Ch. 10: Generational Turnings

“Somebody said me, and then there was nothing to be gained by saying us. Mostly, we are good when it makes sense. A good society is one that makes sense of being good. Suddenly, hanging there below the basket, we were a bad society, we were disintegrating. Suddenly the sensible choice was to look out for yourself. The child was not my child, and I was not going to die for it. The moment I glimpsed a body fall away - but whose? - and I felt the balloon lurch upward, the matter was settled; altruism had no place. Being good made no sense. I let go and fell.” -Ian McEwan, Enduring Love
“OK, Boomer.” - Anonymous

[Con’t]... from a collectivist society to an individualistic society. And to talk about that, I wanted to use the example of - or the framework of - the experience of Baby Boomers in the United States over about a fifty-year period. From about 1960, probably, to about now.

Because collectivism makes sense as long as everybody’s being collective. And individualism makes sense when that’s the best way for people to survive. And what’s interesting to me is the shift in America from a collectivist post-war “The only way we’re going to survive this thing is if we survive it together” kind of attitude to a hyper-individualistic “Every man for himself. You don’t own anything to society and society doesn’t owe anything to you” environment. And both of those attitudes came in direct response to specific historic events that actually happened. And a series of those kinds of things, those kinds of events.

If you’ve ever seen the movie “Forrest Gump'' - you guys ever see “Forrest Gump”? I’m sure you did. Everybody did. OK, I thought so. I thought as much. That’s sort of the history that we’re going to talk about? But not so much because “Forrest Gump” is a self-regarding fantasy - so we’re not actually talking about “Forrest Gump” but we are talking about - well, at least that this history should be sort of familiar to you.

So that's that.  I… I dunno, I don’t want to explain too much before.

The first thing I want to do, though, is to mention this book. A book I really like by this English author named Ian McEwan. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of him. He wrote a book called “Atonement” that was kind of a big deal for a while. But, uh… he wrote this book and IN the book there’s this scene where - it’s in London, and there are these couples in a park, right? And so there’s a man and his wife and they’re having a picnic, and there’s another couple over there, and there’s another couple of couples over here, and in the middle of the park there’s a hill. And on top of this hill is a hot-air balloon, and so in the middle of the park is this hot-air ballon. And there’s this little kid in the basket, under the balloon. And meanwhile his grandfather is outside of the basket, and he’s trying to tie up the balloon so the balloon won’t fly away.

And all of a sudden, even before he can tie it up, there’s a gust of wind. And the gust of wind goes up in the air and the balloon goes up in the air, and - with the kid in the basket - and so all the men in the park, they see this happening and they all run to the balloon and they grab the rope, to keep it from floating - to keep it from flying away. And there’s about five men. And so the five men grab the rope and the weight of the five men keeps the balloon from flying away. But it’s not enough to bring it down either, right? 

I mean, it’s kind of a compromise, right? I mean, the more you put your own weight on it… I mean, it might be OK, it’s not great. So the balloon goes up, it goes down. It goes up another little bit… And then it goes REALLY up, the balloon goes higher… And ONE of the men who’s holding onto the rope gets scared and he lets go of the rope. NOW there are only four people holding onto the rope and not five. And four people is not enough to keep the balloon from flying away. Right? And so now this, this is where this quote in the book starts. And this is what he says.
He says “Somebody said me, and then there was nothing to be gained by saying ‘us’. Mostly we are good when it makes sense. A good society is one that makes sense of being good. Suddenly, hanging there below the basket, we were a bad society, we were disintegrating. Suddenly, the sensible choice was to look after yourself. The child was not my child, and I was not going to die for it. The moment I glimpsed a body fall away - but whose? - and I felt the balloon lurch upwards, the matter was settled; altruism had no place. Being good made no sense. I let go, and fell.”

Right? And so basically what he’s saying is that collectivism - the social contract, all that sort of stuff - that works as long as everybody is playing the same game. But when people stop playing the game, then it doesn’t make any rational sense to be collectivist anymore. Right? And I’ll come back to the idea of the Social Contract in a minute. Because in the story, one guy doesn’t let go of the balloon. And so eventually the balloon rises, he falls, and he dies. Because he didn’t let go in time. The survivors are the ones who abandoned collectivism when it made sense to abandon collectivism. Do you understand what I mean by that?

