02-11-2022, 12:24 AM
(02-10-2022, 01:31 AM)JasonBlack Wrote: Obviously, I don't believe the majority of any generation suffer from malignant personality disorders, but if I had to choose one as the most prominent, narcissism works much better than antisocial/sociopathy. Sociopaths don't have fixations around moral causes (except as a means to consolidate power), pioneer causes like environmentalism (sociopaths don't even care about other people. Why would they care about plants and animals?) or have to convince themselves that everything they do has some sort of "deeper mission". If a sociopath wants something, they...just take it. Maybe they'll be a little more Machiavellian and go about it a little more indirectly, but they don't have to convince themselves of their own moral rectitude the way boomers are more prone to.
Sociopaths can moralize, and few people ever so set themselves on such a gaudy grandstand of feigned righteousness as did Adolf Hitler. Narcissists are more subtle in the harm that they do to the social fabric and are far more adept at expressing hypocrisy. They commonly do more harm over a bigger scope than do sociopaths. They are the ones who use bureaucratic power to enrich themselves and oppress others. They more debase life than they kill, but if one debases life enough one breaks people to ruin careers of otherwise-competent people and may drive people to suicide, alcoholism, and drugs.
Quote:I know plenty of extremely compassionate boomers. The main intergenerational problem I run into with them is not malice or even selfishness, but insularity and a tendency to over emotionalize and moralize at times where neither are helpful. Strauss and Howe's work articulated my experience of them to a degree that took me by surprise, as they go over this "inward" tendency in great detail.
True -- the ones who must earn a living the hard way. There's not much room for narcissism in a retail clerk, a farm laborer, or an assembly-line worker. Such people must humble themselves to fit into roles that we either hate or would hate if we were consigned to them. This said, economic exploitation is no virtue, and resistance to it is a noble cause. These days the worst exploiters are often the vastly-overpaid business executives whose take is huge but whose contributions (aside from treating subordinates badly) are potentially specious.
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.
