Continued from Part 1…
This section looks at how people think, how perspectives differ on a generational level, and the ethical theories that will be used for the rest of this essay.
WHAT IS THE NATURE OF PEOPLE’S INNER EXPERIENCES?
Before criticizing the masses for failing to investigate and organize societal trends in their own minds, let’s first ask if the masses have frequent inner thoughts. The concept is strange, but the answer may be less than one would expect according to a 2007 University of Nevada Department of Psychology study on college students. Per the study, regarding the frequency of common phenomena of inner experience (inner speech, inner seeing (aka images), unsymbolized thinking, feeling, and sensory awareness), the frequency of common phenomena of inner experience is low, with 13-30% of participants not experiencing a specific form of inner experience during the study at all:
If this study is accurate, many people may lack specific types of inner experience, and the overall frequency of some types of inner experience may be surprisingly low. Perhaps the low frequency of inner speech (17% not experiencing it at all, and the overall frequency being 26%) explains the nature of extraverts, or why many women verbalize what they feel to those around them as a running commentary. Regarding unsymbolized thinking, defined as “thinking a particular, definite thought without the awareness of that thought’s being conveyed in words, images, or any other symbols”, the overall frequency was only 22% with 30% of participants not experiencing it at all. A lack of frequent unsymbolized thinking may explain why so many people live paycheck-to-paycheck with no ability to plan for expenses. The premium for car insurance isn’t an event that’s planned for, it’s just something that happens; if a person has the money great, if not they’ll deal with it when the bill comes in. It’s why people living on food stamps eat steak, buy expensive hardbacks and then run out of money before the month ends. The idea that the person will need to eat at the end of the month just like they did last month doesn’t cross their minds.
If this explanation for the general population’s behavior is accurate, the ramifications are disquieting. If many individuals do not experience specific types of thinking at all (such as unsymbolized thinking), what would that say about the nature of democracy (one person one vote) or about standardized education? What would that say about the Western outlook, which believes that everyone is inherently equal except societal racism/ sexism/other -isms and -phobias holding people back?
THE CALCIFICATION OF ONE’S WORLDVIEW WITH AGE
Not only do many people seem to lack frequent unsymbolized thoughts, but most people’s beliefs calcifies as they age: they become no longer open to new ideas, perspectives or experiences which could stimulate changes in younger people’s belief system. Science shows that aging individuals adopt and rigidify the beliefs they learned as children or adolescents while society evolves and changes with the next generation. An example of this is J.K. Rowling’s transsexual position: she grew up in an era when being pro-homosexuality was taboo but hip and exciting but transsexualism was off-bounds; society moved on to make transsexualism the taboo but hip and exciting thing, leaving her behind. Or consider Matt Stone and Trey Parker of South Park fame, whose 90’s libertarian irreverence locked into place, unable to adjust to changing circumstances and they’ve been irrelevant for well over a decade.
This happens in every generation.1 People’s worldview become less sophisticated and more about instinctive reaction to base nature and emotional feelings as they age, and it’s happened with the boomer generation in charge of America today. For transparency, the following criticism is not meant to absolve younger generations of their culpability about the state of society (and they are also criticized toward the end of this section), but merely to describe how rigid mental calcification affects society.
The boomers were a generation where, growing up, they were coddled by the “Greatest Generation” and experienced no external challenges. Times were good and post-World War 2 America was on the ascendency. The boomers took advantage of this time of plenty and prosperity and adopted a superficial bootstrap mentality (“You can make it on your own, just work harder!”), a blind belief in formal education (“Just go to college, then you’ll get a great job!”), an extreme belief in “individual rights” and casual drug use and sex (“Peace and love, brother!”), a declining religiousness and a singular focus on making money at the expense of society. College was cheap, health care was cheap, housing was cheap, raising children was cheap, opportunities were unlimited, and interest rates were decreasing for an uninterrupted 40 years starting in the 1980s which in turn increased asset prices in an almost straight line (as there is a direct inverse correlation between asset values and interest rates):
The mentality created from growing up in idle times of prosperity created the seeds of decadence and decay which would later manifest. The boomer’s fixed worldview of prosperity resulted in a selfish, entitled, self-absorbed, naively idealistic, short-sighted generation, and they decided to drastically increase government spending so they could enjoy life and retirement at the expense of future generations. As Carl Schmitt argues, when times are good nobody likes a pessimistic naysayer.2 Sticking with this bootstrap mentality, white boomer parents cast out their children at eighteen with no financial support in stark contrast to the Jewish, Indian, Asian and Muslim American populations who continued to support their children indefinitely and which therefore gave them a massive leg up on historic white Christian Americans.
