People not accepting our Millennial theory

[pbrower2a]

Cultures change over time. Youth are more often the agents of cultural change than are older generations who have become more set in their ways. Middle-aged people generally quit innovating in their ways of doing things because they get comfortable with certain things and have cast off certain attempts to innovate that did not an out well.

The differences between the generations are

(1) how they are brought up (time is environment much as are ethnicity, social class, religion, region, and education). All times exaggerate some perceptions of certainty and uncertainty. Sometimes youth find gaps in the social assumptions that others have neglected. Some generations find that the time imposes at one extreme a highly-structured pattern of child-raising (which is so for Adaptive children), and some times leave children able to make very inappropriate choices (for Reactive children). The inner world can be very certain and the outer world chaotic for Civic youth; for Idealist youth, the outer world is too certain, but the inner world is a great vacuum.

(2) the store of accumulated knowledge and access to such expands over time, or at least it will until the technological civilization that we know falls apart, as would happen after global thermonuclear war, another ice age, a supervolcano eruption that decimates the human population, a powerful gamma-ray burst, or maybe a collision between the Earth and some body such as the one that wiped out the dinosaurs. (It would wipe out animals larger than cats and small dogs. Unlike the last time, an animal as fearsome as T-Rex would survive. Cats and terrier dogs might stick around. But even "weedy" large herbivores such as deer that ordinarily fill the gaps after some ecological disaster would not return.

(3) Technologies become obsolete, but people tend to do much the same things with new technologies that they did before them. Figure that such an object as the automobile has had interactions with generations from Missionaries to the toddlers of our time. Television has already been commonplace for a modestly-long lifetime. Computers that GI's introduced do what brute-force methods of calculation and record-keeping do. Technology changes attitudes far less than we think.

(4) big historical events. A country such as Japan changed greatly in how it raised children, especially in values taught, between 1935 and 1950. Dying for the Emperor in the expansion of the Empire wasn't so attractive to people who experienced the Second World War - or a younger generation that no longer was taught such nonsense. China, Russia, the USA, India, and Indonesia are just too dangerous to make any Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere in which Tokyo is the center and the Japanese people are the masters anything other than a supreme calamity.

[X Marks the Spot]

(05-31-2021, 12:10 AM) pid=\77242' Wrote:

Eric the Green Wrote:

(05-28-2021, 11:33 PM)X Marks the Spot Wrote: OK, but given what S&H say about the way generations work, and how good the authors' track record is, maybe there are some Millennials who are protesting for liberal causes but they're outliers for their generation? S&H say every generation contains all sorts of people. There are GI's like William Burroughs, tehre are Silents like John Ashcroft, there are Xers like Reese Witherspoon. So there can be Millennials who are "lefty" types but they can be in the "suppressed" group, acting against what's at the core of their generation.

The outliers are those who are NOT for liberal causes. Liberals are the core of their generation. Every poll shows that.

Huh? The polls show Millennials as being social CONSERVATIVES, who trust businesses to do what's right. See https://www.lifecourse.com/assets/files/yes_we_can.pdf

Quote:

Quote:Maybe Obama won because he spoke of "common purpose"? The whole idea of getting with the program.

And yeah, maybe Hillary and Trump were both Establishment in a way. But if Millennials had really gone for anti-establishment, boat-rocking candidates, then given how high Millennial turnout is, Bernie Sanders would be beginning his second term today.

The Millennials supported Bernie, but not in great enough numbers to overcome the huge primary-election Boomer and Xer vote for Joe Biden. Obama did speak of a common purpose. Millennials are like those who supported FDR and his common purposes.

One thing noticable about Millennials; up until recently they were not living up to their civic potential. They copied and conformed to the cynicism toward government of their boomer and Xer elders, and failed to vote in midterm and primary elections. Not being well-educated about civics, they don't realize that civic duty consists of more than voting for the president. Millennials are not reliable voters, at least not yet. They did better in 2018, but they didn't get out and vote in great enough numbers in 2020 to get Bernie elected. Maybe some of them were also pessimistic that he could win, and gave up on him.

Howe and Strauss said: "Unlike Xers, Millennials will vote". They always talk about how Millennials outvote Xers.

Quote:

Quote:OK, I'm not denying that Generation Jones has conservative, even neocon tendencies, but you gotta admit, Jeb sounds like the perfect Millennial choice for president: both conservative AND very Establishment.

Well maybe, but he flopped big time. The perfect millennial candidate will be a progressive Democrat, but progressives support the common purposes of society; they are not libertarians like Xers.

We Xers were libertarian in the UNRAVELING. Then the Crisis began, and we settled down and turned into conservatives. Once we had kids, we realized how unsafe gay lifestyles, pot-smoking, public nudity, twerking, and sex and cussing on TV and the like were for tots.

Quote:

Quote:Don't forget that it was Bush himself who created ICE. I don't want my 6-year-old Homelander son or 4-year-old Homelander daughter to be murdered by an illegal immigrant.