And so basically what we’re looking at here is… we’re looking at that move from holding on to the rope to letting go of the rope over the period of about half a century. And looking specifically at one generation, the Baby Boomers, right? And what I think is interesting about this group in particular is that the spirit in, say, 1965 was to more or less hold on to the rope. Right? It was a collective spirit. And, yeah, obviously it was more complicated than that, but still there was an obvious value in collective efforts. But essentially the spirit is that we are all in this together and that my security depends on your security. That’s the social contract, in a nutshell. Fast forward to this summer - and I don’t know if you remember this story or not, it was a big story at the time - but basically there was a Black Lives Matter protest outside of St. Louis and these guys stood outside of their house with their guns making sure that the Black Lives Matter protesters didn’t get onto their property.

And everybody said “Oh, they’re crazy and…” except that’s the point, right? It’s crazy from the perspective of a collectivist “we’re all in this together” point of view, but it’s completely sane - in fact, it’s the only thing you CAN do - from the perspective of “we’re on our own”. They’re certainly not alone, and so they’re not crazy. Do you remember when I talked about the angels in the room? Way back in the beginning of the course? When I said if there are eight people in the room and six of them believe there are angels in the room, it’s the other two that are “crazy”? Exactly, the same thing here. So unfortunately these people AREN’T crazy, because there are enough angels in the room. If you know what I mean. What I think is interesting is not so much these two - and I don’t think they WERE crazy. I mean, I don’t like them much, and I don’t like what the represent, and it’s certainly not the response that I would have had, but I don’t think they were crazy. I think they were just responding to their understanding of the situation and of what culture is, just as fifty years ago the Peace Corp kids were responding to THEIR understanding of the situation was and of what THEIR culture was.

And where it’s interesting for me is how did it get from the Peace Corps kids to the people standing in front of their houses with guns in the same generation? When you were twenty-two, you were going to New Mexico and teaching poor kids how to read and when you’re sixty-five, you’re standing in front of your house with a gun making sure that the black people don’t get too close. How does that make sense - and it does - and how did the society shift from one extreme to the other? That’s what I want to look at. How did we go from a collective thing to a…

OK, let’s back up and take a look at the Social Contract. We talked about this a little bit with John Locke yesterday, I don’t know if you remember. The idea of people being born with the natural rights of life, liberty and property, and that people can conditionally give up those rights for the good of the collective? Do you remember that? Kind of? Sort of? Maybe? Well, this is the social contract, and it was an idea that was floating around France and England and a few other places at the same time. Rousseau talked about it. John Locke talked about it. Thomas Hobbes talked about it. But it was the same basic idea, right? And again, remember, this is replacing monarchy. This is the alternative model.

A single body. The culture, right? That’s what the single body is. I help you, you help me. Like a family, right? Corpus, etc. I mean, that’s the basic model of a functioning family.

And going back to our Peace Corps couple, this is what the Social Contract looks like. Look, I have the advantages of being middle-class and white and educated, and I might as well use some of those advantages to help other people. NOT because I’m such a great guy, but because ultimately the society I live in is safer and stronger if more people IN that society feel safe and strong. Do you understand what I mean by that? And that makes sense if it makes sense to enough people. But fast forward to our other couple, over here, and they’d say “Yeah, that was great in 1965. But that’s over. That’s done. It’s every man for himself now.”

And that’s why they’re NOT crazy, because if enough people let go of the rope, the one person who doesn’t let go of the rope dies.

I mean, it’s this schism we talked about before, right? I mean, it’s basically this. It’s the idea of a common good metastasizing into two conflicting versions of how we deal with… are we going to do “Hunger Games” or are we going to do “Redistribute the Wealth”? Right? And it’s pretty much a 50/50 split in the culture. And again, I just want to be really clear. I don’t think that these two individual people standing in front of their house with guns were ever going to be these other two individual people doing the Peace Corp thing in New Mexico. And, at the same time, I don’t think THESE two people were ever going to turn into the others. But I do think that it’s interesting that they’re in the same basic category of generation and experience. Right? And nobody - of this generation - was really doing this gun-pointing thing in the ‘60s. You know? And… But things changed.

