Can I offer you one of the T-shirts I just made? ("Where Are the Adults?") Great article. I am a Gen Xer, and while I generally despise all these neat labelings of generations (much like we stamp decades with names as if everything changes on the 1s....) I do find that I hold a weird place between trailing the boomers and resenting them for well established reasons; The "Me" Generation by Tom Wolfe, Wall Street, Oliver Stone etc. and whatever the younger ones are called ---I can't even keep track anymore. Y, Z, Millenial. What I do know is that what you said is true. Fathers walking with their 4 year olds down the street are dressed exactly alike now. 20-somethings at home spend far too much time at home in a social media echo chambers. My question is this....if we are caught between octogenerians in power making decisions and people in their 20s and 30s still "finding themselves" using lovely things like TikTok, where is the wide swath of people like me? In their forties and fifties, raised latchkey sometimes and allowed to trip and fall and do stupid stuff without helicopter parenting. Young enough to be on social media but old enough to know how toxic it can be. Why aren't all of us speaking out and telling the younger generations to put on some big girl/boy pants? Or speaking up against the old status quo from war time? This is what perplexes me. I also believe the silence or perhaps inaccess to people that are upset about all this is what has allowed "cancel culture" to take over. Struggling to understand it.
I understand the frustration of an extended adolescence but not the failure of this generation to fight for what they want. As someone who had an extended educational adolescence, I still moved out of my parents’ home at 19, paid my own way through med school (my parents’ gift to me was to pay my car insurance, which was much appreciated), and worked hours as a resident inconceivable to most of my friends. Turning 30 was tough, though, when I was working 110 hours a week, staying overnight at the hospital every third night (no guy puts up with that), and making a pittance for a salary, when my college chums were making 6 figures, getting married, buying houses, and having kids. I chose a path of professional development that did not allow personal development. But at least I lived in my own place, however lowly it may have been.
I believe when the age children could stay on their parents healthcare changed from 18 to 26 was the catalyst. At seventeen I knew I needed to get my act together and think about the future.
As a lateish Boomer (‘58) with 4 children I think we as parents are largely to blame. We softened every blow - financial, psychological, and social, and restricted the risk they were exposed to at every step of the way to a ridiculous extreme (think walking home from school at six, bicycle helmets, padded playgrounds, etc.).
As a result their decision-making faculties were underdeveloped and they weren’t allowed to learn from their mistakes. We were also richer than our parents, gave them more material comforts and raised their expectations for a life of ease without work in the process.
Unfortunately, the most likely way these trends are reversed involves a lot of societal hardship and anguish ( and the end of the Boomers reign in governance).
A few sociological and biological elements of the "election denier" subculture:
1. the Trump base was Celtic (and Border Reiver) appalachians, a clannish gene pool and social form based on honor systems and fealty oaths that originated as a historically marginalized population that has been holding grudges for at least 500 years, most recently neoconfederates that have been festering in resentment since the Civil War.
2. because that base is a cultural minority that will never be able to dominate US politics, there is a massive level of cognitive dissonance, which creates a need for emotive narratives that are a balm to the wounded "pagan" psyche.
Election denialism is the main form of balm at the moment.
It is not RATIONAL or OBJECTIVE because cold, systematic logic and fact-based arguments are not capable of being emotional balms (on the contrary).
The purpose of election denialism is to focus the outrage that arises from the political impotence of the celtic-appalachian and other rural-working-class-populist gene pools.
None of that would be of much importance except that the mainstream culture is disintegrating due to technology disruption, like the Roman empire collapsing, so the "barbarians" sense an opportunity to crash the gates of the weakened empire.
In other words, the increasing ILLIBERALISM, dysfunction and irrationalism of the "establishment" and the "woke left" is a magnet pulling the "barbarians" toward the gates.
