Amerika

History resembles a series of floods. Some new development happens and surges into civilization, then slowly begins to drain back out, followed by a muddy cleanup for decades or centuries. Floods used to destroy cities that would then never be rebuilt, and the same may be the fate of modern industrialized and educated liberal democracies.

Each new change takes some time to hit, then suddenly is everywhere, but then people are still reacting to it while the water is slowly draining out, and then the side effects take much longer to negotiate. The event itself might be insignificant, since the real action happens after the initial hit.

When we talk about the Baby Boomers, we are speaking of the “Me Generation” who were born in the 1940s and 1950s. Several threads combined in this time to influence them, but we might be accurate in referring to them as the first generation shaped mostly by social influences instead of practical ones.

During this era, the last of the family farms started shutting down and people migrated to the cities; in the 1920s and 1930s, this was what “progress” meant, gradually moving to a city-based job-based lifestyle. For a great critique, see C.S. Lewis’ Silent Planet trilogy or the work of F. Scott Fitzgerald.

In addition, the world tried to make itself make sense again after WW1, which required it go all-in on democracy instead of allowing anyone to have kings or other strong leadership systems. In democracy, the lowest common denominator always wins, which means that there is no hope for quality and everything will be mediocre henceforth.

Further, the WW2 propaganda about “freedom” and “diversity” finally took hold, with it becoming clear that civil rights would rule America. By the mid-1950s, government was enforcing racial integration at gunpoint in American schools, after banning rules permitting any Whites-only spaces.

In the decision, issued on May 17, 1954, Warren wrote that “in the field of public education the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place,” as segregated schools are “inherently unequal.” As a result, the Court ruled that the plaintiffs were being “deprived of the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the 14th Amendment.”

Though well intentioned, the Court’s actions effectively opened the door to local judicial and political evasion of desegregation. While Kansas and some other states acted in accordance with the verdict, many school and local officials in the South defied it.

In one major example, Governor Orval Faubus of Arkansas called out the state National Guard to prevent Black students from attending high school in Little Rock in 1957. After a tense standoff, President Eisenhower deployed federal troops, and nine students—known as the “Little Rock Nine”—were able to enter Central High School under armed guard.

This means that the Boomers came about through the Dale Carnegie style selling of self in a culture of salesmanship, the loss of culture due to civil rights, and the brainwashing into the “antechamber to Communism,” democracy. The Me Generation were the long fruit of the French Revolution and its associated dogmas.

In particular, they were products of a city-mentality that valued salesmanship and politics above all else:

After his brief foray into acting, Carnegie recalled how students had offered to pay him money to teach them public speaking and realized that this skill was what helped him succeed as a salesman. He successfully pitched the idea to teach public speaking classes for adults to the YMCA, which provided him a space to begin night classes in return for a cut of the profits.

The classes proved an immediate success. Focused on the everyday needs of businesspeople, Carnegie taught his students how to interview well, make persuasive presentations and forge positive relationships. His students would often come to class each week with stories of how they had put the skills they learned the previous week to successful use in their workplaces. Within two years, the courses had achieved such popularity that Carnegie moved them out of the YMCA and founded his own Dale Carnegie Institute to accommodate the growing number of students.

In 1936, after years of intense research that included reading hundreds biographies to learn how the world’s greatest leaders achieved their success, Carnegie published just such a book: How to Win Friends and Influence People. Despite its modest initial print run of 5,000 copies, the book became a mammoth best-seller. Carnegie’s book, like his classes, struck a chord with a population hungry for self-improvement, selling nearly 5 million copies during his lifetime while being translated into every major language.

Add to that the recent combination of 1860s Civil Rights law with the anti-Hitler propaganda of WW2 and the rising threat of Communism, which caused people to turn harder toward bourgeois love of money. The bourgeois derived itself from city values, and referred to a worship of money above concern for civilization:

French word bourgeois refers to merchants, bankers, and entrepreneurs of the towns; prosperous middle class, or bourgeoisie, was contrasted with the workers, called the proletariat; bourgeoisie deemed by antiliberals to have different economic interests; word liberalism comes from Latin liber (free); fundamental principles of bourgeois liberalism were individual liberty, right to private property, right to make enforceable contracts, and right of voluntary exchange; classical school of economics, which minimizes role of government in society, founded on these principles; bourgeois liberalism was overshadowed in the 20th century by various schools of socialism and a political liberalism that sought to expand the role of government in society.

The bourgeois mentality underwent a change in the 1960s where it, as it always does, turns toward the “third world system” of warlords trading favors for obedience, mainly because most individualistic people — stable civilization enables these — want anarchy with grocery stores, socialist subsidies, and an administrative state to clean up.

Pity the Boomers. They were born in the slave arc of having to support a system they knew was killing them, and the product-oriented lifestyle of their childhood was a side effect of that.

They also knew that politically, the founding group of America, the Anglo-Saxons, was being replaced by a Southern, Eastern, and Mediterranean European substrata that not only had different values but different abilities. This, like civil rights diversity, guaranteed that the America in which the Boomers grew up was dead by the time they hit their teens.

They were also the first generation to grow up in a time of almost universal radio coverage, followed by television coverage, which determined political power through propaganda impact:

Kennedy started his presidential run just months after this article came out. Ahead of him were a series of famous televised debates with opponent Richard Nixon, the first presidential debates to be televised. Kennedy took some of his own advice in preparing for those debates, writes the JFK Presidential Library, by pre-scouting the location, dressing in a blue suit and white shirt that would stand out from the set and addressing the camera, rather than his opponent, during the debate. “Most Americans watching the debates felt that Kennedy had won,” writes the library, but “most radio listeners seemed to give the edge to Nixon.”

The Boomers were products of their time and the converge of politics, technology, and genetic instability that made it. They grew up in an age of propaganda, whether Carnegie or Kennedy, and were forced to accept the loss of culture through civil rights and WW2 dogma. They never had a chance.

Tags: baby boomers, civil rights, diversity, JFK, me generation