And then you get to this, right? I mean, the reason that I… I mean, the reason that I… one of the reasons that I like to use this picture is that it really does exemplify… I mean, you have “Liberty” over here, even if it’s at the cost of everybody - just like “fuck it, I’m free. So I can do this and you can’t tell me what to do” - or you have the Social Contract over here. Which is “You’ve gotta wear a mask because if you don’t wear the mask I’M gonna die and I gotta wear the mask because if I don’t wear the mask YOU’RE gonna die and I might not even LIKE you, but that’s the deal. Right?

And I know I’ve talked about this before, and… but this is part of the reason why all of a sudden standing in front of your house with a gun makes sense. OK? I mean, not to me, but certainly to those guys. It makes sense because - at least as far as they’re concerned - we are at a Malthusean point of crisis. I mean, this is really… it’s NICE when the population is low and the resources are high and the chances of getting eaten by a bear are minimal. That’s fine. That’s fantastic. Let me come down to New Mexico to teach you how to read.

Look, I don’t mind sharing my dinner with five other people. I have enough food. I could lose some weight, that wouldn’t be a problem. But I don’t want to share my food with TWENTY people. Because then I don’t have enough food, right? And you wouldn’t either. The conditions have changed. You know, this is the whole “population and the resources” thing and let me show you how quickly it changes.

This is the world’s population over the past twelve thousand years. And, uh, 1928 was NOT that long ago. My mother-in-law, my wife’s mother, was born in 1929. And she only died last year. So there’s this… I mean, that’s within living memory. Barely, but still. And there were two billion people on the Earth back in 1929. And it took almost … it took 32 years to get to … now, I know there was a world war to get through, but even so it only took thirty years to get from two billion to three billion people. Right? 1928 to 1960. I was born in 1967, so when I was born - and, you know, I’m not THAT old - so when I was born there were three and a half billion people. So three billion in 1960, four billion in 1975. So that’s fifteen years, it went another billion. And then in another twelve years it went another billion. And then another twelve years it went another billion. And then ANOTHER twelve years it went another billion. And by 2050 the United Nations figures there’s going to be nine and a half billion people on the planet. 

Well, you go back to this thing, this Malthus model, and all of a sudden this isn’t an abstract idea, all of a sudden it’s like “There are not enough resources here”. And so who is going to control who gets what? Right? I mean, if we redistribute the resources, if we act in a collectivist way … “Yeah, we all get healthcare, but the healthcare won’t be amazing. If we’re LUCKY it’ll be good enough”. If we go with individualism - and remember the stuff I talked about yesterday with America and individualism - if we go individualistically, you might not have a doctor but you don’t necessarily DESERVE a doctor because, hey, “every man for himself. Good luck, and I sincerely hope that you’re able to get a doctor, but it’s not my responsibility to GET you one. Where is THAT written?” Right?

So, all of a sudden again, it makes more sense to stand in front of your house with a gun.
And so where did they come from? I mean, I know that, I know that all around the world - I guess - after the Second World War - a lot of people had babies. Right?  I mean, France. There was a population boom in France, there was a population boom in England. But in America, there were something like 76 million kids born - and that’s a lot of kids - born in twenty years. Between 1945 and 1965. And the conditions had to be just right for that to happen. One of the things that has to happen - well, OK, before I even start with that - America, unlike Europe or unlike a lot of Asia, I mean, we were FINE. Physically we were fine. We weren’t invaded, we weren’t bombed. We were protected by oceans and Canada and Mexico.

