Silents vs Boomers

[David Horn]

(12-30-2018, 11:30 AM)Bill the Piper Wrote: Are these two generations really separate? Or were the Silents just Boomers born to early for the 60s awakening?

There is (or was) a lot of countercultural Silents. Lennon was born in 1940, Mick Jagger in 1943. Osho Rajneesh and Anthony de Mello in the early 1930s. All of these heavily promoted values associated with the boomers. On the other hand I'm not sure there are any quintessential Silent ideas. Unless lack of interest in Grand Ideas is a Silent trait?

As for leadership style, I think Berlusconi (1936) was very similar to Trump, although I still think Trump's leadership style is more Reactive. Likewise, Ted Kaczynski the Unabomber was more like an Xer. His (quite accurate IMO) analysis of Leftist psychology predates gen X criticism of political correctness, but is essentially the same thing. I also saw Charles Manson described as a proto-Xer by someone on this board.

There are seemingly lots of proto-Boomers and some proto-Xers, but where are all the typically Artistic Silents? Couldn't ours be a cycle with no Artistic generation at all, and a 30-year-long (1930-60) prophetic generation?

At any given time, all four archetypes will be present in every cohort, because all four are tied, not just to the cultural moment, but also to genetic traits.  Given that, the generational archetype is merely the dominant one at that time, creating the underlying ethos of the era.  I'm a true Boomer, but many of the people I knew when I was young were very different from me.  Some might be called throw-backs -- more like older siblings, cousins or family friends.  Some were legitimately different: Civics and Nomads, well before or after those traits should be expected.  Some of the Civics died in Vietnam after volunteering to go.  

And regarding the lack of Artist types: I can't see that at all.  We didn't have an explosion of art and music in the 1960s from young Boomers, after all.