Understanding The Boomer Meme

A man on the wrong side of male menopause bears a slack, satisfied grin, a can of Monster energy drink in his hand. Despite a beer belly and signs of pattern baldness, all is well in this man’s world. This is the Boomer, and this essay explains his significance in the Clown World Pantheon.

The term Boomer comes from Baby Boomer. This is a reference to the generation of people who were born immediately after World War II. Because the end of that war resulted in a temporary sharp increase in birth rates, it led to a “Baby Boom” of new children who all had unique generational features in common.

In theory, this means that a Boomer is someone born between 1945 and 1963 or so. In other words, people aged between their mid-50s to their mid-70s. This age group comprises the vast majority of high-ranking political and business decision-makers right now. The vast bulk of the world’s power, wealth and control now lies in the hands of this generation.

The Boomer meme satirises the values and attitudes that are characteristic of Boomers.

Boomers were known from the beginning to be a particularly narcissistic cohort. This was mostly a function of the great deprivations that their parents had endured during World War II and the Great Depression. The parents of the Boomers had resolved to not allow their children to suffer the same traumas they had. So they showered everything on them.

Then, as the Boomers reached young adulthood, the popular culture catered to them on account of their spending power. Music, books and movies were all crafted to appeal to Boomer values. After that, when they reached middle adulthood, the political establishment catered to them on account of their voting power. Party policy was then crafted to appeal to Boomer values.

This has led to a generation of people who genuinely believe that the whole planet revolves around them. They know nothing else than getting their own way, and they feel entitled to demand that this state of affairs should continue. They are so accustomed to luxury that they insist that the whole world work to keep them in it, even if they have to destroy everything about their countries that the following generations could have inherited.

This is the Boomer.

The central idea behind the Boomer meme is that the entire world has been set up for the benefit of this generation and that they, like spoiled children, assume that this is the way it should be and demand that it stays that way (even if following generations have to suffer).

The meme captures the frustration of those following generations, who are suffering under housing and employment markets that are leaving them with no realistic chance of ever being able to own a home, and therefore much less chance of ever raising a family of their own. Amplifying the frustration is the knowledge that young people are labouring long hours not for their own benefit, but to pay for the luxurious retirements of the Boomers.

The Boomer image is a Wojak variant. It’s really just the standard Wojak with a generation of age added on. This makes the Boomer meme a caricature of age, and not of anything else. The idea of the Boomer meme is that almost everyone in that generation thinks much the same way – smug, satisfied, and naturally unwilling to countenance any change to a system that puts their wishes at the very centre.

The meme also captures the frustrations with the Boomers themselves. The generations following the Boomers have discovered that their elders don’t give a fuck, at all, about how hard things are for young people now. It’s now widely understood that the generations following the Boomers have it harder than the Boomers themselves did, marking the first time in centuries that one generation had it harder than the preceding generation.

This is not merely a popular belief: studies have shown that life is objectively much harder now. A study by VJM Publishing showed that young people today have less than half of the house-buying power that their parents’ generation enjoyed. Even worse, the mass importation of cheap labour has destroyed any negotiating leverage those young people may have had.

The Boomers own everything, and they run the world in their interests exclusively.

The phrase “OK Boomer,” epitomises the frustration caused by this state of affairs. It’s the reaction of an exasperated young person to years and years of listening to old people bleat about how hard they worked and how they’re entitled to this or that because of how much they supposedly “paid into the system”.

It’s the younger generations’ response to decades of trying to talk about things like housing availability, the failure of neoliberalism, cannabis law reform and climate change, only to encounter millions of goat-stubborn old bastards who wouldn’t listen if the future of the world depended on it.

It’s regularly said in response to “When I was your age,” because this phrase inevitably precedes a lecture about how the young person just needs to knuckle down and work hard. Boomers, as a rule, completely fail to understand that the nature of work and of society have both changed from when they were young and that many things are much, much harder now in many major ways.

The young adults of today know that there is simply no way to get this information through the thick skulls of the average Boomer. No communication is possible with people that self-centered, ignorant and arrogant. Therefore, all that can be done is to say “OK Boomer,” as one would dismiss any other senile old fool who ought to be put out to pasture, and wait for the chance to lever their fingers from the rings of power.

The Boomer occupies a central role in the Clown World Pantheon, as he is effectively Wojak’s Dad. This means that it’s the Boomer’s personal failings that have set the scene for Wojak to become the way he is. The Boomer figure is the archetype of irresponsibility and selfish indifference to the long-term wellbeing of society. All this serves to make the Boomer cut a Zeus-like figure in Clown World.

