some good data on things like boomer failure to save money for retirement. Boomers grew up on the "live for today" ethos. I wouldn't call this "improvidence" "sociopathic." Gen Xers had a much worse record in really-sociopathic things like crime and even drugs in youth than boomers, even though boomers were worse than Silents and GIs in these respects. Now, the white Xers are the ones caught up in an opiates epidemic. S&H were guests on a program which detailed how boomers made better parents than other generations, and the claims of Gibney about how great GI bosses were as opposed to boomers, is really questionable. It was the GI bosses and managers who were complacent and hierarchical. The GIs I remember as bosses were haughty, mean and scornful of young boomers like me. But that's just my experience. We also have the poor record of corporate decline that started under their leadership in the 1970s.
But it's wrong to say that the Boomers created today's neo-liberal politics. Kepi used to make that mistake. One generation is not responsible for how the nation votes; that's up to all the generations of voting age, which is three of them at least. The facts don't bear out the idea that the Boomers were the most neo-liberal of the recent generations. Now they may be, especially as Silents die off, but only since Trump deceived them-- many feeling insecure in a changing society.
The GIs didn't like boomer idealism in youth either, any more than cynical Xers do today, and thought it was the impatience of young spoiled brats. Resentful, conservative Xers like Galen still say that about boomers. But it's wrong to deny that they did play powerful roles in the civil rights, environmental and peace movements, whatever you think of them. Freedom Summer in 1964 was staffed by early boomers, at least by S&H dating. So were all the movements that followed. Many leaders were older, but these Awakening movements would not have existed without the boom in youthful idealism in the sixties.
The question is how many blue boomers are there taking the lead now as idealists in our current 4T, having not sold out or thrown out the idealism of their youth. There are some, but that does not mean they are the majority of voters, or all the most-powerful leaders.
