Generation-X culture vs Boomer culture

[JR_in_Mass]

Just saw this article in The Onion that reminded me of this thread:

http://www.theonion.com/articles/high-integrity-moral-decency-has-cost-idiot-man-mi,26639/

[John]

Just saw this article in The Onion that reminded me of this thread:

http://www.theonion.com/articles/high-integrity-moral-decency-has-cost-idiot-man-mi,26639/

He shoulda been a Boomer.

John

[Marc]

Hi, John and all,

Very interesting conversation here. However, as an X'er, I feel compelled to offer my own observations in regards to how X'ers, Boomers, or anyone else may have contributed to the laissez-faire, amoral atmosphere of today that has lurched us into our current severe financial crisis, and a few related issues.

I do essentially agree with John in that I do feel that there are a great deal of X'ers who played the "active" role in the present financial crisis, with Boomers frequently taking a kind of simultaneous "passive" role, made possible via Boomer idealism and narcissism coupled with X'er nihilism and manipulation. However, recalling my own stories relating to run-ins with Boomers or X'ers in workplace environments, let me briefly share this one: At one place I worked, I was an inveterate suggestion-box stuffer, sending many polite, well-thought-out suggestions to the company. This endeared me to a few of the mostly-Boomer senior management people, although I later realized that several others looked at the behavior not as helpful to the company (it was helpful), but as "trying to tell people what to do." I had also been at that company quite a while, and was admittedly getting a bit bored with my lack of promotion and opportunity there.

After several years, we got a new CEO. I went to a photocopy shop, and bundled a bunch of my suggestions together, and then sent it to the new CEO, who stated that he welcomed suggestions. Shortly thereafter, I was asked to have a quick meeting with two of the senior management personnel in my department. No, I didn't get fired, but was told by one of them, whom I'll call "Mr. Doe" (a prototypical narcissistic jerk, and a Boomer) that the new CEO simply wouldn't understand this stuff; and that he (Mr. Doe) sometimes collaborated with his wife (who I found out in the meeting was the administrative assistant to the CEO!) in mail distributions to the CEO; and as the CEO wouldn't understand it, he (Mr. Doe) had "intercepted" my suggestions. With this power play, I didn't see any evidence of "X'er manipulation" on Mr. Doe's "idealism" (or even Doe's unquestionable narcissism). The guy was just a conniving jerk who wanted to protect his ass against anything that could get himself in trouble (e.g., exposure to quality problems).

An anti-nepotism policy that was adhered to would have greatly lessened the chance of such a scheme happening. The Boomer managers at the very top of the organization seemed to be "big-picture-focused" manager types who were indeed driven by idealism (and probably narcissism, too), but saw little reason to excessively worry about many "attention-to-detail" or "little-picture" issues that should have been paid attention to, but weren't. As such, I respectfully offer a modification of the theory that the malicious greed and fraud, when facilitated in some way by Boomers, is the result of passive Boomers always being driven by active X'ers:

1) In many cases, you indeed do have passive Boomers being manipulated by active X'ers, in where appeals to the Boomers' idealism and narcissism are used to carry out such manipulations;
2) Either for reasons of nature or nurture or both, you have "natural Boomer jerks" (or whoever is in significant positions in an organization) who "do their selfish thing" especially if in an environment in where they think they can get away with it;
3) Hybrid types who, if you really got to know them, you would find a person who is basically not a terrible person, but given the right permissive environment and right situation, will engage in "cover-your-ass" or similar things to unethically protect or better themselves (Jon Corzine may well fall into this latter category).

Go take a look at people such as Bernie Madoff (Silent Generation) or securities huckster Jonathan Lebed (Millennial Generation). I don't think that there was necessarily a cabal of "evil X'ers" who really pushed these men to do what they did; it was bad-apple personalities coupled with opportunity which really opened doors for them, so to speak. I do agree, though, from my own organizational experiences, that many X'ers have struck me as particularly conniving and vindictive in a way that I generally haven't seen in other generations. Some of these nasty X'ers seem to be "natural bitches and bastards" who were/are allowed to "act out" in today's workplaces, but other nasty X'ers seemed to be people who were treated to torturous doses of obscene "X'er bullying" when they were growing up (to which it seems that Boomers and Silents couldn't even begin to see it or understand it or be sympathetic to it, especially before the Columbine High School massacre incident).

Just my kind take on a few things here; any comments that anyone has are welcome. —Best regards, Marc

[John]

If you're in a time zone where you can still see CBS's 60 Minutes
this evening, then do so -- it's absolutely incredible.

If not, then you can watch it on the web site, or read the
transcript:

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-18560_162-5 ... ll-street/

It describes how Citi and BofA knowingly committed massive fraud,
and that the Justice Dept has systematically avoided prosecuting them.