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This article is an excerpt from Clown World Chronicles, a book about the insanity of life in the post-Industrial West. This is being compiled by Vince McLeod for an expected release in the middle of 2020.

If you enjoyed reading this essay, you can get a compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2018 from Amazon for Kindle or Amazon for CreateSpace (for international readers), or TradeMe (for Kiwis). A compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2017 is also available.

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Who Are Virgin And Chad?

A common meme contrasts two opposing figures: the Virgin and the Chad. These two figures represent a diametrically opposed pairing in the Clown World pantheon. Like Apollo and Dionysus, who represent human reason and human nature, the Virgin and the Chad represent manifestations of the divine in human form. This essay explains.

At the most basic, Virgin and Chad represent opposite ends of the spectrum of sexual success with women.

Virgin, as suggested by his name, has had no sexual success with women. He is deeply neurotic, the sort of person that women feel uneasy around or even find creepy. He shuffles along, staring at the ground, downcast. His mind is plagued with thoughts of rejection and worry. Dressed in pallid greys and wearing cheap sneakers, his very appearance suggests rejection and despair.

There is nothing Virgin desires more than female attention, but there is also nothing that his nature is less likely to attract. This enraging paradox means that the Virgin is a deeply pitied figure. All of the memes that include the Virgin use him as a figure of fun – the example of what not to do or be like.

Chad strides along, his bearing perfectly upright at all times. His mind is clear, untrammelled by self-doubt. The appearance of Chad is the opposite to that of the Virgin: where the Virgin blends in with his grotty surroundings, Chad extrudes light and colour. His clothing is bright, with a cheery, glib slogan emblazoned without shame on the front. A genital bulge protrudes suggestively from his pants.

It’s wrong to think of Chad as a mere peacock, something that attracts females only through a visual display. Chad is also a genuine athlete, probably a wrestler or rugby player. His musculature and height are such that women notice him from a great distance just from his silhouette. He is the stuff of female fantasy.

The Virgin-Chad dichotomy represents the contrast between good and bad in a judgmental sense. In other words, the Virgin is something execrable, to be avoided. The Chad, by contrast, is a kind of ideal man similar to Hercules. Every Earthly man is morally obliged to make himself as chadly as possible – indeed, transcending the state of the Virgin could be said to be the act that makes a man a man.

This dichotomy is not merely a physical distinction. Implicit to all the Virgin-Chad jokes is that the Virgin always makes the wrong decisions, or fails to make the right decisions, because he doubts himself too much and lacks courage. The Virgin might be able to make himself physically attractive, under the right circumstances, but his mind will always preclude him from being a Chad. He is mentally weak, unable to control his baser impulses.

Chad, on the other hand, has no concept of fear. He doesn’t need fear, as he is naturally so in touch with his inner being that he can act on higher instinct. If Chad wants to do something, it is always the right thing to do. Therefore, he can act with perfect self-confidence.

Ultimately, the real advantage of the Chad is spiritual, and this is why the Virgin-Chad pairing has a spiritual dimension in the Clown World pantheon.

The Chad is in tune with the Tao, and this is why he always makes the right move. He does not desire anything other than a world precisely like the one that he moves in. Having no desire to change the world, the world has no desire to change him. Consequently, the Chad can operate without resistance. Women don’t resist him because they understand his advances to be the Will of God.

The Virgin, by contrast, is a creature of ego. This ego clouds his vision, which means that he cannot see reality accurately, and this is why he makes so many mistakes. He is desperate for recognition, for attention and for adulation, and this thirst frightens and repels people (especially women). The Virgin is entirely trapped in the illusion of materialism, in the commercial and advertising matrix.

There is a sense in which the Virgin represents the everyday man, and Chad represents, by way of contrast, a Zeus-like figure, something larger than life. According to this manner of thinking, Chad is envied by the Virgin, but is not resented. The Virgin sees Chad not so much as a competitor, but as a force of Nature that has its way with mortals, something to be emulated if possible and appreciated if not.

In magical terms, the Virgin can be thought of as an energy to be rejected and Chad as an energy to be summoned. A man going to a bar in the hope of getting laid wants to summon his inner Chad. The Virgin is, therefore, elementary masculine sexual energy that is rejected by the natural feminine, whereas the Chad represents elementary masculine sexual energy that is accepted by the natural feminine.

