On Gen X Defending Boomers Against Zoomers

As I wait for The Prophets of Doom to come out, my thoughts have started to turn to the final book in the trilogy that started with The Populist Delusion: namely, The Boomer Truth Regime. This is still very much in early gestation, and I am not yet clear which direction it will take. However, one thing I am clear on is the extent to which generational theory which pits, say, Zoomers against Boomers, is getting some pushback. Before going on, it is worth noting that generational theory is core to the cyclical history with which The Prophets of Doom deals. The most notable recent treatment is The Fourth Turning by William Strauss and Neil Howe, but thinking in terms of generations is much older and can be traced right back to the anacyclosis as outlined by Polybius around 180BC. You all know the meme version: ‘strong men create good times, good times create weak men, weak men create bad times, bad times create strong men.’ The idea of generational character is fundamental to this theory. At the most basic level, we can recognise that:

1.      Ideology socially conditions people into thinking a certain way.

2.      Socio-political environment and experience also help shape a person’s outlook.

3.      People born at a similar time experience a shared environment.

4.      Socio-political environments change drastically with time.

5.      Hence, given 1 + 2 + 3 + 4, there is such a thing as generational character.

This is the essential argument being made. All but the crudest of biological determinists would agree with the first four points, so why do people have such trouble with the conclusion? If you accept the premises, why would you reject the conclusion? In this brief article, I seek to explore some possible reasons.

The most notable person who has pushed back on generational theory is Jim Goad, who debated Jay Dyer on it here. Other people who pushed back on it include my esteemed Unpopular Opinions, co-host, Mr Dee, my buddy, Semiogogue, and, back when I first made The Boomer Truth series on Youtube, Rhubba, who I have probably punched enough at this point but it was the occasion of his immortal line, ‘I’m an individual because I listen to Pink Floyd’. It should be striking to you that all these people are over 40 and, Goad aside (he is a very young Boomer born in 1961, the boundaries are always fuzzy), are not Boomers, rather they are Gen Xers – not fake Gen Xers like me, but the real deal. Typical Gen X arguments against generational theory may be grouped into three broad categories:

1.      ‘It’s astrology for men.’

2.      It is a method of dividing us and severing the Burkean contract.

3.      There is no real difference between the generations.

Let us deal with each of these in turn. The first set of people object to the very idea of a generation of people having a general character. This is because Gen Xers are, in fact, the supreme achievement in individualism. Generational theory strips agency from the individual and asserts instead that individuals are somewhat generic products of their time and place. I think this rankles deep-seated Gen X sensibilities. When I made my original video on Gen X some years back, many people reacted with the anger caused by cognitive dissonance, while others correctly felt called out, by the fact that their own personalities were thin ciphers of Bill Murray and the countless other deadpan snarkers that mainstream culture had encouraged them to be their whole lives. The Gen X world is that of viewing the world askance, the knowing sideways look, the aside; the basic Gen X disposition is that of a Shakespearean motley fool standing on one side of the stage, ‘breaking the fourth wall’, and pointing out what idiots the other characters are. The essential truth of this analysis is why, of my many coinages, the phrase ‘Gen X Daria’ has stuck. Because the Gen Xer is, in some sense, the perpetual Daria, deadpan snarking at the world. This is a source of so-called ‘basedness’ too but it is not without its downsides. However, even aside from that, the Gen Xer is also an individual who stands apart or who ‘walks alone’: John Wayne, but as played by Garfield the Cat. If you just think of those Gen Xers I have listed above – I think Goad is spiritually Gen-X – or indeed other Gen X friends such as Thomas777, they are all, in some ways, eccentrics who do not fit any mould. As Method Man once said of ODB, ‘there ain’t no father to his style’. And the Gen Xer – much more than the Boomer – seeks to embody that idea. This is a matter of pride for him, it goes to the core of his identity and sense of self. I do not like amateur psychologising, but we might surmise, as Strauss and Howe do, that it is because Gen X are a ‘nomad generation’, that this is because, in one sense, individualism is all the Gen Xer has. While the Boomer grew up in the safe and stable post-war environment in an homogenous culture, the Gen Xer grew up at a time when the culture was being trashed and remade and the family being torn apart: in such conditions, identity was destabilised and instead we got a radical new individualism. The Gen Xer was truly raised in a liberal Boomer Truth world, while the Boomer was raised in the ‘conservative’ (scare quotes because it was somewhat artificial) post-war world. I am suggesting that the attempt to hand-wave away generational theory with lines like ‘it’s astrology for men’, is ultimately a rear-guard action for individualism per se, because the Gen Xer will fiercely guard his personal sense of style in a way that just isn’t important to some of the rest of us.

