12-30-2018, 12:48 PM
(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?
Martin Luther King? Malcolm X? Louis Farrakhan? Jesse Jackson? Of course if one was black one had plenty to be upset about during the American High. There were cult leaders Marshall Applewhite, Jim Jones, and above all Charles Manson.
The Silent operated in the shadow of the GIs, at least in the US. Maybe people outside the US could be dissidents if part of the ethnic and religious majority (Havel? Brodsky? Yevtushenko?) Adaptive types are more likely to seek to mitigate things than topple them.
Quote: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?
Trump and Kaczynski are pathological characters. Trump is simply a horrible person with Reactive coarseness (a potty mouth that would put Harry S Truman to shame) and an exaggerated lust for money rare among the successful. I've met some rich kids who are down-to-Earth. Truly successful people either have little time for flamboyant indulgence because they are more intent on making money doing what they do best or seek to go into the Maslovian realm of self-actualization.
Kaczynski seems to have Asperger-like symptoms and much rage. The only virtue that I can see in him is a rejection of materialism.
The PC stuff is itself ludicrous. At best it is bromide; at worst it is an attempt to make Orwellian lies out of words themselves. That is one 3T trend already dying.
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.