It confirmed something that I've said many times: That when it became
apparent in 2006 that the bankers' models were wrong and they were
committing fraud, not only did they NOT stop committing fraud, but
they in fact redoubled their efforts at fraud. Whistleblowers were
fired or sidetracked.

Listening to the babbling of Lanny Breuer, head of the criminal
division at the Justice Dept., saying "I'd say to the American people,
they should have confidence that this is a department that's working
hard and we're gonna keep working hard" makes me want to throw up.

It's no coincidence that 60 Minutes has been led by Silents and
Boomers. It's a Boomer culture show reporting on the Gen-X culture.

This show REALLY infuriated me.

John

[Trevor]

No matter how many times i read about this, either on this website or other sources, it never ceases to amaze me. You're always going to have fraud in every time period; that's just human nature. Now, though... there are literally thousands of people who should be serving 20-year prison sentences for fraud, from CEOs and the Board of Directors at the top to the average employees who work at these companies and even ordinary people who lied on their applications to get a loan.

This is nothing short of sickening, but I still have a bit of hope that at least some will get what they deserve.

[John]

From Lost Generation's Bourne: Virtue versus Duty

The question that I've been exploring for years is the the
relationship between Boomers and Gen-Xers, and how that relationship
was directly responsible for the massive fraud that led to the
financial crisis. I've been formulating that relationship as follows:
The nihilistic, greedy Gen-Xers working for incompetent, greedy
Boomers, cooperating to knowingly defraud the public in order to make
money. An important feature of that relationship is the
well-documented loathing and hatred that Gen-Xers have for Boomers
(or, perhaps more accurately, that the Gen-X culture has for the
Boomer culture).

This is OK as far as it goes, but it created problems because it
implied that Gen-Xers as a whole are dishonest, something that can't
be supported by evidence outside of financial institutions. However,
it now appears that the explanation is not that Gen-Xers are
dishonest, but that they refuse to recognize dishonesty in others. A
particularly dramatic example that I've previously given is to
contrast the 1980s savings and loan crisis with today's financial
crisis.

I admit that I'm totally baffled by the apparent lack of what might be
called an "ethical compass" by Gen-Xers, with the Breitling commercial
that I've previously described as an interesting example.

If we look back in history, it seems doubtless that the corresponding
generations of the early 1900s had a similar relationship. The
Lost Generation must have deeply loathed the Missionary Generation,
and that explains why ordinary Germans did nothing to stop the
Holocaust.

A book written in 1913 by Randolph Silliman Bourne of the Lost
Generation

The 1913 book Youth and Life by Randolph Silliman Bourne of the Lost
Generation explains the attitudes of his generation towards the
previous generations, and could have been written by a Gen-Xer in the
1990s.
http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924014520997

In Chapter III, The Virtues and the Seasons of Life, Bourne contrasts
the concepts of "duty," imposed by the repressed previous generations,
with "true morality," which provides an enjoyable "spiritual world of
ideals and feelings and qualities."

Here are some extracts:

> Each season of life has its proper virtues, as each season of the
> year has its own climate and temperature. If virtue is the
> excellent working of the soul, then youth, middle age, and old
> age, all have their peculiar ways of working excellently.

> When we speak of a virtuous life, we should mean, not a life that
> has shown one single thread of motive and attitude running through
> it, but rather one that has varied with the seasons, as spring
> grows gently into summer and summer into autumn, each season
> working excellently in respect to the tilling and harvest of the
> soul. If it is a virtue to be contented in old age, it is no
> virtue to be contented in youth; if it is a virtue for youth to be
> bold and venturesome, it is the virtue of middle life to take heed
> and begin to gather up the lines and nets so daringly cast by
> youth into the sea of life. A virtuous life means a life
> responsive to its powers and its opportunities, a life not of
> inhibitions, but of a straining up to the limit of its
> strength. It means doing every year what is fitting to be done at
> that year to enhance or conserve one's own life or the happiness
> of those around one.

> Virtue is a word that abolishes duty. For duty has steadily
> fallen into worse and worse opprobrium; it has come to mean
> nothing but effort and stress. It implies something that is done
> rightly, but that cuts straight across the grain of all one's
> inclinations and motive forces. It is following the lines of
> greatest resistance; it is the working of the moral machine with
> the ut- most friction possible. Now there is no doubt that the
> moral life involves struggle and effort, but it should be the
> struggle of adequate choice, and not of painful inhibition. We are
> coming to see that the most effective things we do are those that
> have some idea of pleasure yoked up with them. In the interests of
> moral efficiency, the ideal must be the smooth and noiseless
> workings of the machine, and not the rough and grinding movements
> that we have come to associate with the word "duty." For the
> emphasis on the negative duty we must substitute emphasis on the
> positive virtue. For virtue is excellence of working, and all
> excellence is pleasing. When we know what are the virtues
> appropriate to each age of life, we can view the moral life in a
> new light. It becomes not a claim upon us of painful obligation,
> but a stimulus to excellent spontaneity and summons to
> self-expression. (pp. 55-57)

In today's terms, this would be a Gen-X attitude in a major break with
the Silent Generation, and to a lesser extent with the Boomers. The
Silents had a strong sense of duty, of painful obligation. Bourne
talks of a virtue that "abolishes duty." Thus, the Germans of the
Lost Generation had no duty to prevent the Holocaust, either passively
or actively, and today's Gen-Xers had no duty to stop the financial
crisis or, in the case of the Justice Department, even to prosecute
criminals who created the crisis.

