War between generations

J

judvic

The Force is Strong With This One
I have noticed that for a while mainstream medias have been pushing for a war between generations.

On the one hand they claim that the young generation is entitled to be angry with the babyboomers because of the amount of public debt they leave behind them, and on the other hand they are frightening the baby boomers with these young, lazy and uneducated people that are a threat for their security.

I must admit that I am appalled by what happened to the world during the babyboomers' time and by the way they gave over the education and the health of their children to institutions. This has lead to this ignorant youth generation unable to count, write, or think decently, and who unlike its uneducated ancestors has no knowledge of the natural world.

It is highly probable that these institutions were lead astray by the PTB intentionnaly.

We should be very carefull not to fall in this trap of blaming one generation because it will lead to nothing but pain. Had it been us (I am 34) we probably would have acted the same way because until we carry out the Work we are only little machines following the programs written by the PTB.

This war of generations is just anothers means of dividing us and if we subject to it we will only be the pawns of the PTB.

Rather we have to look ahead and start rebuilding together what we can.


Ludovic
 
Dear Ludovic,

What you say it is interesteing (i am 41 so about the same generation like you). Blaming the 'younger generation' is easy since the usuall argument is 'we had nothing, or very few things, and we gave them everything... what they want!!!'. Hope you agree on that and also lets forget the mainstream media and their issues.

Lets see what a 'teenager' through the years. Us for example.

When we were teenagers have the 'political' ideals, no matter how fake they were and are, appealed? There was still the west/east democracy/communism divide. We believe, even wrongly, that we fought for something but it gave us a purpose. The political parties belonged to the right or the left and when in power they followed a policy that was on the right or the left. Nowdays they both do the same things, the only thing that changes is how they pass it to the people....

The resources we had to achieve our education goals were limited because our parents could not give us everything and many had to work to study (i was lucky and did not...but my pocket money were limited). I know that all of those made me appreciate what my parents did for me and made me wanting to do better as a way to show them that they (and for me ofcourse) have achieved something.

Now the now days teenagers.

Political ideals? Non-existent. Money rules all ideals and for many of them is the only 'ideal'. Therefore they are missing something i their lives even if they donot understand it.

Education wise. As you correctly point out they come out completly ignorant of general knowledge, unable to count, write, or think decently. On top of that with all this 'student loans' and get into debt know-pay later policy they are in chains for the rest of their lives the moment they enter the system. Also since they donot understand it and live an 'easy' life how they can appreciate the value of money.

Last but not least and contrary to the statement 'we gave them everything' we gave them nothing. I am not talking about you or me or anybody in particular but in general. How many of those babyboomers as you say that have families seen them in a museum with their kids ? How many seat down with their kids and had a family evening, real quality time and not playing nitendo... How many times have they seat down with their kids and listened to them?

The statement meant that we had a nanny to take care of them, we gave them cable tv and internet and nitendo and xbox and and... but not US.

So you have a generation with no ideals, no real parenthood and guidance, a generation seeing the rich and powerfull doing anything they want and ofcourse make the obvious choice. They have to be like them so they can rip the fruits of power and money and when the system locks us out then... bad system you have to be destroyed...

I donot if i make full sense in what i am trying to say but i hope my point gets through and look forward to your and others opinions about that.

Andreas
 
I have a teenage child and I don't recognize any of this. All this just seems like standard stereotyping.

Looking at my teenager and her friends, they seem very smart, have high political ideals (more than their disillusioned parents!) and have had a much more rigorous education than their parents did.

Statements like "we gave them nothing" are simplistic over-statements and do little to illuminate the situation.

Also, culturally, the generation gap is less than it has been for decades. Just this week the Boston Globe had a feature about parents and teenagers who consume the same culture.

The generation gap that some political types are trying to manufacture has to do with propaganda efforts to dismantle social security. These political operatives have been hammering the younger generation with "there will be no more social security left when you retire" and "the baby boomers will leave everyone broke when they retire and need medical care." All propaganda designed to privatize social security and medicare to make a few financial services companies rich.

The truth cannot be gotten at by thinking in stereotypes, especially ones peddled by the PTB.

eagles fly free said:
Dear Ludovic,

Now the now days teenagers.