            Here is a verbatim quotation from Goad in the debate with Dyer:

This rebellion in the 60s was engineered. And when they became Fox News pill-taking people, that was engineered for them too. The fact is these people don’t have much control of their lives, and even if they had the ability to, they’re too stupid and too herd-like to do it, so yeah, I think they’re just … what I’m saying is these people didn’t create their generation, their generation was created for them. … And it’s just dumb, when people are dumb about it, it’s like slow-motion astrology, you can’t say that everyone born in the same nineteen-year phase has the same character traits. You’re going to have assholes, you’re going to have smart people …

Goad started so well. Yes, stupid, yes, herd-like, yes, engineered, yes, yes, yes! So why this line now about how everyone in a generation can’t be the same, the line about astrology? Why can’t everyone share a generational character? My suspicion is that when Goad is talking in this way, at the back of his mind somewhere, he has himself. He does not want to be reduced to merely ‘Boomer’ because he has interesting thoughts to share and so on. I get the impulse, but really this doesn’t matter. Virtually everyone on our side of things should be comfortable with the idea that exceptions do not disprove the rule, or if you prefer, one Thomas Sowell does not disprove the essential truth of 13/50. Semiogogue highlighted the other issue with generations which is, as I mentioned, that the boundaries are fuzzy. But again, who cares about the marginal case? This is like saying the mixed-race white-black kid problematises notions of white or black, or that the transexual problematises notions of male or female. Categories need not have clearly delineated boundaries to be useful or to have explanatory power. I find it a strange demand. However, back to Goad. When pressed by Dyer, he clarified that what he really wants to get at is the notion that Boomers are somehow responsible for themselves, ultimately a point that both Dee and Semiogogue have also stressed. It is a fair point and I have never denied that The Boomers were Made. So what? This leads directly to the next counter-argument, which is partly about the question of generational accountability. If Boomers were subject to the tools of psychological warfare and the CIA, then can they really be ‘blamed’? This is, I think, maybe the strongest line of attack from the Gen X Boomer Defense Squad.

            The second basic objection is that generational theory divides father against son, long seen as the ultimate in civil strife. For example, there’s a heart-breaking scene in Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part 3, in which the king watches a father kill his own son and then a son kill his own father; this was symbolic of a nation at war with itself.  This was the sort of argument that Frodi adopted here. This is usually a cipher for some other dividing line – let’s say race, for example – and a call for solidarity along those lines instead. Whites, for example, cannot find solidarity if all the Zoomers are dreaming of The Day of the Pillow, instead of venerating their ancestors. In the variant of the argument adopted by Goad, this division is, in fact, what the Powers That Be want. However, I think all this significantly undersells the genuine resentment that many Millennials and Zoomers feel towards the Boomers. The younger generations rightly feel that it is unjust that houses now cost as much as sixteen times average salary rather than the four-times it was when Boomers were getting on the property ladder. Boomers themselves, on a personal level, seem to have an obliviousness to the fate of the world and the society they are leaving behind and are perceived as being incredibly selfish in their attitude. They answer genuine concerns with platitudes about pulling up one’s bootstraps and mocking the youth for spending their money on avocado sandwiches instead of saving for a house. These attitudes make Boomers feel out-of-touch with the lived reality of young people for whom the very idea of buying a house now seems like a pipedream.