Also, very few people - compared to most countries engaged in the war very few Americans died in the war, and, uh… by the end of it we were the most powerful country in the - certainly in the west, alright? Our economy was strong, we had a lot of people, a lot of those people were young, we survived the depression, we survived the Second World War, and then we came back from the war and the government, the U.S. government, did this very smart thing. I don’t know if you know what the “G.I. Bill” was, but it was basically a government subsidy for returning soldiers so they could afford houses and they could afford a college education. And the reason that they did that - I always thought they did that just to be nice, just to say “Hey, thanks for fighting a war. Here’s a house.” But that’s not why they did it. I’m an idiot. The reason they did it was to build a strong and stable middle-class. Right? Because if you want a stable society, you want a stable middle-class. Yeah, it’s nice to have rich people, and you’re always going to have some poor people, but really stability is in the middle. You have a house, you have an education, you have a solid job, you’ve got a backyard. Don’t fuck it up and everything’ll be fine.

And that’s what this was. And then over here, because of the stability and because of the economy and because of strong industry and all of that, the U.S. GDP jumped from - I forgot what the base numbers were, but it jumped by more than three-hundred million dollars IN 1940 to 1960 money. I mean, I remember talking to my in-laws, who went on their honeymoon to Paris in the early 1950s, and Paris in the early 1950s was… I mean, the buildings were beautiful, but the city was POOR. I mean, France in the ‘50s was on the ropes. Germany had to be rebuilt, and… I mean, so there was no real… I mean, as a culture, as a society, America could suddenly dictate the terms of the second half of the twentieth century.

I always thought it was interesting - as an aside - before the Second World War the art capital of the West was Paris. Right? I mean, that’s where all the artists lived, and if you were an American artist with any ambition at all, you’d have to go to Paris - or at least you’d have to go to Europe - for that kind of stamp of approval. AFTER the Second World War it became New York. First of all, all the European artists went to New York to get away from the Nazis, but even after that, suddenly New York was suddenly the place where European artists would have to go for THEIR stamp of approval. 

So culturally it flipped as well.

And then finally, you’ve got this population figure, this 76 million U.S. children born between 1945 and 1964. One thing I want to point out there is that you’re talking about a lot of kids, and you’re also talking about a twenty-year period. Right? And you need to break that down into two halves. The first half was 1945 to about 1955, and you had roughly 33 million kids born - actually I guess a little more than half the total amount - born during that period. Right? Whatever the math is. And then 1955 to 1964 you had another big group of kids born. But if you remember, we talked about “standpoint theory”? How, depending on where you are when something happens or depending on the cultural lenses that you look at the world through, the world looks different. Do you remember we talked about that? You know, if you’re religious the world looks this way and if you’re not it looks another way. You remember that? And one of those cultural lenses is the age you are when something happens. So when you’re looking at these two groups of Boomers, the thing about this, is that if you were born in 1945 that means you were 15 in 1960. Which means that you were old enough to see and to understand society as a working thing. You were old enough to see collectivism work and to see government as a good thing and as an extension of society and all of that. On the other hand, if you were born in 1955, that means you were 15 in 1970, and by the time you were paying attention, America was in pretty bad shape. Between Vietnam, and between political corruption and between assassinations and riots and demonic serial killers and all that sort of stuff, so…

So the early Baby Boomers, that first group, they were inheriting the collectivist idea, right? They grew up being taught to believe in the inherent goodness of society. The second group, they were more individualistic because by the time they came along they saw society as a failure and not as a machine for progress. So the reason … So when you come to this standoff between Freedom and the Social Contract, you know, “Wear a Mask” versus “Open the Shops”. You’ve got these guys over here - this is sort of the “money, private property, small government” sort of stuff, and you’ve got these guys over here, the collectivist “civil liberties and diversity” stuff … Basically, in a really fundamental way, you’ve got Bernie Sanders over here and you’ve got Trump over there. But what’s interesting to me, as somebody who’s a generation younger than those guys, is that it’s kind of like the Houses in the “Game of Thrones”. We’re all still stuck in this ideological battle between these two old groups, who’ve been fighting this fight since about 1966. And they’re old, but they’re still in control of the… I guess, hegemony of society. Or whatever.