Political ideals? Non-existent. Money rules all ideals and for many of them is the only ''ideal''. Therefore they are missing something i their lives even if they donot understand it.

Education wise. As you correctly point out they come out completly ignorant of general knowledge, unable to count, write, or think decently. On top of that with all this ''student loans'' and get into debt know-pay later policy they are in chains for the rest of their lives the moment they enter the system. Also since they donot understand it and live an ''easy'' life how they can appreciate the value of money.

Last but not least and contrary to the statement ''we gave them everything'' we gave them nothing. I am not talking about you or me or anybody in particular but in general. How many of those babyboomers as you say that have families seen them in a museum with their kids ? How many seat down with their kids and had a family evening, real quality time and not playing nitendo... How many times have they seat down with their kids and listened to them?

The statement meant that we had a nanny to take care of them, we gave them cable tv and internet and nitendo and xbox and and... but not US.


Andreas
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Andreas, I see now that you are located in the U.K. I mistakenly thought you were U.S. based. There could well be national differences in these types of things. Sorry if I jumped the gun.
 
Hello Andreas, Donald,

I would like to precise one thing: it is always difficult to make a global analysis because there is on the one hand the individual behaviour and on the other hand the group behaviour.
This is a major point in science:chemistry, thermodynamicss, quantum mecanics. You can predict and give "laws" for a macroscopic phenomenom but these laws will not be right for the indivdual particle, atom, molecule...
Fo instance in chemistry when one writes that a reaction is taking place, one speaks statistically, at the mole level, but it is impossible to say that a precise molecule will interact.

So my point is to enlarge this concept to society: there are global trends but they are irrelevant for individuals. This may seem paradoxal but life is paradox....

So Donald it is possible that your daughter is bright even though the generation isn't so bright.
And what you call stereotypes maybe have a value: they are this global trend I speak about.

I would also like to say that I do not judge the younger generation. I merely observe that they are not able to use their lower intellectual center as the previous 2 generations did.
I aso think that the generation I belong to (and I include myself) is reatively uneducated but it was only the beginning.
In France, Laurent Lafarge (mathematician, Fieds laureate) speaks extensivey about the problem of education and according to him the big shift occured in 1966 when the programs for secondary education were changed and I agree with him.

I don't think the young generation was given nothing, but surely they were not given what they needed. Of course this has happened before, but the scale of the phenomenom has reached a peak here.

I am not as pessimistic as you are Andreas: this generation is still human (even though hampered by terrible nutrition) and if the individuals are willing to Work on themselves they will manage to improve.
I don't want to make a ranking with the worst: following ideologies or living for fun and money are about as bad and have in common the fact that they deny objective reality.

I think what is important is not to blame and self lament but rather to assess the situation for what it is and work together to change it.

And Donald what makes you think that the social security issue is the reason why the press is focusing on this generation gap?

I would rather say that the old tactic : divide et impera, is what is going on.


Ludovic
 
DonaldJHunt said:
Andreas, I see now that you are located in the U.K. I mistakenly thought you were U.S. based. There could well be national differences in these types of things. Sorry if I jumped the gun.
Click to expand...
Yes, I think I was not precise enough.
The pressure for dividing generations is existing in a lot of places but the form it takes changes:
What I wrote was about France but I believe that to a large extent it is true of the occidental world under the dominion of the Anglo-Saxons (US+GB).



In Hungary the generation gap is really visible but those that are worse off are those people who benefitted from the communist system (which by the way wasn't that bad for the working class...).
The young generation (the children of the later) going to college today is in better position, at least from the material point of view.
But the antagonism between these two generations is strong and it is often that the children blame their parents for being communists whereas the parents just can't accept the capitalist system and blame their children for their life. And the media are playing on this.

In western Africa, this generation gap is also used by the PTB. For instance in Ivory-Coast it is the young patriots that back the president, himself blaming the older generation for backing France....
The result is leading to civil war.

I spoke about these two countrie because I have lived and worked there.

I don't want to generalise too much, but I have a strong working hypothesis that such is the case in many places. This would need confirmation.