These selfish boomers are the people who lead the nation now, a country swimming in debt, illegal immigration, degeneracy, tense racial relations and a host of other seemingly unsolvable problems, and their objective seems to be to kick the can down the road until they die off then let others deal with it — “oh well, it won’t be my problem anymore, it’s yours”. Some cultural signs of a stagnant, decaying society include endless forgettable movie reboots and Marvel movies (“capeshit”), dull music with auto-tuned beats and no memorable hits in a decade, politically correct video games, replacing statues with woke versions, and awful, decadent architecture and art3 (such as “Piss Christ”).4
Bruce Gibney makes a similar argument in his book “A Generation of Sociopaths”. He argues:
“[In 1978] the gross debt-to-GDP ratio was about 35 percent. It’s roughly 103 percent now — and it keeps rising. The boomers inherited a rich, dynamic country and have gradually bankrupted it. They habitually cut their own taxes and borrow money without any concern for future burdens. They’ve spent virtually all our money and assets on themselves and in the process have left a financial disaster for their children. We used to have the finest infrastructure in the world. The American Society of Civil Engineers thinks there’s something like a $4 trillion deficit in infrastructure in deferred maintenance. It’s crumbling, and the boomers have allowed it to crumble. Our public education system has steadily degraded as well, forcing middle-class students to bury themselves in debt in order to get a college education….[the boomers instituted] a massive push for privatized gain and socialized risk for big banks and financial institutions. This has really been the dominant boomer economic theory, and it’s poisoned what’s left of our public institutions….
I think the major factor is that the boomers grew up in a time of uninterrupted prosperity. And so they simply took it for granted. They assumed the economy would just grow three percent a year forever and that wages would go up every year and that there would always be a good job for everyone who wanted it. This was a fantasy and the result of a spoiled generation assuming things would be easy and that no sacrifices would have to be made in order to preserve prosperity for future generations. On an abstract level, I think the worst thing they’ve done is destroy a sense of social solidarity, a sense of commitment to fellow citizens. That ethos is gone and it’s been replaced by a cult of individualism. It’s hard to overstate how damaging this is. On a concrete level, their policies of under-investment and debt accumulation have made it very hard to deal with our most serious challenges going forward.”
Good times inevitably carry the seeds of its ultimate demise within it, bringing to mind a G. Michael Hopf quote: “Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.” The boomer “good times” mentality rapidly brought about “weak men” in the Millennial and Generation Z generations, whose stuck-in-perpetual-adolescence mentality is also having disastrous effects.
MILLENNIAL AND YOUNGER GENERATIONS ARE STUCK IN PERPETUAL ADOLESCENCE
Millennials and Generation Z are stuck in a sort of perpetual adolescence deep into their 30s and 40s. The reasons for this are many and include a combination of poor real-world experience and ubiquitous college degrees, having entitled boomer parents unable to impart life lessons with genuine wisdom, incessant media propaganda encouraging pleasure seeking and short-term planning, an over-the-top political correctness preventing practical thinking, weak personality traits (such as being spoiled, entitled, lazy, sensitive, and feminine), a lack of considered perspective which could have been learned from history, philosophy or religion; a failure to procreate (“having kids is hard, I’d rather just enjoy life”), a lack of skills necessary to repair and maintain complicated societal infrastructure, being significantly more homosexual and transsexual than prior generations which have historically been associated with decadence; utilizing smartphones as a crutch while avoiding interacting with the analog world, ever-shrinking work opportunities because America is a “service based economy” (i.e. domestic manufacturing jobs shipped to China so you can buy cheap plastic at Walmart, leaving most people with paper-shuffling, low value-add jobs5) and vastly increased education and housing costs. While significantly more formally educated than prior generations, it’s unclear what the Millennials and Generation Z have actually gained from such education, and it may have actually been detrimental – the well established correlation between more schooling and having fewer children has held strong.
