The Errors Of Baby Boomers

The baby boomers get a bad rep, especially in Generation X. On some matters gen-Xers are right, and on others they are wrong.

One of their most common claims is that baby boomers were spoiled. They were not; they were raised with the whip. Another is that they are selfish. While many of them did act in a selfish manner in 1980s, they did not start out that way. They started out fighting for various altruistic causes while foregoing many selfish rewards. They were confronted in the name of self-interested capitalism, at which point many of them joined it. Some really did become selfish; but once again that is not where they started.

There is however something I noticed about baby boomers that really is wrong. I call it the bad neighbor policy. They tend to identify with their generation at the exclusion of other generations. When they were young it was “trust nobody over 30.” When they themselves became parents, many of them saw their children not as their future but as their competition. This lead many of them to do very wrong things. For a grown man to be competing with a child is a contemptible standpoint. For a man in his 40s to be beating down psychologically on an 18-year-old is a contemptible standpoint. Not only is this contemptible, but it is exceptionally irresponsible and short-sighted. This way you raise emotional cripples who either will need loads of help or be awful citizens.

The women of that generation who were a part of feminism were afraid of masculinity. So they would effectively castrate their sons, resulting in them becoming whipping boys for nasty women. Any number of these men ended up finding strength later in things such as gangs and Jihadist Islam. Of course these men, having been raised in this way, are not going to be nice to women, and what these women have done has been exceptionally self-defeating. They themselves may or may not see the results of this; but many innocent younger women do.

Then there was the New Age movement and its idea that everything that happens to people is a reflection of what's in their consciousness. Now maybe you can believe such things if you have lived all your life in a protected environment; but do not tell that to people who've lived through the Second World War. The beliefs of this kind create complete jerks who would suck up to you when you are up and kick you when you are down, regardless of whether either one is your responsibility. For liberalism and its main thrust of compassion and kindness to have turned into a sociopathic ideology is a betrayal of the worst kind.

We also see the idea of positive thinking. Positive thinking is not the solution. Positive thinking is part of the problem. When you think positive, you fail to anticipate problems and do foolish things. You may want positive thinking in a salesman. But if you are an engineer and you think positively, you will design equipment that will blow up on use. If you are a policy maker and you think positively, you will impose a policy that causes more problems than it solves. It is wrong to think positive. For that matter, it is also wrong to think negative. What is needed is real thinking.

A related claim is that the like attracts like, and that people draw to themselves what they esteem themselves to be. This is completely wrong. In fact in many cases I have seen the opposite. If someone thinks that you think too well about yourself, they will want to tear you down. If they think that you do not think well enough about yourself, they will want to raise you up. Sometimes the like attracts like, but it can work out in any number of possible ways, this being only one of them.

Another very wrong thing that I have seen has been a ideology of self – and not only a supporting ideology but a coercive ideology. I once heard a brilliant, compassionate and naturally altruistic young woman say that if she cannot live for herself then she cannot live. That is a horrible way to think. You can live for any number of things beside yourself. You can live for God. You can live for your country. You can live for the people or causes you care about. Being encouraged to live for yourself is wrong; it being demanded that you live for yourself is monstrous.

Then we see what they have done with romantic love. They have decided that romantic love is about seeking external validation, which is completely untrue. What you feel about someone you love is not about what you feel about yourself; it is about what you feel about them. Maybe if all you care about is yourself you may buy into such ideas. However I have better values than that.

As part of that thinking has been training people who experienced one or another kind of abuse to be strong in themselves and have a high self-esteem. Once again, completely wrong. The self is not the only, nor the best, source of strength. If your only source of strength is yourself, then you are going to be selfish and you are going to be weak. Whereas if you find strength in something greater, you are more likely to be actually strong, to be willing to make sacrifices, and to act with actual courage.

As for self-esteem, it is a completely wrong thing to encourage. This does not improve people, it makes them worse. What it rewards is low standards. If you have high standards for yourself, then you will find it harder to think well of yourself than you would if you have low standards for yourself. Encouraging and rewarding self-esteem does not encourage personal good. It encourages low standards.

There are many people among baby boomers who think that they are better than everyone else because they follow such crackpot ideas. They are in no way alone in that conduct, and there are many people – from Nazis to Communists to feminists – who think that they are better than other people because they espouse an ideology that they believe to be right. This is intellectual hubris. You are not made better than others by espousing an ideology. That is especially the case with ideologies such as preceding that are dead wrong.

We are of course awash in these and many other errors. And, sadly to say, many of these have been practiced and popularized by the baby boom. On these, people responsible for them should be confronted. However do not throw the baby away with the bathwater. The baby boom is also the generation of Steven Jobs, Oprah Winfrey and John Lennon. Cast away the wrongful ideas, but do not crucify a whole generation in the process.