(03-09-2022, 09:42 PM)JasonBlack Wrote:(12-16-2021, 03:53 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: Millennials are not "tough guys" like many in the GI Generation, or Generation X for that matter. They haven't yet personally seen much of big battles at war. Their economic hurdles require many of them to live at home and be more dependent on parents much longer than GIs were. But the essence of civics is not to be tough; it is to be smart, and collegial with each other. And they are.This is more or less the essence of why I like "Civic" more than "Hero" for this archetype in the cycle. The "glorious heroes" gestalt of the GI generation was not shared by all of the past generations.
For sacrificial performance of the heroic role, none in American history could match the Gilded. Of course they went into the Civil War clearly non-Civic: too reckless and materialistic. Becoming cannon fodder was made practically a business proposition. The Gilded took on Civic traits because they could not escape the danger of the 'business proposition' and came to recognize the need for organization and conformity.
For the Millennial generation one can look at the four archetypes. They could never be Idealists because except among those born to the economic elite they would never get the opportunity for 'finding themselves' in some Voyage to the Interior. Young adulthood was strictly pay-to-pay, and they paid a high price through the graft and gouging built into a plutocratic society that demanded work but rewarded it with a brutal cost of living. America divided neatly into places either economically-nuked due to the decline of the manufacturing sector (just about any part of Ohio except for Columbus) or fiendishly-costly (you could be in the information industry but be compelled to spend over half your income in renting a slum apartment). Such religious exploration as the Establishment encouraged was the money-driven Prosperity Cult little different from $cientology except for a Christian veneer or those fundamentalists that offered Pie in the Sky. For the smarter ones, irreligion is saner. To become Reactive/Nomad they would need to have a youth devoid of structure. Millennial kids got structure within a hardscrabble world.That is what the young GI's knew. Generation X got more chaos in childhood and often an alternation between indulgence and either neglect or abuse. Now afult during a Crisis Era, they can't act as Adaptive/Artist types. We know what that leaves.
Quote:- the so-called "Glorious Generation" which came of age during the Salem Witch Trials honestly wasn't very glorious compared to their idealist fathers. They were more like well behaved home school children who went on to become skilled tradesmen, businessmen and professionals.
- the Republican Generation (Thomas Jefferson's generation) was glorious and heroic...but so were the Liberty (Nomad/Reactive, George Washington's generation) and Awakening (Idealist/Prophet, Benjamin Franklin's generation)
- (skip Civil War saeculum)
- GIs were glorious and heroic
- millennials are...well, not.
This time the struggle does not have either the establishment of national independence from a distant, meddlesome and capricious king George III as the focus. Neither does it have the survival of the moral foundation of western Christian civilization against demonic powers intent on establishing universal thralldom among the defeated that they grant the privilege of survival as in The Man in the High Castle. The Civil War boiled down to the solidification or abolition of slavery which decided the fate of about one fifth of the American people (but it did decide that recent slaves would be American and would get, at least for a short time, some opportunity to define themselves personally during Reconstruction.
We have been in a Crisis era whose focus was labor-management relations, with those doing the work getting bare survival (the industrial worker of the 1950's typically had life better than a nurse or even a software engineer ten years ago if you are to look at something like the ability to send his kids to college, buy a new car, buy a single-family house, or attend a major-league sporting event). There is plenty of money to be made on passive investments that become quasi-aristocratic legacies for heirs who did nothing to create wealth yet fare best economically if they preserve scarcity. That of course may have weakened with the Plague of the Trump Presidency, COVID-19, which kills much like a shooting war.
The Crisis is not over. I can see this one ending with the rejection of the neoliberal consensus that can achieve nothing nobler than the sort of inequality that one associates with a feudal order in which people work for little and a few magnates get whatever is not necessary for animal-like survival for the proles and peons. If this Crisis solves nothing except to establish a quasi-aristocratic order, then we can expect further acceleration of the ravaging of resources, with the voracious use of fossil fuels as the measure of prosperity.
(We are in the 'pleasantly-warm bath' phase of global warming; some of us are the stupid frogs who will simply doze off and never wake up before being boiled alive. Some of us are human enough to figure what is going on and have the smarts and manual dexterity with which to turn off the heat on the stove. This said,we are about fifty years away from the inundation of some of the world's most-productive farmland while ... speaking only of Europe, the Hungarian plain, Romanian lowlands, and southern Ukraine become semi-desert. We are playing Russian Roulette with global warming as the partially-loaded gun.
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.