In his book, Bourne then describes the correct way of raising children
- give them no moral values whatsoever:

> We have imagined that we could give the child "the relish of right
> and wrong," as Montaigne calls it. The attempt has usually been
> made to train up the child in the moral life, by telling him from
> his earliest years what was right and what was wrong. It was
> supposed that in this way he absorbed right principles that would
> be the guiding springs of his youthful and later life. ...

> Now most moral ideas in a child's mind are exactly similai:
> [[similar]] to these suggestions. They seem to operate with in-
> fallible accuracy, and we say, — "What a good child!" As a fact
> the poor child is as much under an alien spell as the subject of
> the hypnotist. Now all this sort of hypnotized morality the
> younger generation wants to have done with. It demands a morality
> that is glowing with self -consciousness, that is healthy with
> intelligence. It refuses to call the "good" child moral at all; it
> views him as a poor little trained animal, that is doomed for the
> rest of his life to go through mechanical motions and moral tricks
> at the crack of the whip of a moral code or religious
> authority. From home and Sunday-school, children of a slightly
> timid disposition get moral wounds, the scars of which never
> heal. They enter a bondage from which they can never free
> themselves; their moral judgment in youth is warped and blighted
> in a thousand ways, and they pass through life, seemingly the most
> moral of men and women, but actually having never known the zest
> of true morality, the relish of right and wrong.

> The best intentions of parents and teachers have turned their
> characters into unnatural channels from which they cannot break,
> and fixed unwittingly upon them senseless inhibitions and cautions
> which they find they cannot dissolve, even when reason and common
> sense convince them that they are living under an alien
> code. Looked upon from this light, childish good- ness and
> childish conscientiousness is all unhealthy and even criminal
> forcing of the young plant, the hot-house bringing to maturity of
> a young soul whose sole business is to grow and learn. When moral
> instruction is given, a criminal advantage is taken of the child's
> suggestibility, and all possibility of an individual moral life,
> growing naturally and spontaneously as the young soul meets the
> real emergencies and problems that life will present to it, is
> lost. If, as we are coming more and more to realize, the
> justification of knowledge is that it helps us to get along with
> and enjoy and grapple with the world, so the justification of
> virtue is that it enables us to get along with and enjoy and
> grapple with the spiritual world of ideals and feelings and
> qualities. We should be as careful about giving a child moral
> ideas that will be of no practical use to him as we are in giving
> him learning that will be of no use to him. (pp 59-60)

So, carrying these concepts forward, we can imagine that Gen-X parents
are giving their own children no moral direction at all, since such
ideas "will be of no practical use to him."

We can assume that this is what happened in the 1920s and 1930s, so
that the GI and Silent generations were raised in this manner. After
they survived the Great Depression and WW II, they learned that their
parents' lack of ethics ended in disaster, and so they adopted highly
moral attitudes in their own lives.

And so the cycle continues.

Incidentally, Bourne's book was published in 1913, before WW I. He
became even more radical as a result of the war. He died in 1918 of
the Spanish Flu.

John

[John]

The following posts have been moved from
9-Dec-11 World View -- Sarkozy: Europe risks a new explosion
viewtopic.php?f=4&t=1096

[CrosstimbersOkie]

In this Generation-X culture of fraud and extortion, no one who commits an actual crime is considered a criminal. The only people considered criminals are the accusers.

Easy there Baby Boomer! Holder is a Boomer, born 1951. Corzine is a Boomer, born 1947. Al-Assad was born in 1965. But his generational archetype depends on which cycle of history Syria is in, and how those generations line up with Syria's cycles. If memory serves me, that part of the Middle East's last crisis occurred a few years after the end of WWII. So it's entirely possible that Al-Assad is a Prophet too.

[Trevor]

I think Assad's actually in the Hero generation, at least Syria's version. Their crisis ended in 1984 with the Hama Massacre.

[John]

In this Generation-X culture of fraud and extortion, no one who commits an actual crime is considered a criminal. The only people considered criminals are the accusers.

Easy there Baby Boomer! Holder is a Boomer, born 1951. Corzine is a Boomer, born 1947.

What does that have to do with the statement that you're challenging?

John