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Crossposted from politics@gtio.io

I do want to start this by saying that none of this is meant as an attack on individual baby boomers, or the struggles they went through. I know that despite the narrative I'm about to craft it wasn't all sunshine and rainbows. I reference the stagflation of the 1970s or the recession of the 1990s, but those were real things that real people had to struggle through. Not knowing if a Tsar Bomba was going to hit your town and vaporize everything you cared about, that was a real thing. Regardless, the model I'll paint is reasonably accurate enough broad model in my view to help us choose a new path forward.

The baby boomers, those born after 1945 until sometime around the late 60s, have been a dominant cultural force for easily 50 years, but the world they grew up in is not the world we live in, so we need to stop looking at the world through their lens.

The boomers grew up in Eden, a golden age of unprecedented prosperity for the most part. Even when there were problems (and eventually problems started to show up), the systems were so powerful they could hit the accelerator pedal in the moment to get out of them, such as when Ronald Reagan got America out of stagflation by doubling the federal debt while Paul Volker cranked up interest rates and that was practical because there wasn't much debt out there. They as a cohort were able to purchase houses cheaper than anyone since because the world was used to high interest rates and prices were proportionately affected by that, but held those assets as interest rates dropped causing proportional rises in the prices of the assets they held. They were able to go to college relatively cheaply but even if they didn't there was a strong industrial base in western countries that allowed people to leave school and get a job they could raise a family on. They experienced the largest technological boom in the history of the world, and with the economic prosperity and freedom they experienced they were free to liberalize in ways it's hard to explain today. As they aged, they became the dominant owners of stocks and economic policies were laid out in such a way that their assets would explode in value.

Anyone who has had an argument with their boomer parents or grandparents about how "it's easy to get a job" or "it's easy to get a house" or any one of a lot of different arguments knows what I'm talking about. Their reality is fundamentally different than those who came after them. This directly results in the deintellectualising of society because boomers don't have any existential need to build accurate mental models of the world to protect themselves and thrive by predicting future trends in an unpredictable world -- their world is like a garden of Eden that magically provides during the good times and protects during the bad times. We've seen this with the lowest common denominator politics, and people can totally get by just following a few simplistic ideologies that never have to change with the world, because don't worry -- everything will be fine no matter what.

My father is a boomer. He grew up for quite some time without running water or electricity. He's gone from that world to a world today where he's got fiber optic internet piped directly into his home and he can order virtually anything directly to his front doorstep in 2 days. One reason so many technologies were able to be adopted so quickly is that the boomers adopted them. We say "boomer" as a pejorative for someone who can't get technology, but they've adapted later in life to virtually every technology on earth, and they're the ones who built a lot of the stuff we rely on. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates are boomers. Richard Stallman is a boomer. This has led to the concept that new technologies or ideas are generally automatically good and people who oppose them are just incapable of handling the new thing. I had this directed ideology directed at me when I questioned the new interface in Windows 8. "You're just an old man who doesn't understand new things! Step aside, it's time for a new generation to take over!"

The boomers were raised by those who experienced World War 2, and created this mythologicalized version of World War 2 that's essentially star wars. There's good vs. evil, and the evil is faceless and irredeemable.

Despite living in Eden, the Boomers already realized there was a problem with their life philosophy. The 1983 hit film "The Big Chill" far predated films like The Matrix or Fight Club in identifying that the world people were creating was hollow and empty, and that people were losing connections with each other. Who cares? We'll just make our numbers go higher have some sex and that'll help the pain go away!

One thing it's important to understand is that they aren't bad people, they were just a product of their time (as we are, and I'm pretty certain the Millennials will be judged far more harshly by their children and grandchildren than by their parents, so we'll get our turn). It's easy to be beneficent when you're living in Eden. The attitudes I'll be talking about are natural given what happened around them.


Among the different core beliefs is there's always plenty to go around so we can afford to be generous and to look the other way on thing. It's a moral good to dismantle old systems and old moral frameworks. If there is a belief that is literally true but has bad connotations then it's immoral to have that belief. We should try to get everything now with nothing saved for the future since they experienced the largest quality of life boom ever and lived with the spectre of nuclear war at all times. Judging others morally is the worst thing you can do. These are all luxury beliefs one can hold when there's no immediate existential threat, there's so much food everyone is getting fat, there's so many homes people are buying multiple, and America has most of the stuff.

One line a historian I like talks about how "A strong and honorable person looks for flaws they hate in others and then look for those in themselves, in that evil cuts across all things, including our own hearts, allowing greater empathy when others fail. However, the degenerate refuses to judge themselves against objective moral standards and then create purely evil bogeymen as 'others' to justify their superiority against." This is in the context of painting the Nazis as the total evil to compare ourselves against. Personally, I've seen this worldview in other ways. As America's government engaged in evil during the war on Terror, I'd see people justify mass violations of basic human rights as "Well look at Syria! Look at Iran!" as if those people being evil justified our evil because we weren't being as evil as the most evil people we could find.

Boomer politics don't want to judge anyone for anything... unless they're a group that has been decided upon as evil such as nazis, racists, sexists, misogynists, etc. We see this taken advantage of by politicians today and if we were using our brains we'd realize how absurd and offensively reductive it is. "Everyone who disagrees with me is in a group we've all agreed is irredeemably evil and so we can do anything we want to them as a result including mass violations of basic human rights because they aren't humans, they're nazis!"

The permissiveness and the focus on hedonistic pleasure rather than eudimonia comes directly from the boomers. The idea that high school is the best time of your life really started with them. The idea that partying and sex and drugs are a moral good in themselves is at its core a boomer idea.

