Amerika

As noted elsewhere, civilizations die by success. They find methods that work, then make those the goal and lose sight of what it is to be a civilization. At that point, everything becomes a job, taxes drive the economy, and people abandon culture in favor of individualism, which arises from resentment of how everything has become a job.

We call this process Crowdism because there is no devil involved. It is not even natural decay. It occurs because groups of humans choose what is mentally comforting to them over what involves risk and mental work. As a result, societies become brain-dead and rule-bound over time, squeezing the joy out of life.

The Baby Boomers emerged in a rule-bound society where, thanks to government aid and taxes, everything had become a job. They rebelled, but ultimately knew they were doomed since they did not disagree with the intent behind the system, only the sensations of it. After a brief hippie period, they settled into being moderate Democrats.

As part of their transformation, they became ironist contrarians. Whatever was accepted, they rejected. Whatever was real, they opposed. Whatever their parents liked, they hated. They agreed on the basic idea of freedom and used it to oppose social order.

They detested their origins. They vilified their country. They discarded everything that had worked out in the past and replaced it with symbolic activities that made them feel better. For them, the Age of Symbolism reached an apex: they acted only to use symbols that signaled a lack of conflict, since conflict could impede their individualism.

Whatever might be real and actual they rejected so that they maintained power. Their goal was to make their individual choices more important than reality itself. In doing so, they fulfilled the mandate of democracy: they were finally equal, each person doing whatever they want, even with civilization falling apart around them.

Their excesses were so extreme that they prompted a backlash in the 1980s and this has returned in the current era.

Every time Leftists get in power, they do what makes them feel good, and this requires rejecting the past so that they are not burdened by doing what is logical. This is why everything Leftists does ends in Soviet or Jacobin style disorder: they are doing the opposite of what a study of reality would suggest is a good idea.

The Boomers themselves were a product of the diversity brought on by the world wars, in which governments realized that whoever rounded up the most warm bodies was going to be the Soviets marching into Berlin, and whoever relied on quality warfighters was going to go the way of Nazi Germany.

Boomers believed in the same fiction that propels all Revolutions: somehow the powerful are oppressing them, therefore they need to oppose The System and set up a new one based on being friends and having the same amount of stuff. For the Boomers, it was overthrowing government and Anglo-Saxon culture to replace it with mixed-ethnic socialism.

They saw themselves as rebels, their prophets were entertainers and journalists, and they believed they were making a “new world order” based on socializing and individualistic pursuits instead of time-honored stuff like productivity, order, reverence, and culture. The 1960s took over the West and administered a killing blow.

With diversity, culture went out the window, and this accelerated the ironist contrarian trend. We no longer shared anything in common except a political/symbolic belief in nebulous ideals like “freedom” and “eekwality.” The Boomers ran with this and took it to its extreme of subsidized anarchy, which is what every Leftist group from the Peasant Revolts onward has (secretly) desired.

Late Stage Democracy looks startlingly similar between Rome, Athens, Paris, Moscow, and now the USA. People detach from reality, retreat into themselves, and abolish all of the methods we have used to adapt to our environment because those methods offend the controlling individualist.

Whatever is real, they reject, so that they alone maintain the power. Civilizations die of success because it sets people free to indulge in their fantasy worlds as if they were real, merely because these fantasies make them feel good:

Unlike most hypotheses in this regard, mine addresses the fact that human civilizations die of success.

This applies to any Crowdist ideals, whether organized religion, liberal politics, or simply whatever people select on committees and in social groups. Societies become powerful and focus on eliminating risk instead of growing toward some goal, which leads to reliance on method and symbol.

Baby Boomers are a symptom of this and can be identified by their xenophilia, or love of the Other. Whatever works for their people, they reject, since this gives them more power. Whatever is foreign or illogical, they embrace because this allows them to pursue subsidized anarchy.

As the Baby Boomers wind down, they reveal how poorly this has worked for them. Most of them are living alone in their twilight years, thanks to divorces, and heading into full-blown dementia as they struggle to absorb the last free healthcare they can before fading away.

Most are estranged from their kids and the ones who are married seem to exist in contentious codependent relationships with their partners. Individualism lets you reject the world, but then there is nothing left but the ego, which becomes an all-devouring monster.

Tags: baby boomers, decline, individualism