If American standards of living are rapidly declining while decadence is skyrocketing, how can these younger generations even begin to think about reforming the system when they are stuck in a mental haze of perpetual adolescence? One blogger discusses this point in detail:
I am one of the oldest millennials. Something terrifying is happening to us. We are dying while we are still children….
The oldest of us are rapidly closing in on 40. We are the least married, least fecund generation in history. Really, only 30% of people under 40 are married! Big-brained thinkers blame economic conditions, largely because big-brained thinkers go through years of training to ensure they don’t see what is right in front of their faces….
My entire life, the only message I got from school, or church, college, and the media was that every decision I made, from what degree to pursue, to where I lived, to whether to marry, was with the goal of having a maximally pleasurable life. True, as someone raised in a conservative church, I was warned against fornication and substance abuse, but these were framed in terms of interfering with the good life. In the 1990s, there was no difference between Christians and non-Christians in that general outlook. Both Christian and non-Christians were equally horrified at the notion that a bright young woman might not end up “maximizing her potential,” which meant putting 40 hours a week into a cubicle. Both warned her against getting married too young, because marriage could cut short a promising career. Evangelicals, for their part, indulged in a pious fiction that the unmarried 25-year-olds in the church were all virgins, but still, everyone agreed that the proper way to treat the world is as your playground.
Any kind of social responsibility or context to our choice-making was completely absent from what our boomer elders told us. What is the social purpose of marriage? Conservative boomers couldn’t say. They appealed to “tradition” without understanding why it existed, to a Biblical literalism that was as mindless as it was quaint, in a world where their own self-indulgent concept of marriage had led to record-smashing divorce rates in the 1970s and 80s, and my generation growing up with every weekend alternating between parents. The boomer had already set up the foundation of marriage as an exercise in self-indulgence; gay marriage came as the consequence. If marriage has a social purpose, to channel and direct human sexuality in a way that promotes social cohesion and provides for a man’s progeny, then gay marriage is nonsense….
It’s sad to watch my generation collapse into nihilism and fear as our bodies begin the process of dying. The men become bugmen, living to consume, filling shelf after shelf with toys their adult brains can’t find amusement in, because they know of nothing else to do. The women are in a panic, desperately trying to hold onto their evaporating youth, trying to prove to themselves that a woman can be just as sexy and alluring at 35 as she could at 23. There’s a lot of rage at the Boomers, but it’s aimless and uninformed….
Boomers have a perpetual teenage mentality that their parents never understood, and they raised us to be the eternal teenagers they didn’t get to be. When you’re 17, the idea of just buying cool stuff, having consequence-free sex, and binge-consuming media for the rest of your life sounds fantastic. You do not understand that when you are 40, you will not want that any more. There are tons of guys my age and younger who wear Star Wars T-shirts, collect Marvel [toys], and have gotten vasectomies, and they have no idea why they’re so miserable. There are women my age who just broke up with another live-in boyfriend of three years and have no children. So here we are, and we’re falling apart.
Our parents instilled in us a totalizing selfishness that they never got to indulge, assuring us that marriage and family “would just come” when “the time is right.” As far as they were concerned, that’s just what happens. Except it “just happened” to them because of all the social capital of previous generations that was still there for them, which they razed to the ground. Now my generation is absolutely miserable because we’re reaching that age where your brain shifts modes from “consume and copulate” to “prepare your offspring for adulthood,” and we don’t understand that’s what is actually happening. Women of my generation have been told their entire lives that loneliness is a psychological disorder, that children are parasites, and that exhausting yourself for 40 hours a week at work is the meaning of life. It turns out that continuing to live as though you were a teenager does not in fact bequeath eternal youth. “Age is just a number” is the most insidious of all Boomer proverbs.