Great article, but I disagree with this: "Aside from the technology sector—which prizes outliers, disagreeableness, creativity and encourages people in their twenties to take on the founder title and to build things that they own—most other sectors of American life are geriatric." As a 49-year-old that has worked in technology since my mid-20's this is laughably untrue. It USED TO be this way. Now tech is one of the least innovative, most stifling and conformist industries there are. I say this as someone who has worked for Google, Microsoft, and Amazon. I got out of the industry a few years ago and should have done it sooner. The only thing I miss is the pay.
Purpose – Organisations sometimes select and promote the wrong individuals for managerial positions. These individuals may be incompetent, they may be manipulators and bullies. They are not the best people for the job and yet not only are they selected for positions of authority and responsibility, they are sometimes promoted repeatedly until their kind populate the highest levels of the organisational hierarchy. The purpose of this paper is to address this phenomenon by attempting to explain why it occurs and why organisational members tolerate such destructive practices. It concludes by proposing a cultural strategy to protect the organisation and its stakeholders from the ambitious machinations of the organisational sociopath.
Design/methodology/approach – The authors develop an explanatory framework by attempting to combine elements of the theory of memetics with structuration theory. Memetic theory helps to analyse culture and communication of beliefs, ideas, and thoughts. Structuration theory can be used to identify motives and drives. A combination of these theoretical approaches can be used to identify the motives of organisational sociopaths. Such a tool is also useful for exploring the high level of organisation tolerance for sociopathic managers.
Findings – Organisational tolerance and acceptance for sociopathic managerial behaviour appears to be a consequence of cultural and structural complexity. While this has been known for some time, few authors have posited an adequate range of explanations and solutions to protect stakeholders and prevent the sociopath from exploiting organisational weaknesses. Reduction of cultural and structural complexity may provide a partial solution. Transparency, communication of strong ethical values, promotion based on performance, directed cooperation, and rewards that reinforce high performing and acceptable behaviour are all necessary to protect against individuals with sociopathic tendencies.
Originality/value – The authors provide a new cultural diagnostic tool by combining elements of memetic theory with elements of structuration theory. The subsequent framework can be used to protect organisations from becoming the unwitting victims of sociopaths seeking to realise and fulfil their needs and ambitions through a managerial career path.
The organizational culture/leadership of established companies tends to become sociopathic over time, and is then "disrupted" by innovators. So goes the lore/narrative.
At a deeper level, evolutionary psychology, (establishment) "tech" is a weird, schizoid mix of national security fetishists , digital capitalists and global financiers.
They are attempting to make postmodern relativism ("wokeism", etc.) the new faux religion because it is the counter-archetype to traditional industrial capitalism (whose archetype is systematic modern rationalism).
... a passage from the late Christopher Lasch’s book The Revolt of the Elites ... is worth repeating here:
The thinking classes are fatally removed from the physical side of life… Their only relation to productive labor is that of consumers. They have no experience of making anything substantial or enduring. They live in a world of abstractions and images, a simulated world that consists of computerized models of reality – “hyperreality,” as it’s been called – as distinguished from the palatable, immediate, physical reality inhabited by ordinary men and women. Their
[->] belief in “social construction of reality”
[--->] – the central dogma of postmodernist thought
– reflects the experience of living in an artificial environment from which everything that resists human control (unavoidably, everything familiar and reassuring as well) has been rigorously excluded. Control has become their obsession. In their drive to insulate themselves against risk and contingency – against the unpredictable hazards that afflict human life – the thinking classes have seceded not just from the common world around them but from reality itself.