Ludovic
 
This is the function it served in the United States since the 1980s with the rise of the "Generation X" along with the push to eliminate the social welfare protections. To this day, the press keeps saying, we need to "reform" entitlement programs (i.e., drastically cut benefits) before the baby boomers retire or else raise taxes very steeply. This was preceded by years of propaganda saying that social security will be "bankrupt" and there will be nothing left when Gen X and the one after that retires.

All of which is not true. I can't go into all the details now, but here's one. They have tried to sell the idea that Social Security is a retirement investment program. In fact, the way it works is that those who are working pay into it and that money is drawn out by those retired or disabled. So there will be a type of accounting "deficit" while the bulk of the baby boomers are retired and the less numerous Gen X are working. But, they never mention that when Gen X is retired, the system will generate a surplus because there are fewer Gen X people but the next generation, the so-called "millennials," "echo boomers," or Gen Y are actually very numerous. Not to mention the fact that Social Security would have been generating a big surplus in the last decade or so but the fund was raided to cover up deficit spending for the War on Terrorism.

But the timetable and reasons for pushing the generation gap are very different in the United States because of these political reasons.

Again, the cultural data in the United States is very clear. The generation gap is less than it has been for a century.

judvic said:
Hello Andreas, Donald,


And Donald what makes you think that the social security issue is the reason why the press is focusing on this generation gap?

I would rather say that the old tactic : divide et impera, is what is going on.


Ludovic
Click to expand...
 
DonaldJHunt said:
This is the function it served in the United States since the 1980s with the rise of the "Generation X" along with the push to eliminate the social welfare protections. To this day, the press keeps saying, we need to "reform" entitlement programs (i.e., drastically cut benefits) before the baby boomers retire or else raise taxes very steeply. This was preceded by years of propaganda saying that social security will be "bankrupt" and there will be nothing left when Gen X and the one after that retires.

All of which is not true. I can't go into all the details now, but here's one. They have tried to sell the idea that Social Security is a retirement investment program. In fact, the way it works is that those who are working pay into it and that money is drawn out by those retired or disabled. So there will be a type of accounting "deficit" while the bulk of the baby boomers are retired and the less numerous Gen X are working. But, they never mention that when Gen X is retired, the system will generate a surplus because there are fewer Gen X people but the next generation, the so-called "millennials," "echo boomers," or Gen Y are actually very numerous. Not to mention the fact that Social Security would have been generating a big surplus in the last decade or so but the fund was raided to cover up deficit spending for the War on Terrorism.

But the timetable and reasons for pushing the generation gap are very different in the United States because of these political reasons.

Again, the cultural data in the United States is very clear. The generation gap is less than it has been for a century.
Click to expand...
The functionning of the social security in the US comes as a surprise for me, because I thought people had to capitalize on an individual basis, saving while they work for when they are retired. From what you write I understand that it actually works the same way as it works in France, that means that there is a solidarity between generations and that the working people are transfering part of the money they earn to the retired people.
So actually the situation in France is the same as is the US but with an offset of a decade: today French are told that this system of solidarity between generations is not possible any longer and that people should save money for the future, and the reason they give is the demographic choc, exactly the same as in the US.
For sure here also they forget to say this demographic problem is only transitory. (in France the fertility rate is roughly around 2 children/woman).

Maybe there are differently timed agendas also. What you state (financial predators) is compatible with the "divide et impera" (divide in order to rule) that is going on endlessly.

I felt like stressing this matter of war between generations because it comes in addition to so many other pressure to divide us (race, religion, gender, class...) and is really symptomatic of an Orwelian world.

And I also wanted to warn about this because I fell in the trap of blaming the babyboomers, and thus failed to understand that by doing so I was acting mechanically and serving the PTB's interests.

Until then I had never made the mistake of blaming a group for what went wrong and so it came as a shock to me when I realised that I was blaming people because of their belonging to a class age.

What is the point of avoiding to fall in the anti-islamic hysteria if one falls in another hysteria?

Ludovic
 
I read Harry S Dent Jr's book "The Great Boom Ahead" in the early 90's and this first interested me in the generation divide. Dent based his boom on baby boomers reaching the peak of their spending powers at an age of 49 and super-imposed the birth rate chart over the S&P 500. The two charts seemed to be in synch. I'm not sure how it is today with the advet of easy credit.