For my generation, there is not really a path back out. All the social institutions of this country have been detonated in the quest for money and self, or via the hysterical condemnation of every kind of organic social relation as “sexist” or “racist.” In the cities, nobody knows anybody. Professional associations and social clubs are borderline nonexistent. Nobody knows or cares about anyone, and nobody knows how to start. It’s so sick and twisted that my generation uses the word “community” to refer to people who buy the same consumer products, like going to see a movie means you’re part of the “Star Wars community.” Even churches have been consolidated into massive theme parks where anonymous masses of people go to be entertained; centuries-old congregations have shuttered as the people moved to the megaplex. Brain-dead “conservative” pundits can only worry our declining birth rate in terms of funding entitlements or GDP; hardly anyone will come right out and say a society with low fertility is fundamentally sick and disordered.
Millennials need to accept that the values inculcated in us were a load of horse crap. I don’t see that happening, as we’re mostly are upset that we can’t live the idyllic lives of self-indulgence the Boomers promised us. Even suggesting that divorce should be harder, marriage should be younger, and women were built to be mothers, not office drones, causes the average Millennial to dissolve into hysterical outrage. We’re the generation that thinks having a country is racist and the most important thing about space exploration is making sure hijab-clad Muslims are a part of it. So we’re probably not going to snap out of it. We’ll be buried in Batman coffins, surrounded by our Xbox games. Maybe whoever buries us will finally discard the morality of the Boomers.
What a nightmare.
THE CHOICE OF VALUES
We’ve established that the gulf between what most people want and what they receive from society is a wide chasm, amplified by unthinking thought patterns and generational attitudes poorly adapted to the modern world. But by what standard are we to judge these trends?
There are three main ethical theories that attempt to justify moral rules and principles: deontological ethics, virtue ethics and consequentialism. Briefly stated:
- Deontological ethics focus on the rightness or wrongness of actions from a duty, rule or obligation based perspective (such as religious believers whose actions derive from the requirements of the religion without focusing on the real-world consequences, for they believe they will be judged by God in the afterlife).
- Virtue ethics focus on the development of the individual’s character and understanding of the virtues that make up good character. This theory holds that a good and moral person will naturally act in the right way, and that this is the best way to determine right and wrong. Virtue ethics places importance on understanding the virtues, such as courage, justice, and wisdom, that make up a good character.
- Consequentialism focuses on means-end testing to maximize the value(s) chosen by the person conducting the analysis. These values can either be hedonistic utilitarianism (trying to maximize overall wellbeing of society) or preference utilitarianism (emphasizing certain subjective values and seeking objectives which maximize those values; for example, a desire for mankind to advance technologically, or a desire for humanity to get close to Promethean perfection, or a desire to protect/preserve nature, etc). Under utilitarianism, objective truths about our material universe do exist but objective values do not exist for human beings due to our imperfect minds. The closest we can get is to listen to our intuition, the voice of morality inside ourselves about which values are most important and then seek to achieve them.
Having a discussion about the state of society without settling on the ethical method being employed results in people arguing past each other, making it harder to achieve agreement.
Because most of the provided analysis is descriptive about the nature of society as opposed to prescriptive, the hope is that this essay may appeal to those under any of these ethical theories. The method employed attempts to formulate a descriptive framework for human nature and society judged by its predictive value, derived recursively under a time-consuming trial and error process. It attempts to discern the perennial laws governing material reality and human nature until it’s explanatory power synchs up as closely with current and future events as possible.
After extensive analysis there will be some moral judgments applied, primarily based on the Golden Rule (“do unto others as you would have them do unto you”). There will also be an interpretation offered of where Western society’s core values originate that may upset those with a deontological outlook.