A practitioner I also taught at different University Architecture Programs in Philadelphia from 84 to 95. In 93 a "Women Department Chair" felt that I (married with 2 kids) was being too "tough" (toxic masculinity) in that I required far too much hard repetitive work building study models and doing drawing. I stressed the studio as a "serious place" ( a place to work) without distraction for min of 3 hours..... I demonstrated that the profession valued producers along with ideas. I felt set upon by women faculty (my toxic masculinity) repeated the charge that hard work is gendered and kinda abusive... I sadly look where we are now.....infantilized universities
Hugely important observations, it's the core of the problem in all western societies. It goes well beyond the gentrification of politics which it's an effect and not a cause: in the absence of christian religion (the only western founding cultural myth), we have no rite of passage from childhood to maturity. This rite of passage, present in any "classical" culture from the primitive times of human civilization, is the one assigning responsibilities, direction and meaning to the becoming adult. In Christianity, starting your own family provided this direction and meaning, and the entire culture was build, as a result, around the family. ("culture" used here in the broad meaning). The epidemic of "puer aeternus" (a type of complex confined until then to the area of dominating mother complexes) coincides with the evaporation of the christian culture, and starts well behind us, at the beginning of XXth century. It's only normal that adolescence, which was initially just a transitory phase of no more than 2-5 years, just a border between childhood and adulthood, to become in the absence of a clear passage rite a kind of long age in itself, exhibiting a lot of childish values, attitudes and world views. e.g. in Europe there is a huge problem with adults, up to 30 yo, living with their parents. Of course, woke is both effect and catalyst to this, and some other cultural shifts make the problem worse. It's a deep subject & there is a much needed discussion about the psychological processes behind this "infantilization" of the modern society. I think anyone with an interest in Jungian psycholgy should re-visit "Puer Aeternus" of Marie-Louise von Franz, published in 1970. It helps to see the problem in its true magnitude. Thanks for the text, it's like a breath of fresh air! :)
If your comment was intended to be a response to someone else, it should have showed up in a subthread, not as a separate comment, directly under the OP.
If you are just semi-randomly posting replies directly under the OP, they are unlikely to be seen by the person that you are replying to.
This guy should be tried, and if convicted, given a stiff sentence. I hope you aren't implying that all conservatives are just as guilty of this crime as the perpetrator, or that this is sufficient justification for removing all firearms from law abiding citizens. I would refer anyone who thought that way to the MA husband who seems to have killed and dismembered his wife with a kitchen knife as a counterexample. No guns used here, but a heinous crime nonetheless. Both of these crazies were the problem, not their weapons of choice.
You now have a much bigger problem: the terrorist attack by an election denier in New Mexico is going to further undermine the public appeal of election denier narratives.
(I assume that the paranoid conspiratard troll farms will quickly spin yet another conspiracy theory about the terrorist attack by the election denier.)
I grew up in a military family. My dad grew up building radios and airplanes in the garage (1930s), so he went into the Air Cadets at 17, was flying cargo plane ferry flights while in high school and was trained as a B24 navigator/bombardier by 1945 (18 years old). He was a combat fighter pilot in Korea, 1953, and a B52 commander in Vietnam, 1967-68 (flew over the Tet offensive).
The idea that men would be willing to die for honor and country and the Constitution was still pretty meaningful, even though by the end of the Vietnam war, it was getting tarnished.
A country that has non-serious (stupid regime change) wars like Iraq and Afghanistan (and now Ukraine) can't expect its warriors to take the country very seriously.
When the warrior class, the people expected to die for the cause, don't take the country seriously because it has dishonored itself, no one else is likely to do so either.
The military itself has expanded into a giant collection of careerists and bureaucratic sociopaths obsessed with "diversity".
Unfortunately the author didn't include the situation with the military into account in this article.
I remember when this Colorado politician, Gary Hart, stupidly challenged the press while he was in the beginnings of a run for POTUS. Ine guy took him up on it and followed him around for weeks, finally getting a series of photos of him out on a yacht with a mistress. That was the end of him.
You don’t get to the grown up table by whining about it. Grow up, grab a pair, and earn it.
Can I offer you one of the T-shirts I just made? ("Where Are the Adults?") Great article. I am a Gen Xer, and while I generally despise all these neat labelings of generations (much like we stamp decades with names as if everything changes on the 1s....) I do find that I hold a weird place between trailing the boomers and resenting them for well established reasons; The "Me" Generation by Tom Wolfe, Wall Street, Oliver Stone etc. and whatever the younger ones are called ---I can't even keep track anymore. Y, Z, Millenial. What I do know is that what you said is true. Fathers walking with their 4 year olds down the street are dressed exactly alike now. 20-somethings at home spend far too much time at home in a social media echo chambers. My question is this....if we are caught between octogenerians in power making decisions and people in their 20s and 30s still "finding themselves" using lovely things like TikTok, where is the wide swath of people like me? In their forties and fifties, raised latchkey sometimes and allowed to trip and fall and do stupid stuff without helicopter parenting. Young enough to be on social media but old enough to know how toxic it can be. Why aren't all of us speaking out and telling the younger generations to put on some big girl/boy pants? Or speaking up against the old status quo from war time? This is what perplexes me. I also believe the silence or perhaps inaccess to people that are upset about all this is what has allowed "cancel culture" to take over. Struggling to understand it.
