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.

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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Clown World Chronicles: Who is Wojak?

A simply-drawn MS Paint image of an expressionless man is one of the commonest memes seen today. Some know him as Feels Guy, but to most Internet denizens he is called Wojak. As this essay will show, Wojak and his many incarnations are a core part of the Clown World pantheon.

To many who see him for the first time, there is nothing special at all about Wojak. He is simply a generic-looking white face with a blank expression. Neither is he drawn with any great finesse – he is merely an MS Paint depection of a young adult male. This, however, is his great power. Wojak represents the common human spirit that is shared by all of us.

Wojak bears the brunt of the cruelties of Clown World. This is shown in his manifestation as Feels Man. As Feels Man, Wojak is the face that expresses the disappointment and crushing sadness that follows coming to terms with the reality of living in a Clown World. He is the expression of all kinds of sadness, disappointment and despair.

A common portrayal of Wojak is from behind as he stares out across an ocean towards a setting Sun. This meme speaks to the sense that one’s naivety has come to an end. As the Sun sets and leaves Wojak on the beach, so too do our conceptions of an ideal world disappear, leaving us in Clown World with all its insanity.

Another common portrayal of Wojak is as the Doomer (this concept is elaborated upon in another chapter). The Doomer is a man who has been worn down to near breaking point by the insanity of Clown World. He cannot see anything getting better – doom lurks just beyond every horizon. He is strung out, with bags under his eyes, stubble under his chin and a cigarette butt in his mouth.

Yet another is the Coomer (also elaborated upon elsewhere). The Coomer is a man who has become hopelessly addicted to pornography, to the point where he lives for nothing else. This incarnation of Wojak represents the potential sex addict inside each of us, and serves as a warning.

So Wojak, much like Pepe, represents another kind of everyman. Perhaps the essential difference is that Pepe is the masculine form, whereas Wojak is the feminine form. Whereas Pepe feels disgruntlement leading to rage, Wojak feels sorrow leading to despair.

Fundamentally, though, Wojak’s place in the Clown World pantheon is as a representative of the youthful idealism that is lost when a person realises that they live in Clown World. It’s natural to grow up thinking that one lives in a world of reason, where science and evidence weigh heavily. The realisation that only power matters and that logic is meaningless comes as a spiritual shock to many.

For those who have been through it, however (and most have), this spiritual shock is highly relatable. This relatability is the reason for the success of the Wojak meme and its descendants – the ubiquitous nature of Wojak means that he can serve as a kind of template upon which other memes are based.

NPC Wojak is a variant of the original that satirises the unthinking nature of the average pleb. NPC Wojak is similar to the original, only with a grey face and simplified features. The commonest meme to feature the NPC Wojak is a multipanel comic where he is presented with some inane political fact and becomes enraged – a satirisation of how the average NPC out there has no consciousness and simply responds to stimuli like any invertebrate would.

Brainlet Wojak is another common variant. This one involves the regular Wojak but with a variety of cranial deformities so that his brain is clearly much smaller than that of a normal person. The implication, of course, being that the idea associated with the Brainlet Wojak image is a stupid one.

There is also a female version of Wojak, identical to the male original but with long, coppery hair. This version is most commonly seen incarnated as Tradfem Wojak, wearing a flowery blue dress. In this incarnation she also represents a lost promise, in this case the promise of a loyal wife who was interested in raising a family – something that Clown World has made impossible.

Wojak and the various forms that he appears in could be described as an ur-meme and its memetic offspring. Wojak represents the grim, inescapable awareness that the world is really much, much worse that what it promised to be. His feels are our feels; his loss of innocence is ours too. Wojak represents the everyday citizen of Clown World: lost, confused, dismayed.

This article is an excerpt from Clown World Chronicles, a book being compiled by Vince McLeod for an expected release in the middle of 2020.

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If The Nazis Had Won World War II

Trade is a human universal and, as such, is more fundamental than trivialities like who exterminated who

The common perception of World War II is that, had the Nazis won it, the world would now be a wasteland of rubble and burning wreckage. It’s true that the world would certainly be different in some major ways to the timeline we currently live in, but there are many things that would be recognisable. This essay asks the question: what would our societies look like today if the Nazis had won World War II?

If the Nazis had won World War II, and united all of Europe under one Reich, our political leaders would have found an accommodation with it. If the Nazis had knocked out the Soviet Union and made peace with Britain, our political leaders would have shrugged, said “fair enough” and started to do business with the new bosses.

