Are Millennials Cemented as Civics/Heroes Yet?

[Eric the Green]

(03-11-2022, 01:44 PM)galaxy Wrote:

(03-11-2022, 05:04 AM)Eric the Green Wrote: They are that. But many of us Boomers really felt liberated and elevated by the social and spiritual movements that our generation experienced in our youth. The best of us do, at any rate. Younger generations have a distorted view of those times painted by the media and conservative propaganda. I celebrate and revere those times. Millennials who understand this are blest.

It's all well and good to appreciate those times for what they were, but it's also important to recognize that those times are in many ways responsible, at least indirectly, for the current times. No turning can continue forever, especially not a 2T, which is perhaps the least sustainable of all of them. It's interesting to me that you have such positive feelings about the 2T still, because the social and spiritual movements of the 1960s and 1970s, as positive as they were (at least at the beginning), were ultimately responsible for creating the very neoliberalism you are so vocally against. These two things are inseparable. They are one event and must be understood as such.

Long reply; sorry

My view at the time, and I still basically think this, that a society is not really functioning unless it is in 2T all the time.

I totally disagree, and have said so here many times, that the Awakening was responsible for neoliberalism. The Awakening was cultural and spiritual, and politically progressive. Neoliberalism did not originate and grow out of boomer youth movements and other spiritual and cultural movements of those times nor out of the social reform movements of those times. The latter especially are the opposite of neoliberalism. NO, they are NOT one event, and MUST be understood separately, and in fact as opposites.

Neoliberalism has a specific origin among economic thinkers who were concerned about growing totalitarian trends in the 1940s. It originates then, and not in the 1960s. The founders of neoliberalism are Hayek, Mises, Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman. Specific academic locations were involved, especially Vienna and Chicago. Older GI gen member Howard Jarvis (also a John Birch Society member and organizer) can also be considered a founder, because his anti property tax initiative in California started a nationwide tax revolt in 1978 that Reagan took over in 1980 and brought into power. Thatcher brought it to power in the UK in 1979, and Helmut Kohl in West Germany about this time.

Boomer cultural creatives and hippies did not create an economic theory against taxes and regulations on business, nor the trickle-down economics theory. That was done by economists and politicians. It came to power in the late 2T, but that was a period of the first major reaction against the Awakening. I call it the Sleepening, and also included the "white awakening" in pop music (lousy cynical punk, heavy metal styles), and religion back in politics (the moral majority, the Ayatollah's revolution in Iran, the Jonestown massacre and Moscone/Milk killings). But its power was tenuous until Reagan's re-election in 1984, when it was definitely established as the ideology of the 3T, and it has the traits of a 3T unravelling, and it took firm hold when Reagan convinced the people that it was Morning in America.

Quote:This is why many Millennials feel negatively toward this time. It is not just the time that created the ideology that this generation perceives as responsible for many of the problems of today - it's also the time when society appears to have collectively decided "well, it looks like we're driving in the right general direction, I guess we don't need this anymore" and thrown the steering wheel out the window. And this worked fine for a few decades (3T), but Millennials are now the generation that has been saddled with the responsibility - through no fault of their own - of desperately trying to reattach the steering wheel as fast as possible while the Car Of Society is careening toward a cliff, and the Boomers are fighting it every step of the way, because they're either planning to jump out or expecting to be dead before the car reaches the cliff.

This is where Millennial anti-2Tism comes from. It is the perspective of people who have experienced only negative effects of 2T, never the positive parts.

NO, it is NOT why many feel negatively toward this time. It is because the reforms and proposals of the 2T were resisted by neoliberalism and during the 3T. If Millennials blame the 2T, they need to redirect this toward the 3T, or at least toward the ANTI-Awakening of circa 1979-1980, which in that sense you could say the ANTI-Awakening (Sleepening) was part of the late 2T. Indeed, in the late/ending period of the 2T and early 3T society more and more decided we didn't need the older kind of liberalism anymore, but I'd say the final decision was made in 1984, because at first nothing changed about the deep recession that we were in and trickle-down economics had not yet SEEMED (falsely) to get the economy going again. Reagan was a very powerful and charismatic actor-politician, with a very high horoscope score as a USA presidential candidate. He was destined to win, and the USA adopting neoliberalism was in large part due to the simple fact that Reagan was a more skilled candidate than Jimmy Carter or Walter Mondale.

Boomers are a divided generation. Probably a slim majority of us adopted neoliberalism and turned their backs on the higher realizations, and also on the reform movements of the 2T (environmentalism, the peace movement, equality movements, consumer protection movements, social-spending movements, etc.). The Boomers who helped energize those movements (many led by mid-life Silents or late GI Generation members) did not create neoliberalism, but some became Yuppies and adopted neoliberalism in circa 1984. The S&H authors pointed out that that was the year when people of all living generations decided to go along with the prevailing materialism and conservatism and follow the charming actor onto the road that leads off the cliff. The problems understood and protested and the created reforms by the Boomers of the actual Awakening (circa 1964-1980) (rather than the Sleepening) are still the agenda of our 4T today. That's because neoliberalism caused them to be blocked for 40 years and counting.