I understand the frustration of an extended adolescence but not the failure of this generation to fight for what they want. As someone who had an extended educational adolescence, I still moved out of my parents’ home at 19, paid my own way through med school (my parents’ gift to me was to pay my car insurance, which was much appreciated), and worked hours as a resident inconceivable to most of my friends. Turning 30 was tough, though, when I was working 110 hours a week, staying overnight at the hospital every third night (no guy puts up with that), and making a pittance for a salary, when my college chums were making 6 figures, getting married, buying houses, and having kids. I chose a path of professional development that did not allow personal development. But at least I lived in my own place, however lowly it may have been.
I believe when the age children could stay on their parents healthcare changed from 18 to 26 was the catalyst. At seventeen I knew I needed to get my act together and think about the future.
How many bootlickers does it take to change a light bulb? Most of the commenters on this article, it seems.
As a lateish Boomer (‘58) with 4 children I think we as parents are largely to blame. We softened every blow - financial, psychological, and social, and restricted the risk they were exposed to at every step of the way to a ridiculous extreme (think walking home from school at six, bicycle helmets, padded playgrounds, etc.).
As a result their decision-making faculties were underdeveloped and they weren’t allowed to learn from their mistakes. We were also richer than our parents, gave them more material comforts and raised their expectations for a life of ease without work in the process.
Unfortunately, the most likely way these trends are reversed involves a lot of societal hardship and anguish ( and the end of the Boomers reign in governance).
(duplicate)
A few sociological and biological elements of the "election denier" subculture:
1. the Trump base was Celtic (and Border Reiver) appalachians, a clannish gene pool and social form based on honor systems and fealty oaths that originated as a historically marginalized population that has been holding grudges for at least 500 years, most recently neoconfederates that have been festering in resentment since the Civil War.
2. because that base is a cultural minority that will never be able to dominate US politics, there is a massive level of cognitive dissonance, which creates a need for emotive narratives that are a balm to the wounded "pagan" psyche.
Election denialism is the main form of balm at the moment.
It is not RATIONAL or OBJECTIVE because cold, systematic logic and fact-based arguments are not capable of being emotional balms (on the contrary).
The purpose of election denialism is to focus the outrage that arises from the political impotence of the celtic-appalachian and other rural-working-class-populist gene pools.
https://medium.com/s/balkanized-america/the-11-nations-of-america-as-told-by-dna-f283d4c58483
None of that would be of much importance except that the mainstream culture is disintegrating due to technology disruption, like the Roman empire collapsing, so the "barbarians" sense an opportunity to crash the gates of the weakened empire.
In other words, the increasing ILLIBERALISM, dysfunction and irrationalism of the "establishment" and the "woke left" is a magnet pulling the "barbarians" toward the gates.
Great article, but I disagree with this: "Aside from the technology sector—which prizes outliers, disagreeableness, creativity and encourages people in their twenties to take on the founder title and to build things that they own—most other sectors of American life are geriatric." As a 49-year-old that has worked in technology since my mid-20's this is laughably untrue. It USED TO be this way. Now tech is one of the least innovative, most stifling and conformist industries there are. I say this as someone who has worked for Google, Microsoft, and Amazon. I got out of the industry a few years ago and should have done it sooner. The only thing I miss is the pay.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/242338489_Organisational_sociopaths_Rarely_challenged_often_promoted_Why
excerpt:
Abstract
Purpose – Organisations sometimes select and promote the wrong individuals for managerial positions. These individuals may be incompetent, they may be manipulators and bullies. They are not the best people for the job and yet not only are they selected for positions of authority and responsibility, they are sometimes promoted repeatedly until their kind populate the highest levels of the organisational hierarchy. The purpose of this paper is to address this phenomenon by attempting to explain why it occurs and why organisational members tolerate such destructive practices. It concludes by proposing a cultural strategy to protect the organisation and its stakeholders from the ambitious machinations of the organisational sociopath.