Strauss & Howe’s Generational Turnings

OK, Strauss and Howe. Strauss and Howe were basically … one of them was a historian, Howe was the historian, and I think Strauss was just a writer. But basically, they came up with this theory that every hundred years or so there is a “reset” in culture. That basically there’s a crisis that happens, and then after the crisis people need to rebuild society, and then the children of the people that rebuild society tend to take from society, and then as that accelerates there IS no society, and that leads to another crisis, and then they have have to rebuild society again. And, you know … Howe, being the historian that he is, he looked at every century for the last five hundred years or whatever, and he said “Yeah, it usually happens around HERE. And the last one was roughly the Great Depression and the Second World War. So from about the end of 1929 to about the middle of 1945 you have a crisis. And then, from about 1945 to about 1965 you have another twenty years where it’s the rebuilding and then maintaining of society. And then from about 1965 to about 1990, you’ve got another twenty to twenty-five years, you have the rise of individualism. And then from about 1985 to about 2005 - though I’m kind of tempted to say September 2001 - you have no real society at all. And then from about 2005, for the next twenty years or so, you have a crisis. You understand what I mean by this? Are you following the chronology? Are you even able to? I’m sorry, guys.

And so what Strauss and Howe were arguing was that the last crisis - Great Depression and Second World War, fine - and there was this generation that fought in the war and were young adults during the Depression and… you know, that group. And then, after them, you have this group called the Silent Generation, and the Silent Generation were the parents of the Baby Boomers and they were the adults in the 1950s and their job was essentially just to not fuck it up. “OK, we survived the war, we survived the Depression. What we’re going to do is make a nice, stable, calm society and everybody’s going to play their part.” This is a very Social Contract generation. They were conformist, they were fairly conservative, but at the same time, they really did believe in the whole model of “I will contribute and I will take, and I will maintain that balance. And together we’ll get through this.” And then they had kids, and those kids were the Baby Boomers. 

The Baby Boomers tended to… Ultimately, they were very good at half of the Social Contract. They were very good at the “taking” part of the social contract. They weren’t so enthusiastic about the “contributing” part of the Social Contract. And that was encouraged by their parents. Remember, their parents had survived the Depression and the war and they wanted to make sure their kids didn’t have the same problems they had when they were young. Also, the Silent Generation had built a really strong society, so their kids grew up just assuming that a strong society was just the natural state. “Of course we have good houses! Of course we have good schools! Of course we have enough food!” All that sort of stuff. Because their parents and their country supplied that kind of base environment. So for them, and speaking in a very very general way, it was more about taking that it was about the balance. Although remember that thing I said before, about the two halves of the Baby Boom generation. The first half, they’re still kind of at the contributing end of the equation. The second half, it was more along the lines of “gimme, gimme. Gimme.”

So during this generation, the cultural model goes from collectivist to individualist. And THEN, it gets SO individualistic that society itself unravels, it falls apart. And then there’s unregulated competition for the resources, and then you have something like a pandemic, which … you know, the only way to effectively beat a pandemic is collectively, right? Because it’s biological and it spreads through groups and the virus doesn’t care. The virus doesn’t care if you’re black or white or poor or gay or rich or whatever. It doesn’t care, it’s a virus. But because the collective infrastructure is gone, because we’ve dismantled collectivism, and so now we have to reorder society again.

Which means that you guys - if Strauss and Howe are right - it means that you guys are the ones who have to reorder society again. More or less. You’re the right age at the right time (or the wrong age at the wrong time, depending on how you look at it) of overseeing and building a new society. So, Good Luck! I hope it works out! We’ll soon find out. So get your rest, eat your vegetables, because you have a lot of work to do. So that’s the idea. And if Strauss and Howe are correct, this crisis - this “fourth turning” thing - it kind of started with September 11th, and it would kind of end with I GUESS the pandemic. I don’t know. We’ll see what happens. Beats the hell out of me.

OK, this is just a breakdown of Strauss and Howe’s “generational turnings” theory. The Silent Generation, individuals in service to society. The Boomers, individuals autonomous from society. They have no responsibility to society, but they like the stuff. Then the unravelling generation, that’s me. Generation X, the disaffected Nirvana generation. Individual in opposition to society. I’m not even entirely sure I agree with that, because it sounds a little more dynamic than I remember it. There wasn’t really even a society to be in opposition to. And then finally the reordering of society. That’s the Generation Y, Generation Z cohort.