Like him or hate him, Donald Trump is the most boomer president ever. He's loud, views the world in binary terms, has a personally degenerate lifestyle including excess and debauchery including sexual debauchery, has an unintellectual view of the world and is extremely narcissistic. He makes short slogans using simple language and promises things will be fixed right away. He doesn't focus on any traditional values such as honor, gravitas, or duty. He isn't actually religious, but especially on the campaign trail doesn't negatively judge those who are.

Ironically though, his most influential detractors are the exact same. They don't make arguments. They just keep yelling "You're a nazi!" over and over again because the world must be separated into good and evil. The press (even the independent press) plays red rover taking two sides of the former president either being the worst evil of this generation or the greatest hero since the last one. There are no shades of grey, there is no disassembling different parts of the man or his presidency. Even stuff intended to appear intellectual is a simulacra of intellectualism, simple ideas wrapped up in a nice suit.

The thing is, we're no longer in the garden of Eden. There were recessions in the late 70s, early 80s, early 90s, in 2001, 2003, and 2008 and each time the political world (including the millennials who are arguably more boomer than the boomers in some of their broken views of the world) cheered as a simple but dangerous solution of hitting the accelerator pedal with debt and later money printing powered through times that were supposed to hurt. Those simplistic policies may have worked in the short-term, but every time they were used the entire fabric holding Eden together was damaged a little more, and at this point it's inevitable we've entered a period of pain we can't escape from with easy solutions. Witness the United Kingdom which just tried the "just cut taxes" solution and ultimately was required to increase taxes to the highest level since world war 2.

the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic and its response is an excellent example of boomer politics, and the dangers we're facing. The simple solution of "just shut everything down! Everyone will starve if we do that? Just send everyone free money! There's an experimental vaccine? Stop being such a Luddite and take it, everything will work out, we live in Eden! You don't agree? You're not one of the bad guys, are you?" was implemented, and even simple discussion of the ramifications of different policies was effectively banned by big tech (and I see you out there small tech platforms that did the same)

I'm pretty sure that was the last bite at the forbidden fruit. The consequences of simplistic policies are now impossible to escape. We can spend more money to get people out of things, but debt is getting more expensive for everyone. We can print money to keep debt cheaper, but that increases inflation. The boomer existence where there was plenty of everything and you never wanted for anything besides a couple scary times at the gas station in the 70s isn't real anymore, we're no longer living in Eden.

Everything that's happening right now was predictable. I know because I predicted it, and acted upon those predictions to successfully make my life better, and I'm not alone. I'm not a hyper-academic, but what I've got is my eyes open and a desire to build a realistic model of the world so I can predict what happens next. While the talking heads on TV who are ostensibly paid to help us understand what's happening act as if nobody could possibly have predicted anything that occurred. Of course they're failing to predict this, their models are based on living forever in Eden.

We have been kicked out of the Eden of our parents and grandparents. We can't close our eyes and pretend our actions don't have consequences anymore. The past 50 years has been marked by decadence, a decline in governance, philosophy, morality, social life, and practicality that was enabled by an unprecedented golden age of plenty caused by demographic factors and several technological booms the likes of which the world has never seen before. That's not to say there haven't been positives of this era, but it isn't sustainable.

In history, we've been in moments like this before. During the Muslim invasions of India around 1100, rather than improve their armies, the Hindu Rajas built more temples to their Gods so they would be granted victory resulting in massive losses despite a 100 to 1 numbers advantage and virtually all of India being conquered. At the same time, the Song dynasty was being attacked from the North by the Liao, and instead of actually doing anything to protect their country they just wrote poems about how much they wanted to win instead of doing anything that would help. Much later, the arrogant Qing dynasty would look at shipments of modern firearms from England and say "There's nothing we need here" which ultimately led to the end of imperial China altogether. Rome famously was decadent during its decline and there were massive parties and orgies while the country was slowly picked apart until the republic fell to dictatorship. These all happened because the good times led to unrealistic mental models of what the world was like, and when the good times ended acting upon those models led to disaster.

The boomers were a product of their time, but so too we must be. The answer is not a binary choice between liberals and conservatives. Both those ideologies as manifested by the boomers fail to reach effective solutions to the problems we face and while we can take some good ideas from both, they must be largely rejected as decadent in our current times. Other people have a list of other ideologies we can slot into, but the fact is that we don't need 200 year old theories about a world we don't live in. That's no less decadent.

Millennials have largely inherited the attitudes from their parents without realizing it. While attacking Boomers, it's usually for not being boomer enough. Gen Z is the first generation in 100 years to be more conservative than their parents, and I expect that trend to continue as kids rediscover the wisdom of their ancestors in the much more brutal era ahead.

We need a new intellectualism intended to reconnect with the reality of the world. Reality outside our perception is the ultimate arbiter of truth as the Chinese, Indians, and Romans discovered, and we need to reconnect with truth by investigating reality. We need to build true and honest mental models to understand the world, and we need to reconcile our ethical framework with the reality of the true and honest world, and we need to come up with ideas both new and old put together in ways that actually deal with the world that exists around us.

Those models need to be multi-order. Boomer politics stops at first order thinking. "poor people? give them money. Homeless? Put them in houses." That's fine in Eden, but in the real world everything is a trade-off. First order thinking leads to big solutions that end up genocidal. We need to grow up and accept that we need to make decisions that will have bad outcomes for people we don't want to hurt because that's what being an adult means -- When you leave Eden, decisions stop being easy and you have to choose between hurting one person or hurting another.

It's going to mean a lot of sacred cows need to be slaughtered, and that does mean your sacred cow too.

toe knee

I've been finding lately, now that there's a space where I'm free to express any sort of idea, freedom of speech really is freedom of thought and I'm not inclined to either one of those camps. I'd prefer a worldview that's accurate to a worldview that's popular.