A Cultural Tidal Wave

There's an intriguing demographic shift going on the the West, and particularly in the US.  As a child of the 1960s, I vividly remember the counter-culture liberals activating against an entrenched conservative elite.  Issues included ecology, economic inequality and the drug culture.  Free sex and feminism - yes, they were once related and exploded due to the Pill - were the catch phrases of my peers in the Baby Boom generation.

The Baby Boom was a unique phenomenon in world cultural history.  A huge group of post-WW2 children grew up in a world where economies always boomed, the US was the undisputed leader of the "Free World", and the majority of the population was no longer rural.

Freed from having to work the farm and milk the cows, and dripping with Daddy's money from the post-war boom, an entire generation was afforded the ability to turn in on itself and navel-gaze.

For better or worse, the liberal Baby Bommers made significant changes to society and culture.  In the US, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was set up, marijuana is finally becoming more acceptable, and a mini-Boom of babies - commonly referred to as GenX - were the results of Boomer influence.

The Boomers also managed to elect two of the most corrupt presidents in US history: Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.  The former was elected because he was young, handsome, loved free sex, smoked dope and played the saxophone; the latter because he was black, which apparently was his only qualification - not to mention that many suspect he was the son of a radical 60s Marxist.

As these generational things do, the Boomers were Marxists because their parents grew up in a time when the US was dabbling in Marxist/Communist philosophy - the 1920s and 1930s, during the Great Depression.  The Boomers echoed, and then carried their parents' dabblings to the extreme.

GenX became the Greed Generation, immortalized in Oliver Stone's Wall Street film, while the Boomers themselves cashed in on organic grocery stores, herbal teas and environmentally-friendly plastics ( a la The Graduate).

Each time a new generation echoes their parents' politics, things got just a little more extreme.  The Capitalists went overboard in the Reagan years with derivatives and paper assets, while the Marxists went overboard with Identity Politics and Share The Wealth schemes, like Global Warming, etc.

What seems to be happening now is a blend of ecological consciousness with kinder, gentler capitalism, self-identifying as the new counter-culture.  In other words, the current emerging generation is creating a synthesis of the two extremes, while eschewing the more radical ends of the spectrum.

Now, you have the YouTube millionaires spouting anti-Liberal rhetoric while working out of their parents' basements.  They are anti-consumerist, preferring to rattle the economic order with cyber currencies and a Digital Revolution.  They are shunning Old Media like broadcast networks and Hollywood movies, in favor of producing and consuming each others' projects, and sharing the wealth through crowd-funding organizations.

Culturally, they are leaving the club scenes, swapping underground band MP3s and amateur film projects, and paying for it all with Bitcoin and Etherium.

It's really a bizarre amalgam of preceding philosophies, at least to the eyes of a geezer, and quite fascinating to watch.  These folks don't buy anything the social institutions tell them, and instead actually seem willing to do the work to research information for themselves - not the mention proudly crow their findings on YouTube.

In the end, the revolution that the Boomers promised, but never delivered, is coming out of their great-grandchildren.  The digital world has empowered them to the point that they can do with a phone what us geezers used to do with multi-million dollar rooms full of equipment and distribution licenses and Hollywood studio monopolies on media, and New York brokers.

In other words, there is a shift occurring that hasn't been seen since the Enlightenment and the birth of the Scientific Revolution.  The Gentleman Scientist of yore is now the YouTube producer.  The great composers of yore are now the synth track creators.  The great artists of yore are now the PhotoShop jockeys.

It is an explosion is slow motion.  This new generation is slowly discovering just how much power is at their fingertips.  They are re-evaluating things like college degrees, when all the materials (books, lectures, etc.) are available online for free.  Who needs an investment house when you can get $1 from one million people?  In fact, the Enlightenment ideal of the educated individual is coming to fruit 300 years later, as the technology catches up to the concept, and this new generation, many with no concept of the philosophical roots of their discoveries and efforts, is inheriting the wind.

It is quite a remarkable thing to watch, as the Liberals become the Conservatives, the Conservatives become the radicals, and both are panicking because there's a whole new deal on the horizon that they never considered.

What is truly gratifying is that all of it is moving toward a libertarian ideal that empowers the individual in a self-correcting marketplace of ideas, where feedback from consumers is immediate and the rewards are direct to your pocket with no middle men.  Better yet, they are impervious to the divisive machinations of the withering elite and have no concept of national borders, racial separation and economic boundaries.

Get your popcorn warmed up.  The show is just beginning.