At a deeper level, younger people lament the Boomers for failing their end of the Burkean contract: for example, failing to hand down skills and traditions, failing to hand down stories, failing to take them to church so that their kids no longer know the hymns their own parents sang, failing to pass on various inheritances and so on. This leaves the younger generations with an overall feeling of being cheated out of their heritage and Boomers, it seems, from reports that come in from far and wide, have not helped themselves with their generally cavalier and dismissive attitude towards all of this. Yes, they are a product of their time and place, but there is, in truth, nothing stopping them being quite so callous about it all. All of this combined with the fact that they seem quite un-redpillable, which is to say, incapable of imbibing any of the 59 theses I outlined – points that are more or less a distillation of the sorts of things we in the sensible centre talk about more broadly – leave many left with nothing but feelings of animosity towards them. So while it is true that generational division is a bad sign societally, it is also true that Boomers have, perhaps uniquely, left society in a demonstrably worse place than that into which they were born. Even before Covid, this was true, now trillions of dollars have been spent on top of all the rest of it to save Boomer lives and Boomer pensions. It may be a kick in the teeth too far for many Millennials and Zoomers. Boomers cannot be held accountable for their own brainwashing, but they can be held accountable for those things over which they have some control, and certainly they have control over how they respond to the complaints being raised in the here and now by their own children and grandchildren.

            Finally, there is the claim that there is no real difference between the generations, which we’ve touched on already. Let’s turn back to Goad who, once again, paradoxically starts by denying generational theory in general, but then in the next sentence affirms it and sticks the boot into the homosexual youth, and then goes back to denying it by the end:

My take is that the general level of character in any generation is pretty much the same, they just do it in a different style. The other observation is that a hundred years ago, I think that people were much more bad-ass. They’ve even done studies: men had, what is it, four-times the amount of testosterone and sperm count that they do now. But again, conditions, you’re going to have these three-pound trans midget goldfish cos, y’know, you don’t need to remove tree stumps any more. Because technology does it all, I guess people will get weaker. Whether they get more ethical or not, I think that’s pretty-much constant, and like I said the only difference is style, and one style may annoy me more than the other.

With respect to Goad, this is just incoherent. He starts with a general thesis: there is no such thing as generational character, then in the middle of the passage reaffirms classic generational theory a la Polybius (‘good times create weak men’), but then by the end of the passage doubles down on his original assertion that there is no such thing as generational character. Call me old-fashioned but the difference between a guy who would sort out his problems in a bar fight and the guy who dresses up as an anime cat-boy and sticks dildos up his arse is more than a question of style. The idea that there are no moral consequences to such style choices is a little bit of Boomer Truth short-circuiting in Goad’s mind here. He is too smart not to see the underlying truth, but somehow cannot abandon his Boomer Truth priors quite enough to follow the premises to their logical conclusions. He also, through the back door, asserts a linear if not progressive view of history driven by technology. Something in Goad is stopping him going the whole way, and I suggest it is the same force that causes many other men born between, let’s say 1960 and 1980, instinctually to do the same thing.

            My own view is that it is self-evident that generations do have a general character, that generational theory is inescapable, that it has explanatory power, and underpins cyclical history. This has been understood implicitly since at least 200BC. I do not encourage personal animosity towards Boomers, who can be some of the least self-aware people on the planet, but I do encourage you to kill the Boomer within yourself. Vox Day’s notion of The Day of the Pillow is not really enough, the real issue facing everyone is the fact that liberal priors run so deep that you often are not aware of them, don’t want to let go of them, and find yourself fighting rear-guard action for Boomer Truth in strange areas like this. It’s no good. The whole edifice must come down, Gen X individualism and all.