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The Cult Logic Behind Modern SJW Culture

A 1981 entry in the Harvard Mental Health Letter describes the basics of cult psychology. Describing cults as “ideological fundamentalism”, the letter by Dr. Robert J Lifton lays out the characteristic qualities of cult psychology and cult formation. As this essay will examine, there are many parallels between cult psychology and the psychology of modern Social Justice Warrior culture.

According to the Lifton paper, “milieu control, mystical manipulation, the demand for purity, a cult of confession, sacred science, loading the language, doctrine over person, and dispensing of existence” are the typical ways that cults seek to control the thoughts of their acolytes. An investigation into the nature of the SJW culture shows that it tries to achieve exactly the same thing.

The desire for milieu control involves “the control of all communication within a given environment”. This is commonly referred to as ‘brainwashing’ because it features the targets being soaked in cult propaganda. Cult members must be exposed to lectures, seminars, news reports, websites and Internet forums that all say the same thing. This milieu control makes it possible to normalise any idea, no matter how crazy.

Modern SJW culture achieves this through Internet echo chambers. Websites such as Reddit commonly ban anyone who thinks differently, which creates communities of people who continually reinforce each other’s prejudices by parroting back to them everything they say – an echo chamber.

This is also achieved through the common cult tactic of excommunication. People who deviate too far from the SJW orthodoxy are shunned, their reputations smeared and their social support networks deliberately destroyed. This creates a fear of wrongthink among cult members. This fear of wrongthink prevents them from disrupting the milieu with novel thoughts.

Many SJWs are astonished to meet a person who believes, for example, in the genetic basis of intelligence. Despite the fact that the science clearly demonstrates that intelligence is mostly hereditary (i.e. genetic), the milieu control of SJW culture means that few of them have ever been exposed to the actual science. Consequently, they respond to people who talk about the science with mockery and abuse.

The demands for purity can be seen in the never-ending escalation of virtue signalling. Inside SJW culture is a constant struggle for social status, where the most pure of heart is thought to rise to the top of the hierarchy. Indeed, the great conceit is that the top of the SJW hierarchy is also the most virtuous, and not the one who most successfully lowered the social status of their competitors by shaming them into submission for wrongthink.

Because the Nazis were nationalists, purity of thought requires that SJWs be globalists. Consequently, any kind of national loyalty must be completely rejected. Open borders must be embraced, because any nationalist sentiment is impure. The strongest bonds of loyalty, in SJW culture, are with those as different to you as possible. This is as true of race and religion as it is of nation.

SJW culture has gone so far in its demands for ideological purity that they even attack people who say it’s okay to be white. Even expressing a will for the continued existence of white people is equated with supremacism and a desire to exterminate other races. This bizarre logic inevitably leads to a purity spiral, and this inevitably leads to cult members becoming unhinged from reality entirely.

Part of this drive for purity is emphasis on confession. This is the origin of the commonly expressed sentiment that “we’re all a little bit racist.” The purpose of saying this is to instigate a moral self-flagellation session. One confesses to harbouring lingering racist sentiments (or other wrongthink) as a kind of public ritual humiliation. These ritual humiliations serve to strengthen the bonds of solidarity among people who have been through them.

The irony, of course, is that the only other people who think like this are other people in the SJW cult. The demands for purity are so stringent that only those with plentiful leisure time to devote to understanding the ins and outs of the etiquette can ever meet the standard. This has led to the absurd outcome of SJWs who virtue signal all day hanging out only with other white and middle-class people.

SJW culture also has its own sacred science. This sacred science has a number of cherished truths that cannot be questioned (lest one get shamed into silence). These cherished truths often run entirely contrary to the established science, because they are determined by expedience, not by truth (here it is meant expedience to globohomo values).

Actual science, which states clearly that intelligence is mostly hereditary and therefore genetic, is rejected. The sacred science of SJW culture dictates that evolution stops as the neck. The great variety of physical environments, although they have clearly led to a great variety of physical expressions, have not led to a commensurate variety of psychological expressions. All human subgroups are precisely identical in every behavioural measure.

Likewise, the sacred science of SJW culture dictates that the mass importation of cheap labour has no impact on the wages of the native working class. Despite the fact that a high schooler could tell you that increasing the supply of cheap labour will reduce the price of said labour – in other words, it will destroy working-class wages and the ability of working-class people to have families – SJWs are happy to support it.