But don’t hold me to it. It’s culture, there’s room for mistakes. 

“Babies Mean Business!” I’m not even going to talk about this, really. Except to say that there was always this sort of indulgent materialistic aspect to Baby Boomers that … Well, we’ve gone over this before.

OK, this is the conservative collectivist childhood of Boomers. This is the environment they would have grown up in if they were lucky, right? And again, the idea was that everybody conforms for the good of everybody else. And it was a very black-and-white binary thing, you were either with society or you were a threat to society. Just by existing.

So this is kids going to school, being patriotic, pledging allegiance to the flag. Which we still do, as far as I know. When I was a kid we still did this. You stand next to your desk and you put your hand over your heart and you … I don’t know if I can remember it now. “I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America. And for each…” something… “for which it stands. One nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.” One nation. Indivisible. And then you sit down.

And these are the suburbs, that were built after the war to take care of the new families, of the new middle-class. And the most famous one, maybe, was Levittown, which was just outside of New York City. If you’ve ever gone to New York City, if you’ve ever flown into JFK, instead of going towards Manhattan, if you went back? Behind you? You’d find Levittown. It’s in Nassau County and it’s in all the sociology textbooks and when I went there I didn’t see anything exceptional about it at all. I couldn’t see what was so special, because it looked just like where I grew up. But this was the first place to look like that. And, you know, it was a purpose built suburban community for people who were working in New York. And one of the interesting things about it is that all of the houses here, there were only four models of house you could live in. You could have this house, you could have this house, you could have this house, or you could have this house. And you could only paint them one of, like, three colors. You could have a white house or a red house or, I don’t know … green. Whatever it was. But the conformity was the point. That was the appeal. The other thing was that in an area … maybe because Levittown was outside of New York City, and most of the people who would have moved there moved from New York City, if you were Jewish you could probably live here. But if you were black you certainly couldn’t. Right? No real estate agent was going to show you a house in Levittown. If you could even afford one, you wouldn’t be allowed to move there. And that still happens, if we talk about “redlining”, but I don’t know if we have time now.

Because, again, it was about conforming. It was almost Utilitarian in a way, the greater good and all of that. Anybody or anything that was outside of the mainstream parameters of acceptability was seen as a threat to the mainstream. And you can’t afford a threat to the mainstream, because we just survived the war and the Depression and we’re not doing that again.

And this was the ideal. This was the post-war ideal, the Man in the Grey Flannel Suit, which is taken from a book that was actually a criticism of that ideal, but anyway… Paul Fussell, I don’t know if you remember him but he’s the one who wrote on “class”.

And yeah, there are rewards for being a conformist, and people wanted to be conformist, and all that. Absolutely. You get a job and you feed your kids and - security. Of course I get that. Hey, I’ve got kids. And yeah, it costs, and it continues to cost and it cost them, too, like going back it was a very neurotic and anxious and repressed time -  but at the same time it was also, you know … it was like being a soldier in an army in a new war.  In part because there were obvious and immediate rewards to being a conformist - which is, you know, you get a job and you can buy a house and there’s security - We are going to reconstruct society, and hey, if you’ve got to get a haircut and you’ve got to choose between a blue house and a red house, that’s a price worth paying.

And so part of the response in the 1960s, part of the response of their children, the appeal of hyper-individualism, was a direct response to their parents conformity and the conformity they grew up with. It was like “God, I grew up with this and Mom and Dad were like this and they were miserable. And I hated it. So I want to be my own person, I don’t want to have to be part of ‘the society’.” That’s part of why Boomers became such individualists. But each side has its benefits and each side has its drawbacks. Right?

So anyway, let me get back to this Paul Fussel quote. So he’s this historian, and he said that the ideal in America after the war was “good looking Aryans, blonde and tall, beloved by slim blonde women and surrounded by much-desired consumer goods.” This essay that he wrote this in is interesting, because what he’s doing here is he’s comparing pre-war German ideals with post-war American ideals, and he’s finding some commonalities. And he’s saying, you know, “weirdly, there’s a lot of similarities here”. The other thing is this Jean Cocteau quote, where he talks about the “conspiracy of the plural against the singular.”