Some might doubt this, but an examination of history and human nature make it very clear. If the Nazis had won World War II, our political class would be lining up to whore themselves out to them.

If the Nazis had won World War II, and established a Lebensborn project to populate Poland with German settlers, and if this had led to an excess population such that many of these Germans sought to emigrate to other countries, our political system would tell us that this was a good thing. We would be told that we had to accept it otherwise we were evil.

Politicians all around the world would be clamouring to curry favour with the Nazi Empire by forming trade and diplomatic links with Nazi territories, or by agitating in favour of further immigration from Nazi territories or by attacking those who criticise Nazi actions. These politicians would dismiss anyone who accused them of siding with evil as conspiracy theorists, bigots and haters.

Politicians of German ancestry would be climbing onto social media saying that it’s hate speech to mention the Hungerplan, or that the Hungerplan didn’t really happen, or that the Poles deserved it because of genocidal attacks on Germans in Polish territory in the lead up to World War II. As with the Armenian genocide, a sufficiently strenuous denial would cause people to either doubt or to not care.

Many outside Europe would have ended up marrying Germans once the war tensions cooled off (as they have done in this timeline). They would say “Yes, the Nazis are evil, but Ulrike/Heike/Beate is against all that stuff.” Some of the fathers of these brides and grooms would be Nazi Party functionaries, and would have done some horrific things, but their sons and daughters-in-law would operate on a “Don’t ask, don’t tell” basis.

If the Nazis had won World War II, it would be an accepted fact that the Nazi Empire was too big to not trade with. People would say “Yeah I know that they starved a hundred million people to death but you can’t just not trade with an entity that comprises X% of the world’s GDP.” Even if they still had millions in concentration camps this would not matter.

No doubt the Nazi Empire would have established a competitive advantage in some economic manner, such as vehicle manufacture. It might be possible that the whole world would be driving German-made cars, or flying in German-made aircraft. In such a case, most people wouldn’t think anything of using such goods. Some might make jokes about the tens of millions who were exterminated to make it possible, but this wouldn’t prevent trade any more than the North American genocides prevent trade.

Had the Nazis won World War II, there would be politicians and pundits trying to curry favour with them by talking about Naziphobia. An excessive dislike of Nazis would be likened to a mental illness by politicians and by media enterprises chasing the Nazi advertising dollar. There would be mutterings that hate speech legislation ought to be introduced to prevent people from being too open about their dislike of Nazism.

If the Nazis still had people in camps, their plight would be ignored, save for the propagandising of a small number of social justice activists. These activists would widely be seen as obsessed or unhinged. In much the same way that the imprisonment of many Uighur people is dismissed as an outcome of the Uighurs’ religious fanaticism, so too would the imprisonment of the Jews be dismissed as an outcome of their predations.

If the Nazis had won World War II, our entire education system would be different. Naturally, we wouldn’t be taught that Germany started World War II by invading Poland. We would instead be taught about the German Revolution of 1918-19, and who was behind that revolution. We would be taught about the Holodomor, and how the Holodomor influenced anti-Communist attitudes in central Europe in the 1920s.

Nazism more general would be seen as an anti-Communist movement that arose in response to the horrors of Soviet rule. The role of the British and the French in forcing the Versailles Treaty on the Germans after World War I would be emphasised. The psychological effect of hyperinflation would be explained at length to all schoolchildren.

Perhaps it may even have been necessary, had the Nazis won World War II, to accept that many of the actions of the British and French Empires in colonising the world were effectively criminal. Perhaps conquering 40 million square kilometres of territory and then declaring war on Germany was a bit hypocritical. Winning the war meant we never had to face up to this charge, but losing it would have meant that we were forced to.

None of this is to say that the world would have been any better if the Nazis had won World War II. The fact is, however, that a Nazi victory in Europe would not have changed human nature in any way. Humans would still be opportunistic, acquisitive and dishonest. The winners would still write the history books, and they would still do so in a way that absolved them of all guilt.

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Clown World Chronicles: The Great Awokening

For thousands of years, intellectual and spiritual humans have dreamed of an age where people would come to cherish truth and wisdom – a Great Awakening. Such a golden age would bring peace and harmony to the entire world. Unfortunately for us, we’re not getting such a thing. Even worse – we’re getting a sickly, plastic, pallid imitation of it – The Great Awokening.

