The New Nurture Is Already Developing

[pbrower2a]

(05-04-2022, 05:48 AM)JasonBlack Wrote:

(05-01-2022, 10:57 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: The timing is of course about right for kids to start being raised to be Idealists or Prophets. What will be different is the presence of plenty of Prophets who will know what went wrong with their elites . Obviously Donald Trump exemplifies Idealist vice without Idealist virtues, and the remaining Boomers (we are now old, but not too old to make a difference) may be some mitigation. Donald Trump will almost surely be the loudest expression of the Boom generation and, to the shame of many fellow Boomers, the one most remembered, if for all the wrong reasons.

The worst sort of Idealist is the one who exploits others severely yet insists upon being recognized as a benefactor. So it was with the loudest proponents of slavery among the Transcendental generation -- they thought that they were the best thing to ever happen to Africans and that the abolitionists would burden freed slaves with responsibilities for which ex-slaves were completely unready. 

Our assembly-line workers, our miners, our farm laborers, our domestic servants, and our salesclerks were humbled. They saw the system as repressive, inequitable, and hierarchical -- and beyond challenge. Boomer executives schooled with their MBA degrees relished getting well paid to treat others badly. I doubt that we can maintain that while having more than a veneer of democracy. Maybe one has the vote, but one must get one's vote approved by one's employer, which means that one's vote is as useful as a piece of used toilet paper. Boomer executives may have been the most rapacious exploiters since the time of slavery. They acted without mercy, and they pushed the sorts of politicians who believe as they do that no human suffering can ever be in excess so long as such results in their power, indulgence, and gain... well, maybe they will support wars for profit, but not the sorts likely to result in the overthrow of the gravy train for America's shareholders and executives.

This is similar to what I was thinking. There is also this growing tendency toward "parenting without authority" which I believe is going to be incredibly problematic and could lead to a cohort of know-it-all children who don't understand when they need to defer to those with more experience. I say this not as someone who is interested in super-authoritarian parenting, but as someone who believes people need to learn when they don't know what the fuck they're talking about and need to listen more than preach (there are plenty of people from my generation who do this too).

Boom style of child-raising is at best authoritative: firm, but always in control of itself. The authoritarian parent 'spareth not the rod' often enforcing its ways with brutality. The authoritative parent knows what he does and why he does, and knows when to give the child more autonomy. This is the opposite of the style that is neglectful most of the time and brutal when things go wrong (the kids want legitimate attention and Mommy and Daddy are hung over). Then comes the beating. I don't know what to call it, but I would suspect that that style leads to some messed-up kids. 

It is not adequate that kids learn to defer to whatever authority is out there. It is essential that people decide what the legitimate authority is, and that is not something that one can discern as a small chi8ld. Kids need to learn logical reasoning so that they do not fall for arguments from fear (as in, do you believe in evolution? Do you want to burn in Hell for that?) OK, I have used a similar line that involved Hell as a threat, but that was with a neo-Nazi (I assure you, you do not want to end up in Hell with the Nazis... I'd rather end up in the part of the Afterlife in which George Gershwin and Irving Berlin are writing the pop tunes -- wouldn't you?). Of course Nazism and any derivative thereof is demonic. 

Eventually kids need to establish some individuality as well as the ability to cooperate for some collective good. We all have the responsibility to contribute to overall prosperity, but there are plenty of ways to do that, and those can be very individual. One of the most basic realities of life is that human nature generally supports survival by making most good things for us feel good and most bad things for us feel bad. Putting a finger into battery acid should not feel good, and nobody should have the desire to do so. Oranges taste good, and they are good for us. Of course it is not so simple to say 

"if it feels good, do it",

and expect good results because much that feels good is ephemeral, costly bliss whose excess can hurt one or at the best keep one from making mature decisions. (The best happiness, I have found, is not so intense, but more lasting. That typically requires some learning, foresight, and planning, which themselves are virtues that a workable society promotes.   Anyone who has the potential to be a manager or a high-powered professional must learn the complexity of human nature and why institutions must adapt to it instead of denying it. To put that in the crudest terms -- slavery over-simplified the role of the slave as someone to suffer for the indulgence and gain of an irresponsible elite, and that made slavery wrong. That is one of the easiest ethical arguments possible. Know well that those arguments that require extreme contortions of thought to accept require that one accept some monstrous fallacy. The Spanish Inquisition, anyone? It thought itself consummately righteous.      

Quote:While my overall emotional landscape and bluntness are more aligned with my 13er next elders, my attitude of "most people need to shut up and read a book" is actually more typically civic than I originally realized. Unfortunately, I'm not confident that most millennials will be assertive enough in rearing children with these values in mind. I will say this for boomers: like most idealists, they were very assertive in raising children with clear moral imperatives (probably because, on some level, they realized how much they fucked shit up in the 70s lol), but I can't see millennials following suit, and when they come of age, their children are likely to resent them for it. Principles are just as important for providing society with structure as the institutions on which they are built, but, as is common, the intangibles are easier to miss. Millennials just...aren't confident in this area. Even the ones protesting loudly in the streets tend to do so at the behest of some authority figure or mentor and exhibit an underlying sheepishness completely foreign to their boomer elders.

Well, we aren't reading enough books, and most of what we are reading is trash. Maybe one can learn something from playing video games oe indulging in virtual reality, but all in all if you can't talk about what you are doing something might be very wrong. OK, so we must not tell official secretes or leak (or abuse) confidential information. This said, there's not much to be said about "boozing and whoring" except that it will drain resources and it is really dull material for discussion. 

Boomers were not a monolith. One career that is relatively easy to enter is that of welding -- because many Boomers did it and are retiring, so the jobs are opening. Those were the 'low-class', thing-oriented Boomers who knew that "peace, love, and dope" were not going to solve any problems, but welding together a pricey machine would. The blue-collar Boomers never ruled anything, and they tended to go toward religion as their intellectual life.   

It is always easy to miss the intangibles. The MBA model of management grossly underestimated the humanity of people in the workplace, especially those doing the hard and servile work. The intangibles that people neglect in the service of something bigger themselves become bigger over time, and potentially much more troublesome. Every generation has its collective faults. The Lost (the oldest generation that I knew in large numbers) was realistic to the fault of either fatalistic acceptance of victimhood or cold-blooded cynicism -- the latter usually being put away or blown away before I was born in the mid-1950's. GI's had their bold visions that made assumptions about human nature that proved wrong. The Silent preferred well-paid employment to entrepreneurialism, and that ensured that there would be few genuine growth industries in the Double-Zero decade... just in time for the dot-com disaster at the beginning of the decade and the 1929-style meltdown late in the decade. Boomers got to full of themselves if in power (with predictable results, like Donald Trump who exemplifies Idealist vices with none of the virtues), were broken enough to turn to evangelical or fundamentalist religion for lack of anything else, or separated into some intellectual Nirvana irrelevant to others. X? See the Lost. I see it again, although its pop music lacks an Irving Berlin or George Gershwin. The oldest X that I now know are much like the youngest Lost that I knew as a small child. Millennial adults? I never knew the GI generation as really-young adults.