Quote:So, all of this to say...it's important to try to step outside of one's own generational biases, and appreciate all turnings for what they are, in full. All turnings are "morally neutral." They are good and bad equally, and none should be celebrated more than any other. This is a crucial point of the theory.

The times you celebrate and revere cannot occur in isolation. There is always another side to the coin, and it can't be ignored.

So, YOU step out of your biases too. And it's true, younger generations today are generally ignorant and misled about the Awakening culture.

I know that appreciating all the turnings is part of the theory. I understand the point; there's no cycle without all its phases. But I dissent to a degree from this. The cycle is largely dysfunctional (including the 2T, actually). It's better than no progress at all, which is what society was like before saecula started. But the turnings only exist because either people resist the movements that bring progress in the 2T-- because the powers-that-be resist (that is directly where neoliberalism came from, and how it was financed)-- or because of other harmful ideologies like materialism which have so dominated American society, and maybe others. A healthy society is one in which spirituality, enlightened religion and creativity are cultivated and developed all the time, not just in spectacular and explosive early and middle 2Ts as in the USA. I understand that is my opinion, and not necessarily Mr. Howe's, nor was it Strauss's.

It's not that I don't see the flaws in the Awakening culture. I do, but it's partly those flaws (like rampant drug abuse, exaggerated innocent rebellion, angry protests, etc), and the abrupt arrival of new lifestyles that disrupted old patterns that were hard to adjust to (like feminism, sexual revolution/free love, racial integration, neglect of children, gay rights, etc.), that helped make the Awakening fail and thus create the reaction in the 3T and among Xers. And this is all largely due in turn to the general on-going inferiority of American society; it's crass commercialism and competitiveness and its astounding ignorance of the spiritual nature of life and its higher purposes. Neoliberalism had a ready-made soil in the USA, where rugged individualism and capitalism were so well-entrenched already and where similar ideologies had already prevailed and dominated two previous 3Ts and 1Ts.

Millennials do not resent the Boomers as much as you say. They have adopted many of their causes, because neoliberalism caused these causes to be blocked for over 40 years. That block is why we are going off a cliff now, not the movements of the Awakening. Boomers in many cases have also been slow to retire and move over and give up their status, wealth and power, and many Millennials do resent this. Neoliberalism has created a society in which upward financial mobility has been largely lost and the middle class shrunk.

Of course, neoliberalism has an appeal to all generations. It is an easy sell, and many Millennials also adopt and vote for it, especially in the southern and red states. So do many early cohort Boomers, and especially Silents and Jones Boomers and most younger and middle cohort Xers. Who likes "the government"? "Freedom" "Government is the problem, not the solution" "lower taxes will allow job creaters to stimulate the economy and the benefits will trickle down from them"; all very tempting slogans. Who likes to pay taxes? What an easy sell; just abandon all civic responsibility and the magic of the market will just work on its own. And it has great appeal in the USA because of its history so far.

The Awakening of the 60s and 70s was an attempt to move the USA off this path toward a genuinely healthy society. But it's hard to do, not only because of the habits and resistance, but because that new path is too hard for Americans brought up in this crass commercial society to live out. It was easy for market capitalism to co-opt the boomer youth styles; American capitalism is adept at selling what's "cool." The USA is a nation of salespeople. "Dollar trappers, no past, no future" as Oswald Spengler described it over 100 years ago. We needed that "movement toward a new America". We still do need it.

The hippes talked about "doing your own thing." It was people doing their own thing, more-or-less like the others in their group. It was "everybody get together, try to love one another right now" too. At a deeper level, the human potential movement that powered the 2T, and is largely forgotten today among Millennials, was geared toward discovering the inner core of the genuine self, spiritually connected to a larger Being, out of which fulfilled living comes; rather than being led around by an implanted inner gyroscope of social programming about what success is in a commercial and conformist and glamour-driven society (so dominant in the 1T that preceeded the 2T). Some people seeking this inner discovery in the Awakening were later coopted by the false individualism of neoliberalism (Jerry Rubin is a famous example), which really just brought back the same conformity to the "greed is good" commercial programming about material and financial success through competition so dominant in American society during previous 1T and 3T periods. Discovering inner power and confidence and the "power of positive thinking" was already applied to commercial rugged-individualist competition culture in the USA long before the Awakening, and some yuppies applied it again in the same way during its 3T revival in the 1980s. Donald Trump is a famous adopter of this philosophy. But it's not the same thing.

In All in the Family terms, Archie Bunker was the GI veteran, and GI generation. Michael Stivic was the protester, the Boomer. Now you are saying Archie Bunker was the Boomer, and Michael is the Millennial, with no difference at all.