ONE MUST UNDERSTAND THE PRESENT IN ORDER TO UNDERSTAND THE PAST
How does one even begin to develop a predictive framework to analyze human nature and society? Carl Sagan famously said, “You have to know the past to understand the present.” It’s a nice quote and certainly true in some respects, but Sagan got the cause and effect mostly backwards. It is difficult understand the past until you understand the present; to discern in real time, by observing the people you know in your own life how they choose what to believe, who they listen to and who they ignore, and why; seeing the ways news propagates and how narratives evolve, and whether they are believed or not and why; what people are taught in school and what is left out of their education, with various strains of thought forbidden; and the various assumptions, incentives and demands people receive that impacts their work, their mating choices, their lives. As Orwell wrote in 1984, “Those who control the present control the past, and those who control the past control the future.”
How can one attempt to properly understand the past, whether and to what extent historical narratives are true, what information is being conveyed by who and for what purpose, without first developing the discernment necessary to separate fact from fiction in the present? It is exceedingly difficult. With careful observance one may learn how false stories are generated today; how these stories are pushed by authority figures to further their own power and control; how these narratives are taught to the masses via media, entertainment and schooling, who absorb these official dogmas and uncritically teach it to their own children, who then perpetuate the cycle. A judicious individual can take these lessons on propaganda and misinformation and then apply them to what we know of history.
If one focuses on the present, observes and comes to understand people’s motivations and then applies those lessons to the past, a more accurate understanding of the world can be ascertained. This is where we turn to next.
1 See Edward J. Watts, The Final Pagan Generation, 7: “The work of scholars such as Glen Elder has shown that, in the modern world, social and economic conditions experienced during childhood. People who grew up at different times and under different conditions often do not understand the same event in the same way because their life experiences have conditioned them to react to certain stimuli and ignore others. Their different worldviews are not shaped by any one dramatic day. They instead reflect the slow process of learning to live in the world in which they were born. We know intuitively that older and younger people now share neither the same concerns nor the same reactions to events, but we often forget that this generation gap existed in antiquity as well. Obscuring or ignoring generational differences, then, prevents us from seeing shape people’s behaviors for the rest of their lives, the full implication of historical events.”
2 “Without wanting to decide the question of the nature of man one may say in general that as long as man is well off or willing to put up with things, he prefers the illusion of an undisturbed calm and does not endure pessimists. The political adversaries of a clear political theory will, therefore, easily refute political phenomena and truths in the name of some autonomous discipline as amoral, uneconomical, unscientific and above all else declare this- a devilry worthy of being combated.” ― Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political
3 The Turner Prize exemplifies the decline. Joseph William Mallard Turner was a British landscape artist who made beautiful, romantic paintings. A prize was made in his honor, which degenerated into the worst of filth. Per Robert Conquest in Reflections on a Ravaged Century, p. 210: “It is already some years since the Tate gave the Turner Prize to half a mother cow with half a calf, cut horizontally, in a glass case. (A friend phoned the Tate to tell them that the supposed mother was in fact a heifer – and a good sign was that the unfortunate Tate people laughed heartily.). And all this defended by the typically mind-scrubbed ex-financier in charge, Lord Palumbo, on the grounds that Turner, too, was rejected in his time…Later Turner Prizes, some less “transgressive” than others, show a similar taste – the latest being smeared with elephant dung.”
4 But this trend is nothing new. “We can assert with some confidence that our own period is one of decline; that the standards of culture are lower than they were fifty years ago; and that the evidences of this decline are visible in every department of human activity. I see no reason why the decay of culture should not proceed much further, and why we may not even anticipate a period, of some duration, of which it is possible to say that it will have no culture” – T. S. Eliot, 1948
5 Most office workers only “work” a couple of hours a day, staring at their iPhone for sports and politics updates the rest of it. As an example of this, Elon Musk fired 80% of Twitter employees with no discernible loss in site quality. But the whole economy is like this and has been like this for a very long time. As Henry Adams wrote in 1910, “The whole fabric of society will go to wrack if we really lay hands of reform on our rotten institutions.” Then he added, “From top to bottom the whole system is a fraud, all of us know it, laborers and capitalists alike, and all of us are consenting parties to it.”