Design/methodology/approach – The authors develop an explanatory framework by attempting to combine elements of the theory of memetics with structuration theory. Memetic theory helps to analyse culture and communication of beliefs, ideas, and thoughts. Structuration theory can be used to identify motives and drives. A combination of these theoretical approaches can be used to identify the motives of organisational sociopaths. Such a tool is also useful for exploring the high level of organisation tolerance for sociopathic managers.
Findings – Organisational tolerance and acceptance for sociopathic managerial behaviour appears to be a consequence of cultural and structural complexity. While this has been known for some time, few authors have posited an adequate range of explanations and solutions to protect stakeholders and prevent the sociopath from exploiting organisational weaknesses. Reduction of cultural and structural complexity may provide a partial solution. Transparency, communication of strong ethical values, promotion based on performance, directed cooperation, and rewards that reinforce high performing and acceptable behaviour are all necessary to protect against individuals with sociopathic tendencies.
Originality/value – The authors provide a new cultural diagnostic tool by combining elements of memetic theory with elements of structuration theory. The subsequent framework can be used to protect organisations from becoming the unwitting victims of sociopaths seeking to realise and fulfil their needs and ambitions through a managerial career path.
...
Innovator's Dilemma.
The organizational culture/leadership of established companies tends to become sociopathic over time, and is then "disrupted" by innovators. So goes the lore/narrative.
At a deeper level, evolutionary psychology, (establishment) "tech" is a weird, schizoid mix of national security fetishists , digital capitalists and global financiers.
They are attempting to make postmodern relativism ("wokeism", etc.) the new faux religion because it is the counter-archetype to traditional industrial capitalism (whose archetype is systematic modern rationalism).
https://theupheaval.substack.com/p/reality-honks-back
excerpt:
... a passage from the late Christopher Lasch’s book The Revolt of the Elites ... is worth repeating here:
The thinking classes are fatally removed from the physical side of life… Their only relation to productive labor is that of consumers. They have no experience of making anything substantial or enduring. They live in a world of abstractions and images, a simulated world that consists of computerized models of reality – “hyperreality,” as it’s been called – as distinguished from the palatable, immediate, physical reality inhabited by ordinary men and women. Their
[->] belief in “social construction of reality”
[--->] – the central dogma of postmodernist thought
– reflects the experience of living in an artificial environment from which everything that resists human control (unavoidably, everything familiar and reassuring as well) has been rigorously excluded. Control has become their obsession. In their drive to insulate themselves against risk and contingency – against the unpredictable hazards that afflict human life – the thinking classes have seceded not just from the common world around them but from reality itself.
...
