02-26-2021, 11:08 AM
(03-08-2019, 04:41 AM)Eric the Green Wrote:(03-01-2019, 11:12 PM)It could be the next Idealist generation that has some recognition of X for leaving behind a better world than they inherited, and for not demanding too much to make the world good for the new Idealists.
Quote:pbrower2a Wrote:
Xers haven't done much yet to clean up the problems of this saeculum. The problems of this saeculum are not due to silents and boomers who neglected them as children. The problems are due to all the generations who neglected the heritage of the New Deal and threw it over to embrace the neo-liberalism of Ronald Reagan. The Xers grew up under this and embraced it, and did not work to stop it. That is up to the millennials now. Xers failed, and Boomers failed too, although at least many boomers in youth caught a vision of a better day. And recently, a certain millennial sang about it.
Some of the boomers and Xers can still get up and help lead the millennials in this task; the saeculum still has 10 rocky years to run yet. The Crisis climax still ahead may yet bring out the best in all 3 generations.
As is often my wont, when someone revives the activity in a thread I go back reading it...and I see something that everyone missed. X'ers have done little to clean up the mess that GI's. the Silent, and Boomers have created... in part because many have spent their whole adult lives knowing only one purpose in life in a heartless plutocracy: making people already filthy-rich even more filthy-rich, or on the other side, getting an early break because one is born into a privilege milieu and getting to stay there by enforcing the rules of a plutocratic order. The neoliberal era offered an order that considered monopoly and vertical integration the natural order of things, with those in power using it to reward people for already being rich and powerful. The proper way in which to deal with an inequitable order without overthrowing it is to start mom-and-pop businesses which demand much and offer little initially, but usually become more remunerative over time. Note well that the inheritors of assets and the bureaucratic elites in corporate behemoths often do everything possible to destroy competition should it start to challenge the economic and administrative hierarchy.
If a plutocratic elite is ever overthrown, then the solution is more safely a free-wheeling capitalist order of small business instead of Marxism-Leninism. Free-wheeling capitalism does not need bureaucratic control unless to suppress crime and commercial chicanery, or perhaps to foster some level of welfare state to protect the helpless (typically the very young, the very old, and the disabled). Ideally the Common Man has some moral compass.
Boom adulthood begins with the recognition that the assembly-line is no place for finding happiness in life. So Boomers rejected the assembly line and when X started to enter adulthood X found that the factory jobs were gone. Note well: the factory has typically been the most reliable means of getting away from grinding poverty. Well-paying government jobs depend upon a broad base of taxpayers being able to earn copious income, buy stuff that can be taxed, and of course own property suitable for property taxes. Education has its highest return of investment in preparing people for semi-skilled work such as operating machinery or working an assembly line -- and not in translating cuneiform inscriptions into idiomatic English. (It may be almost facetious to say that many academics simply get paid for doing a hobby and talking about it in a few hours of teaching each week. It's a great life, but only a few can get away with it without the overall economy going into the tank).
X entered the workforce about when giant corporations once renowned as manufacturers (like General Electric, RCA. IBM, Xerox, Philips (known in America either as Norelco or Magnavox), and of course what remained of the American textile industry became importers because kids raised as peasant farmers in very poor countries thought that working on an assembly-line was a boon instead of mind-rotting drudgery. The Lost made America a better place through enterprise; X had no choice except to pretend to accept the idea that the elites offered: that no human suffering can ever be in excess so long as it improves the economic position of people who own far more than they could possibly use, who can indulge themselves without conscience in the presence of grave hardship for everyone else, and who have established a command-and-control system almost as repressive in the 'free-enterprise' workplace as a prison. If one takes the trend in inequality far enough one ends up with the condition of the Gulag or a plantation in which all one can hope for is to earn "three hots and a cot". OK, maybe one has a TV that offers mind-rotting 'entertainment'. To most fully appreciate a thoroughly-rotten order, stupidity is a solid aid.
As you can imagine, I have little good to say about Boom executives, arguably the worst exploiters in American history since the end of the antebellum slave system who aren't outright criminals. They took advantage of their roles as gatekeepers to ensure that they had no meaningful competition from talented people from below to get incomes that allow them to live like sultans while workers' pay stagnated or even shrank. Boomer landlords, if they owned residential property in places with vibrant economies, could lease tiny slum-like flats at rates that one associates with 'luxury' hotels. For these elites the word luxury became the Great Quest as if it were righteous among the devout or enlightenment among the curious.
The rotten system either humanizes itself or collapses. Watch the next few years.
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.