Boomers Fall Down Go Boom

The 60s...all we needed was love.  Everything that had come before was wrong and we were going to set it right.  We revolted against the old order: the manners, the consumerism, the individualism.  Our parents had soiled the Earth with their greed, and it was up to us to set things right.

Our music was subversive.  We met in dark underground caverns to listen to the poet/warriors.  We found power in our numbers and fought against war.  We used drugs to expand our minds and explore new frontiers of Self.  We tried to tear down the System from the outside in.

We had a better way.  We would share the Earth and live in peace, and everyone would be happy because there would be no want.  We knew better than all of human history how to set things right, so we needed no rules.  We couldn't trust anyone over 30 because they WERE the problem.  We had our Weathermen to tell us which way the wind was blowing.



The 70s...we became mainstream and thought it was pretty cool.  Our music became money factories.  Our caverns became discos.  Our mod style became leisure suits and free love became free sex.

We tarted up a bit with our cultural leaders wearing make-up and costumes.  Glam and glitz replaced poor and grit, and we got lost in the power of our collective consumption.  Drugs were no longer mind-expanding but recreational.  We had stopped a war and to congratulate ourselves, we became intensely self-centered, admiring ourselves with a narcissistic orgy.



The 80s...we were passing 30 and starting families of our own, but we were still enamored of our selves.  We didn't want the responsibilities of adulthood, but we couldn't figure out a way around them.

Instead, we decided that we could fight the System better from inside.  We threw ourselves into corporate take-overs and high finance.  We used our numbers to lobby for deregulation so that we could amass the wealth we thought we needed to change the world.  We became the captains of industry we despised just years before, but it was OK because we had our ideals and goals.

But we got lost in the hype.  We liked the wealth and the power, and instead of stopping wars, we started them.  Small at first: Haiti, Panama.  We were drunk on the power we had taken control of and used it for our own advantages.

We realized that the drugs we once used to expand our minds, then used to enhance our pleasure, were now a commodity.  And if they were illegal, they brought in a lot more money.  So we created a war on drugs, and while we were at it, a war on poverty and a war on anything else we could find.  The anti-war generation had become the biggest war-mongers in history.

But it was OK, because we were who we were and we were special.  If we acted the same or worse than our parents, then it was all for a good cause.  We needed to do these things in order to fix the System we had once reviled.  And if we made a little money long the way, all the better.

Of course, while we were in , rather than this convulsion of greed and avarice, we forgot that we had spawned another generation.



By the 90s...our kids were coming into their own, and they weren't so optimistic.  They gave up.  They looked at what we had done and concluded that there was no hope to change anything.  Instead, they withdrew into a virtual world, one far more consuming and addictive than any of the drugs we played with.  They didn't care what the future held because we had already consumed it, and the futures of their children, while we were at it.

In our orgy of self-regard and congratulations, we had done far worse damage to the world than any of the generations before us.  We had become a plague of locusts on the face of the planet that we had once proclaimed so important.  Oh sure, we cleaned up the rivers, but we fouled the DNA.  We stopped littering, but started pumping noxious chemicals into ourselves.

We spawned an industry of youth in which we competed directly with our children for the same attention, rather than maturing gracefully and leaving our childhood behind.  We were the most spoiled generation in history and the world has suffered from it.  Dr. Spock had raised us and an army of psychologists and social workers had cajoled us, and we thought the sun shone out our tail ends.

Our ecology movements became big business.  Greenpeace, WWF and global warming were now sticks with which to beat money out of people, not to achieve anything, but to assuage our consciences that we were still living up to our ideals.  And anyone who disagreed became a target of war by the anti-war generation.

And now Dweezle and Moonbeam have kids and that generation has not only given up, they are rightfully pissed off.  They will pay dearly for our narcissism and insincerity.  They will bear the burden of our complete lack of integrity and intense self-admiration.

They are rightfully pissed because we spent their inheritance, corrupted their society, and trashed their Earth.  There are no frontiers for them that we haven't already trampled and befouled.  We had the party and they have to clean up for the rest of their lives.

Even now, as we stand in the ruins of our greed, losing our McMansions and sucking up medical resources to fight our sagging faces, we still have the gall to demand that the world owes us something more.  We want more taxes, more resources, more of everyone else's productivity to protect us from ourselves.  We are the privileged and the pampered.  We are the best and brightest.  Our self-esteem has become a ravenous beast devouring the world to feed it.

Is it any wonder our children are expanding euthanasia.  They want us gone before we pull down the last vestiges of civilization with our idealism.

They Rage Against the Machine, and we are the Machine.