This suicidal masochism is perhaps the defining feature of the cult mentality that possesses the average Social Justice Warrior. In any case, it’s clear from looking at the logic that underlies religious cults that the entirety of SJW culture follows it. Not only do they practice milieu control and possess an obsession with purity, but they also have their own sacred science distinct from mainstream science.

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Civilisation Is An Act of Alchemy

The art of alchemy is the art of transmuting base elements into precious ones. On the personal level, a successful alchemist will transmute their own baser nature into something that is in tune with God. As above, so below: such a process also occurs on the collective level. Civilisation itself is an act of alchemy.

The main life objective for any spiritual person is to overcome their raw animal instincts, especially when those instincts cause suffering to other sentient beings. The instincts to dominate and destroy, and to kill and conquer, are controlled by the spiritual person so that they don’t harm anyone. The spiritual man seeks to impose order upon the chaos of his soul.

Chaos, in this sense, represents the vital biological energies and instincts that have been shaped by evolution to meet survival and reproduction challenges, and which would have found expression with or without consciousness. Chaos represents the workings of Nature in raw form.

As awesome as the workings of Nature in raw form may be, they don’t take into account the suffering of conscious beings. Nature is famously indifferent to that. In a state of Nature, men fight and kill each other over food and territory and women, and survival to adulthood is rare. The spiritual impulse is the impulse to transcend and to overcome this.

Transcending and overcoming is the reason why so many religious traditions practice some form of abstinence. To fast is to learn to go without food, which is to learn to be at peace with one’s instincts to eat. To be celibate is to learn to go without sex, with is to learn to be at peace with one’s instincts to reproduce. Admonitions against violence and greed are likewise intended to encourage people to go against their savage natures.

It’s also why many religious traditions practice repetitive tasks, such as Buddhism with meditation, which requires a person to sit still for some time. If a person can learn physical discipline, then they can try to learn mental discipline, and if they can learn that, then they can try to learn spiritual discipline. Achieving spiritual discipline is the highest goal of the alchemist.

The ideal is to take the energy of some instinct, such as for sex or violence, and to sublimate it into a higher order, such as an art. This is what is meant by the transmutation of lead into gold. An alchemist can take their base impulses (represented by lead), which are indifferent to the suffering of others, and transmute them into energies (represented by gold) that work to reduce those others’ suffering .

As above, so below: all the things stated above as truths of personal alchemy are also true on a global level. There is a work of alchemy taking place right now on Earth that amounts to the imposition of order upon chaos on a planetary scale.

The fundamental act of civilisation is, like the fundamental act of alchemy, the imposition of order upon chaos.

The history of civilisation is the history of the imposition of the higher order of will upon the chaos of raw animal instinct. To be civilised is to have developed the ability to resist impulses to attack, rape and steal. A civilised man can laugh off insults, because he knows that to give in to his instinct to punish would be weakness. His highest value is not dominance but composure.

Our society invests a tremendous amount of time in trying to teach young people to think twice before giving in to temporary impulses that might have permanent consequences. Children are told morality stories from when they are old enough to listen and they continue getting lectured well into adulthood. The idea is to induce them to behave in ways that do not cause suffering to others.

Civilisation, then, is the same thing as alchemy, only it is the name given to alchemy at the collective level.

A statesman transmutes lead into gold by passing a law that proscribes certain behaviours. A great author does the same thing by writing a novel that gives its readers insight into the human condition. A great sportsman transmutes tribal bloodlust into a performance of improvisational theatre. All of these people further civilisation by minimising actions that cause suffering.

An ideal civilisation will operate on the frequency of gold. At this level, the ruling class is guided by God, and all of their actions are in tune with the will of God. If the ruling class is correctly devoted to God, then those devoted to the ruling class will be devoted to God, and so on, so that even the simplest peasant acts in accordance with the divine will.

A civilisation that has lost touch with God might operate on the level of silver, as ours appears to. We are godless but are yet to disintegrate into the level of all-out warfare – although this may happen if we fail at the great work of alchemy that is civilisation. A civilisation at war has fallen to the level of iron, and one that falls so far that its very survival is in question has regressed to the level of clay.

The alchemical future of our civilisation will depend on whether we can reconnect to God, or whether we fall further into violence and savagery. It seems that many of our most primal instincts for acquisition and competition are making a comeback, and this has led to a lower frequency of consciousness all over the world. If it keeps decreasing, then war is all but inevitable.

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If you enjoyed reading this essay, you can get a compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2018 from Amazon for Kindle or Amazon for CreateSpace (for international readers), or TradeMe (for Kiwis). A compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2017 is also available.

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