“Wokeness” is one of the foremost sociological trends of our time. This refers to a particularly shameless form of virtue signalling that has become extremely common today. The point of it is to present oneself as morally superior to ones fellows – more sensitive, more refined, more enlightened.

There is little more to wokeness than the usual ego-driven posturing and oneupmanship that has depressed honest people since before civilisation. At its core, it’s a desire for the little dopamine hit that comes with triumphantly rubbing another person’s face in the shit. The sort of person who participates in the Great Awokening is generally incapable of doing this to a person physically, so they do it metaphorically.

One notable thing about wokeness is that it is equally as hateful and discriminatory a philosophy as anything that has come before. Wokeness has its ingroup and its outgroup, and the ingroup is fully encouraged to shun, bully and abuse the outgroup. In this sense, it can be said that wokeness, and SJW culture more generally, is like a sort of cult. As with other cults, abusing outgroup members can strengthen solidarity among ingroup members.

The outgroup of the Great Awokening are the unwoke. In theory, the unwoke are those without the moral strength to act with compassion. The woke believe that the moral values held by the unwoke are primitive, backwards and animalistic. The unwoke have failed to undergo the necessary self-reflection to achieve wokeness, and therefore any abuse one feels to give them is justified. The unwoke are the untermensch, the infidel, the goyim, the heathen.

In reality, wokeness is not based on any transcendental truth but is rather based on whatever is fashionable in the moment. It was once woke to oppose Islam on the grounds that it was cruel to women and homosexuals – now it’s woke to support Islam on the grounds that Muslims are non-white. The same people who were praised for an enlightened attitude to Islam are now excoriated for being Nazis – without changing a thing.

Likewise, the unwoke are bullied for little more than being unfashionable. This is one reason why people from the working class are seldom considered woke – it takes a lot of leisure time and a lot of socialising with the right people to learn the right values. Because these values can change on a whim, knowledge of them has to be maintained via continual access to the high priests. Poor people don’t have this access.

The Great Awokening could be described as the grand climax of the worldwide epidemic of virtue signalling that has now run for some years. Never before has the world been this pretentious. Never before have people at large made such a strenuous effort to create a false image of themselves for the sake of preening their egos. Never before have the social stakes been so high, and the error margins so thin.

The problem is that we’ve started to believe our own lies.

For decades now, we’ve been blaming everything on white men because it was the woke option. White men had most of the power, therefore it stood to reason that they took most of the blame. No-one woke could oppose this because the woke attitude is that all wealth was earned by theft, and all privilege stolen from someone else. Opposing this meant to believe that non-whites and women deserved their relative poverty – a horribly unwoke position.

This has led to a situation where if you don’t openly hate white people now, you’re unwoke. The paradox of claiming to be the least racist person while at the same time hating white people is an example of the doublethink that is now everywhere. The Great Awokening doesn’t worry about contradictions like this because the most important thing is the intention. Hating white people isn’t racist if you do it for the right reasons.

The hypocrisy is how the highest echelons of woke can get away with jetsetting around the world to browbeat us into reducing our carbon footprint. Prince Harry and Meghan Markle represent the most vomit-inducing excess of unearned wealth. They are triple distilled privilege. But for them, the Great Awokening is an opportunity to market themselves as enlightened world leaders.

The Great Awokening is why comedy is essentially dead today. In order for humour to exist, someone has to be willing to tell the truth. Humour is when needles of truth prick the balloons of falsehood, and laughter is released as a form of catharsis. It has been a fundamental part of civilisation forever, but today people are so afraid of getting a moral browbeating that they’re less willing to crack jokes.

The Great Awokening is essentially the final victory of slave morality over life on this planet. Resentment now has free rein, and the slaves are trying to rip down everyone and everything in the world. The total victory of slave morality means that everything of value in the world is to be destroyed, and the weakest and most execrable aspects of humanity are to be held up as exemplars.

As there is always a seed of yang even when yin appears to be triumphant, so is there a seed of truth within the bullshit of The Great Awokening. That seed is the small number of truth-tellers who are not tempted into telling lies, despite the social pressure of the woke hordes. The longer the Great Awokening goes for, the more ridiculous it will become, and eventually it will become so ridiculous that the merest whisper of truth will cause the music to stop.

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