That's true; W. Bush started it. Don't worry about illegal immigrants though; they are more law-abiding than the average US citizen. Trump created lots of lies; you can't believe anything he says. ANYTHING.

I voted for Trump in the 2016 general election, but in the primaries I voted Jeb, as did my (now) 25-year-old nephew Danny. Danny preferred Hillary in the general election, but he and I agreed that Jeb was the ideal candidate, especially considering how much we loved George W.

R.I.P. Donald Rumsfeld.

Quote:

Quote:Did you read S&H's 2003 article in Axess? They say Millennials want "stability, not radicalism".

I just don't conclude from one writer's statement that all of anybody thinks a certain way. Millennials are a huge generation. Some are radical and some are stable. Sometimes there no difference between the two. Some think that some radical ideas will create stability, like for example the fact millennials are so cash-strapped because of college debt, high prices and low salaries and wages. So they support "radical" policies like Bernie's ideas about free college and higher minimum wages and higher taxes on the wealthy, or Yang's idea of universal basic income, and stuff like that. Pretty radical, but the goal is stability and security (including greater social security). Marijuana legalization has been happening throughout the 4T. It is no longer a radical idea, and shouldn't be.

You say "I just don't conclude from one writer's statement...", but that Axess article cites a lot of polls. Plus, it all just makes sense how the theory (with the different generations and turnings, the archetypes and opposites) fits together.

Quote:[quote pid='77242' dateline='1622437834']

Quote:I'm not a young white man, I'm a Gen-Xer born in 1974. I am a middle-aged straight white man.

The point is that young white male millennials support Trump by a narrow margin, but all other millennials support progressive Democrats by wide margins. You being a core Xer straight white man are the conservative one, and you are projecting your own views onto the millennials. Polls show it is the Xers who are the conservatives; your own core Xer groups, and the younger "Jones" boomers, plus the oldest boomers and silents.

[/quote]
Frankly, I don't know any Millennials personally, except for my nephew Danny. And Danny DOES act like the way S&H describe Millennials --  he trusts the system, he's a social conservative, he's clean-cut with no tattoos, piercings, long hair or facial hair, he's a straight cismale, he stays away from weed and other drugs, he voted for Jeb and then Hillary. Also, just look at Millennial pop culture: we had artists like Nirvana and Beck, they have the Backstreet Boys, *NSYNC, High School Musical and the Jonas Brothers. Given the information S&H, my chief two pundits (now down to one pundit), have supplied, I assume he's typical and the authors had it right.

[JasonBlack]

(05-20-2021, 10:33 AM)David Horn Wrote: It's hard to avoid seeing the backlash that decades of hedonism have generated, and the hedonists exist broadly in both political parties and all segments of society and culture. What this portends is still TBD. The last Civics were progressive in politics and culturally conservative at the same time. That may be true this time too, but the jury is still out on the culture piece. Their politics are already tilted pretty far to the left.

fwiw, even as a staunch individualist, I've been cynical of gross hedonistic displays from my early teens. It mostly comes from 1 of 3 types of people
1) people with mental baggage who have terrible coping strategies that end up making the problem 10x worse (I do think they should get help, but I don't think modern councilors in the states are very effective)
2) spoiled rich/upper middle class kids who think they're being "deep" and "exploratory" when they have just lived in a world devoid of tangible consequences for any of their actions and are bored and out of touch as a result
3) spineless conformists (of any age) who give into peer pressure

Don't get me wrong. I'm all for good food, travel and having good looking clothes, but some people are controlled by moment sensations to a degree that is pathetic, counter-productive and downright self-destructive. Freedom only works for the disciplined. The undisciplined just self-destruct.

[David Horn]

(02-16-2022, 08:50 PM)JasonBlack Wrote:

(05-20-2021, 10:33 AM)David Horn Wrote: It's hard to avoid seeing the backlash that decades of hedonism have generated, and the hedonists exist broadly in both political parties and all segments of society and culture.  What this portends is still TBD.  The last Civics were progressive in politics and culturally conservative at the same time.  That may be true this time too, but the jury is still out on the culture piece.  Their politics are already tilted pretty far to the left.

fwiw, even as a staunch individualist, I've been cynical of gross hedonistic displays from my early teens. It mostly comes from 1 of 3 types of people
1) people with mental baggage who have terrible coping strategies that end up making the problem 10x worse (I do think they should get help, but I don't think modern councilors in the states are very effective)
2) spoiled rich/upper middle class kids who think they're being "deep" and "exploratory" when they have just lived in a world devoid of tangible consequences for any of their actions and are bored and out of touch as a result
3) spineless conformists (of any age) who give into peer pressure

Don't get me wrong. I'm all for good food, travel and having good looking clothes, but some people are controlled by moment sensations to a degree that is pathetic, counter-productive and downright self-destructive. Freedom only works for the disciplined. The undisciplined just self-destruct.

All good points.