So if you were this guy - the Man in the Grey Flannel Suit - the world was built for you. If you were black or if you were gay or if you were Jewish in most areas, or … I was going to say “Muslim” but it wasn’t even a thing back then. Nobody knew what that was, in 1945 in America. But if you were anything outside the norm, you were seen as a threat to the stability of society. It wasn’t even personal. Nothing personal.

Collectivism: Interest of the group prevails over the interests of the individual. Life in service to the collective. Individual aims secondary to social welfare. You don’t want to get a haircut? Well, tough. You have to get a haircut because our social stability depends on you getting a haircut. Our social stability depends on you marrying Becky Sue from down the street. But I don’t want to marry Becky Sue!

And the rewards were this. Right? Food, jobs, houses. Decent schools. Also, remember, you guys know what Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is? PTSD? Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is when somebody goes through a traumatic event, if they survive it, they have a lot to deal with. With reconciling … it happens a lot with soldiers, when soldiers come back from war and they have to readjust to the new peace of being home, or whatever. I mean, you’re talking about a whole generation of post traumatic stress disorder. The ones who fought in the war obviously had to deal with that. But also the Depression. I mean, my grandmother, for example, she was a young woman in the Great Depression and she was smart and she wanted to go to university and she had the grades and all, and she had her dream and she had her plan and she was going to go to Boston and then the Depression hit and there goes that. So she went to secretarial school instead and learned how to type. And her eventual husband, my Grandfather, was a wedding photographer and then he went off to France to fight in the Second World War. Where his friends got blown up. In front of him. And then all of a sudden, two years later, you’re in this house in Central Kentucky and it’s like … “Let’s just get the haircut.” And so there was a lot of drinking and there was a lot of general unhappiness on a personal level, but at the same time there was a lot of “let’s just keep it cool. Let’s just keep it cool.”

So yeah, there was a lot of conformity, but in conformity is security. So these are the rewards. You get a house, you get a … Is it the same today in the United States? No, not really. I mean, that’s what we’re … give me 42 minutes and I’ll tell you why not. I’ll get you to where we are today. There’s a narrative here, man. So you get the house, you get the heating system, you get the turkey at Thanksgiving. You get the shopping mall. You’ve just got to be good. You’ve got to behave yourself. And the threat - you know, the stick to go along with the carrot - the carrot is the nice house and the turkey on the table. The threat is that you could die at any minute. We’re at war with the Russians, we’re on a permanent war footing. The Second World War ended, now we’re in a cold war with the Russians, the Communists are everywhere, and there are spies who are taking our nuclear secrets and all that sort of stuff.

And the anxiety was real, don’t get me wrong. You really COULD die at any minute. The anxiety was legitimate because, you know, is IS sort of scary, the thought of getting blown up by a nuclear bomb. And so you’ve got a bunch of kids, who… I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of “Duck and Cover” but if you’ve ever done anything on Cold War American history, you’ll have come across “Duck and Cover”. What it was was basically a way that the school taught children how to deal with the threat of a nuclear explosion. They said “OK, kids, if there is a flash, say New York has just been blown up, what I need you to do is I need you to get under your desks in your classroom to protect you from the bomb.” And when I was a kid and I read about that I was like “what a line of bullshit THAT is.” Right? I mean, what is THAT going to do? That’s not going to do anyth… Those must be some pretty impressive desks. Those desks must be amazing. But then I read later that, no, they knew. Of course they knew. It wasn’t about protecting the kids from a nuclear blast, it was just that they wanted to give the kids some sense that there was something they could do. So that they didn’t just have all this free-floating helpless anxiety to deal with. It kind of makes sense.