His charts can be seen here, the one pictured runs from 1960, the ones in his book are from 1920, it should give some idea though.

http://store.hsdent.com/index.asp?PageAction=VIEWCATS&Category=5

Dent's prediction was that "the mother all depressions" would be in around 2010.

Anyway, Dent bases a lot of his generational information from Strauss and Howe's research. I've snipped a bit of it from wikipedia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Strauss

Generational Archetypes

Generations last the length of time of one phase of life--the same length of time as a turning. Like turnings, generations also come in four different archetypes, defined in "The Fourth Turning" as Prophet, Nomad, Hero and Artist.

* Prophets are values-driven, moralistic, focused on self, and willing to fight to the death for what they believe in. They grow up as the increasingly indulged children of a High, come of age as the young crusaders of an Awakening, enter midlife as moralistic leaders during an Unravelling and are the wise, elder leaders of the next Crisis. The Boomers are an example of a Prophet generation.

* Nomads are ratty, tough, unwanted, diverse, adventurous, and cynical about institutions. They grow up as the underprotected children of an Awakening, come of age as the alienated young adults of an Unravelling, become the pragmatic, midlife leaders of a Crisis and age into tough, post-crisis elders during a High. Generation X and the Lost Generation are examples of Nomad generations.

* Heroes are conventional, powerful, and institutionally driven, with a profound trust in authority. They grow up as the increasingly protected children of an Unraveling, come of age as the Heroic, team-working youth of a Crisis, become energetic and hubristic mid-lifers during a High and become the powerful elders who are attacked in the next Awakening. The G.I. Generation that fought World War II is an example of a Hero generation. Millennials are expected to emerge as the next generation of this example if all goes well.

* Artists are subtle, indecisive, emotional and compromising, often having to deal with feelings of repression and inner conflict. They grow up as the over-protected children of a Crisis, come of age as the sensitive young adults of a High, rebel as indecisive midlife leaders during an Awakening, and become the empathic elders of an Unravelling. The Silent Generation is an example of an Artist generation.

Each of the four turnings is composed of a unique constellation of generational archetypes. During an Awakening, for example, the children are always a Nomad generation, the young adults a Prophet generation, the mid-lifers an Artist generation, and the elders a Hero generation. During a Crisis, by contrast, the children are always Artists, the young adults are Heroes, the mid-lifers are Nomads, and the elders are Prophets. In "The Fourth Turning", Strauss and Howe show how this has held true with remarkable consistency over 500 years of Anglo-American history, since the birth of modernity.

This is the case because history shapes each generation differently depending on what phase of life it occupies as it encounters key historical events--a period of crisis will leave an impression on children that is very different from the one it leaves on midlife leaders. The boundaries of each generation and the shared characteristics of its members emerge because they share a common age-location in history. For instance, Strauss and Howe define the Boomer generation as anyone who doesn't personally remember World War II. They are very different from the Silent Generation, who share the formative experience of childhood during the war. Thus history creates the generations--and the generations in turn reproduce the cycle of history. As the protected children of a High who never personally experienced Crisis, and as the moralistic, uncompromising crusaders of an awakening, the Prophet-Boomers are most likely to provoke a new crisis when they grow to control the nation's institutions. As the overachieving children of an Unraveling who never personally experienced an Awakening, and as the team-working, conformist civics of a crisis, the Heroes are most likely to provoke a new awakening when they get control. And so the cycle of turnings--and the cycle of generations--continues.
Click to expand...
So, one thing I've noticed in Australia is the revival in patriotism as the millenials put their trust in their leaders and the country. A recent rock festival I attended saw an huge amount of the new generation draped in Australian flags. Australian tattoos were also in profusion.

Anzac Day (Veterans Day) parades and dawn services seem to be very well attended by Millenials.

Couple of more points.

Generations seem to go in "waves" the parents and childern are either the front or back of a wave. Those on the wave face are almost revolutionary in it's outlook, those on the wave tail settles things down. I've heard that this may explain the particular closeness between grandchildren and their grandparents.

The "baby boom" generation on average is 6 years younger in the EEC than that in the USA.
 
Millennials in the Workforce, A Generation of Weakness - Simon Sinek
A Millennial Job Interview
 
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