All kinds of relations are bad in Clown World, but generational relations are at their lowest point ever. Instead of the difficulty that marked generational relations in the past, today there is hate. This hate is based on the fact that one generation in particular – the Baby Boomers – are chiefly responsible for Clown World and for its perpetuation.
The social contract, ever since the start of human civilisation, was that each generation prizes and nurtures its young so that, when those young are adults, they can take care of the elderly. This contract worked successfully for hundreds of generations. Each cohort of elderly people, upon observing their children, could take pride at the quality of life they left for those following.
The Boomers were the first generation to break this contract. Thanks to their unprecedented levels of godlessness, the Boomers decided that they had to indulge every possible desire during this life. And so they spent up large, whether by cash or on credit. Even their descendants’ credit was spent.
Instead of acting to preserve the wealth they inherited, so that their offspring could enjoy it, the Boomers squandered it on material possessions and crude pleasures. They became the first generation in history to leave less wealth to their descendants than they inherited from their predecessors. This is the main reason why generational relations are so bad in Clown World today.
In Normal World, elderly people put aside wealth they don’t need so that their children and grandchildren can escape poverty. In Clown World, Boomers vote themselves luxurious pensions that their children and grandchildren have to labour to pay for. Generational relations in Clown World are analogous to a war that the Boomers won 20 years ago. Since then, they have been enforcing their terms.
Boomers are happy to cut funding to any sector of society if it means more for them. Young people who, because of growing up in Clown World, have developed a mental illness that prevents them from working, are given less to live off than Boomers who already own their own homes. Other young people, struggling to start families, are given less assistance than Boomers give to refugees.
The result: in Clown World, generational relations are marked by hate and accusations of neglect and ingratitude.
The archetypal Boomer invention is the reverse mortgage. Thanks to the invention of this financial device, the descendants of many Boomers will inherit next to nothing. The bank gets the property, and the Boomers spend the rest. Like the grandmother in Dostoevsky’s Gambler, they just piss the money up the wall and let their kids go begging.
Nowhere is this more obvious than with national debts. The Boomers started getting their fingers on the national pursestrings around the turn of the century. At this time, the American national debt was less than $6 trillion. After two decades of Boomer stewardship, the American national debt is now over $26 trillion. The Boomers just ticked up luxury on the national credit card and left it for the younger generations to pay off.
Boomer mismanagement of the economy has led to Millennials having much less wealth than the generations before them. The average Boomer in 1989 had four times as much wealth as people of the same age today. By 2020, most of them have inherited from their WWII-era parents and are living it large. They don’t care if any of this largesse is left for the coming generations.
This has led to the Boomers becoming known as the Parasite Generation. They have purposefully set out to take as much from the following generations as they possibly could, and to give back as little as they possibly could.
The younger generations resent this immensely, but are so far too timid to do anything about it. Few speak of revolution, at least not seriously. The plan seems to be to wait 20-25 years for the Boomers to die off en masse. By then, hopefully, normal relations will restore themselves between Generation X, the Millennials and following generations.
The Boomers seem to have become as selfish as they are for two major reasons.
The first reason is because they, themselves, are heavily damaged. The Boomers were the first generation whose parents and grandparents were both World War veterans. This means that they were the first to be raised entirely by severely traumatised people who, quite naturally on account of the suffering they endured, put themselves first.
The prewar generations were too busy dealing with the psychological damage caused by the World Wars to raise the Boomers properly. The Boomers were, consequently, emotionally neglected. Most of them internalised this example and decided it was natural. So they neglected their own children in turn.
The second reason is spiritual. The Baby Boomers are a cohort of spiritually undeveloped beings. Very few believe in God; very few care about the possibility of incarnating in a place of torment after the death of one’s body in this world. The vast majority of them believe this world is all there is, so gimme gimme gimme now now now.
This widespread spiritual ignorance has convinced the Boomer that there is no punishment for misdeeds in this life. The Earth is a free-for-all, where one is permitted to indulge any desire one wishes at anyone else’s expense, and when the physical body dies the moral ledger is wiped clean. So selling the future of the younger generations, for the sake of comfort now, is not morally unconscionable for those born before 1964.
That generational relations are terrible can, given all this, be predicted.
When the Boomers start dying off, it will be a great relief to the younger generations. Quality relations between young and old will return when Clown World ends, and this is extremely unlikely while the Boomers still call the shots. Barring sudden support for a Day of the Pillow-style move, it’s probably at least 20-25 years away.
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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 January 2021.
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If you enjoyed reading this essay, you can get a compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2019 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 2018 and the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2017 are also available.
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