A practitioner I also taught at different University Architecture Programs in Philadelphia from 84 to 95. In 93 a "Women Department Chair" felt that I (married with 2 kids) was being too "tough" (toxic masculinity) in that I required far too much hard repetitive work building study models and doing drawing. I stressed the studio as a "serious place" ( a place to work) without distraction for min of 3 hours..... I demonstrated that the profession valued producers along with ideas. I felt set upon by women faculty (my toxic masculinity) repeated the charge that hard work is gendered and kinda abusive... I sadly look where we are now.....infantilized universities
Hugely important observations, it's the core of the problem in all western societies. It goes well beyond the gentrification of politics which it's an effect and not a cause: in the absence of christian religion (the only western founding cultural myth), we have no rite of passage from childhood to maturity. This rite of passage, present in any "classical" culture from the primitive times of human civilization, is the one assigning responsibilities, direction and meaning to the becoming adult. In Christianity, starting your own family provided this direction and meaning, and the entire culture was build, as a result, around the family. ("culture" used here in the broad meaning). The epidemic of "puer aeternus" (a type of complex confined until then to the area of dominating mother complexes) coincides with the evaporation of the christian culture, and starts well behind us, at the beginning of XXth century. It's only normal that adolescence, which was initially just a transitory phase of no more than 2-5 years, just a border between childhood and adulthood, to become in the absence of a clear passage rite a kind of long age in itself, exhibiting a lot of childish values, attitudes and world views. e.g. in Europe there is a huge problem with adults, up to 30 yo, living with their parents. Of course, woke is both effect and catalyst to this, and some other cultural shifts make the problem worse. It's a deep subject & there is a much needed discussion about the psychological processes behind this "infantilization" of the modern society. I think anyone with an interest in Jungian psycholgy should re-visit "Puer Aeternus" of Marie-Louise von Franz, published in 1970. It helps to see the problem in its true magnitude. Thanks for the text, it's like a breath of fresh air! :)
Geez my wife and I were almost exactly 28.6 and 30.4 when we got married. Just another statistic...
What substack glitch?
the one that orphans comments like this
https://www.thefp.com/p/its-time-to-get-serious/comment/12026632
Huh. Doesn't appear to be orphaned in my browser. Maybe you're being gaslit.
If your comment was intended to be a response to someone else, it should have showed up in a subthread, not as a separate comment, directly under the OP.
If you are just semi-randomly posting replies directly under the OP, they are unlikely to be seen by the person that you are replying to.
This guy should be tried, and if convicted, given a stiff sentence. I hope you aren't implying that all conservatives are just as guilty of this crime as the perpetrator, or that this is sufficient justification for removing all firearms from law abiding citizens. I would refer anyone who thought that way to the MA husband who seems to have killed and dismembered his wife with a kitchen knife as a counterexample. No guns used here, but a heinous crime nonetheless. Both of these crazies were the problem, not their weapons of choice.
AGAIN:
You now have a much bigger problem: the terrorist attack by an election denier in New Mexico is going to further undermine the public appeal of election denier narratives.
https://www.newsweek.com/solomon-pena-new-mexico-shootings-gop-candidate-election-denial-1774323
(I assume that the paranoid conspiratard troll farms will quickly spin yet another conspiracy theory about the terrorist attack by the election denier.)
-----
replying to your comment:
https://www.thefp.com/p/its-time-to-get-serious/comment/12026262
(duplicate)
I grew up in a military family. My dad grew up building radios and airplanes in the garage (1930s), so he went into the Air Cadets at 17, was flying cargo plane ferry flights while in high school and was trained as a B24 navigator/bombardier by 1945 (18 years old). He was a combat fighter pilot in Korea, 1953, and a B52 commander in Vietnam, 1967-68 (flew over the Tet offensive).
The idea that men would be willing to die for honor and country and the Constitution was still pretty meaningful, even though by the end of the Vietnam war, it was getting tarnished.
A country that has non-serious (stupid regime change) wars like Iraq and Afghanistan (and now Ukraine) can't expect its warriors to take the country very seriously.
When the warrior class, the people expected to die for the cause, don't take the country seriously because it has dishonored itself, no one else is likely to do so either.
The military itself has expanded into a giant collection of careerists and bureaucratic sociopaths obsessed with "diversity".
Unfortunately the author didn't include the situation with the military into account in this article.
And these days he would have laughed at them and shrugged it off.
your comments are getting stranded by the substack glitch.
-----
replying to your comment:
https://www.thefp.com/p/its-time-to-get-serious/comment/12025514
I remember when this Colorado politician, Gary Hart, stupidly challenged the press while he was in the beginnings of a run for POTUS. Ine guy took him up on it and followed him around for weeks, finally getting a series of photos of him out on a yacht with a mistress. That was the end of him.
Hart was otherwise probably the most qualified. Compared to Mondale, Teddy Kennedy, etc. Hart was more of an independent thinker.
The press were of course vermin, then and now, with a few exceptions such as BW.