But at the same time, weirdly… You know, this was the time when all these nuclear explosions were taking place, where they would test bombs in Nevada for example, outside of Las Vegas, and what they used to do is they used to build these little towns, these little model towns, like full-sized neighborhoods, a couple of houses. And the houses looked a lot like these Levittown houses we were looking at earlier. So they’d build these houses and then - and this is where it gets really weird - and then they would put mannequins inside the house. They’d dress them up and everything, little families. You’ve got the Mom Mannequin and the Dad Mannequin and you’ve got Uncle Charlie mannequin and little sister mannequin, your baby brother mannequin and all this, and they’d arrange them in the living room of the little model house, and then they would film this, and then they would blow it up. Using these hydrogen bombs or whatever. And I don’t know how the footage managed to survive, but it did. And then they would show those films in schools to kids. To the same kids that were ducking and covering. And as far as I can tell the only reason to put the mannequin people in the houses was to scare the kids. You know what I mean? If you blow up an empty house, you go “Oh, that’s what the bomb does to a house.” But once you put a mom and a dad and a baby in there, and THEN you blow it up, you’re creating empathy. You know what you’re doing. And so I think part of the message was “be good, because if you’re not good, this is what can happen.”

We talked about that yesterday, right? How it’s easier to control a scared population. If there’s a population that’s scared for its life, it will do what you tell it to do if it thinks that’s the road to survival.
  

Plus, you had other things. I mean, this was the Cold War. You had things like the situation in Vietnam, which was escalating. And which, frankly, the Americans inherited from the French. But the idea that there was a global orchestrated Communist conspiracy, which … I mean, ultimately the war in Vietnam was a civil war inside the country that was regarded by America as a Communist overtaking. And I’m not really sure that’s what it was. It was a little more complicated than that.

But then you also had the Cuban revolution, and there was a good reason for a revolution in Cuba. I mean, the guy that was running Cuba before Castro came to power, Batista, was essentially a dictator who was supported by the U.S. government and by the American Mafia. But it was also 90 miles from Miami, and if you remember the stuff we talked about with Teddy Roosevelt and the American Hegemonic Empire, the enemy was never supposed to get that close. This is our backyard, not theirs.

And we talked about this before as well, when we talked about heroes and popular culture, but America in the 1950s saw itself as the cowboy. Or the cowboy sheriff. I mean, one of the interesting things about this - if I can go back a minute to Strauss and Howe - according to the Strauss and Howe model, the reason America got to determine what post-war Western culture looked like was because America was the most powerful Western culture left after the war. Because of money and geography and timing and luck. If some other culture was the most powerful culture, THEY would have got to determine what the second half of the 20th Century looked like. And - sticking to the Strauss and Howe model - maybe after THIS crisis it’ll be somebody else, somebody other than America, who will determine what the next chapter’s like. Who knows? But the point is that after the war, in late 1940s and 1950s, America really did see itself as the sheriff. Again, we talked about this when we talked about heroes and myths. As the people that were establishing a new society on the frontier. Where there wasn’t any.

Also, I’m going to switch up here. This is also around the time that young Baby Boomers start paying attention to the outside world. I mean, you had television for the first time. Which we talked about before, with hegemony and all that. But the thing about television is that you could see things outside of your immediate experience. In America. And again, this is still a collectivist society and for the most part I think … well, I don’t know. Maybe I’m being too idealistic here. But, you know, you could turn on the television and you could see what was going on with the Little Rock Arkansas high school integration. Which, I don’t know if you know if you know anything about that, but basically there was a law that was passed in America - a federal law - that said you can’t have “separate but equal” schools for black kids and white kids in public schools. Basically, everybody’s American, everybody’s entitled to go to the same school. And in Arkansas, the state government said no. They said they weren’t going to do it. They didn’t need to integrate their schools based on some decision up in Washington D.C. and the federal government said “Yeah, you do, and we’re going to send the army to your city to make sure you do.” So that was on the news, right? Also on the news you had the marches in Selma and Montgomery. The civil rights movement was picking up some national momentum.

And, maybe not overwhelmingly, but I think there was a sort of general idea in most of America that the civil rights movement was not a bad thing. I don’t think everybody was necessarily going “this is a great thing,” and certainly poor white areas in the South - and importantly not JUST in the South - were not saying “this is a great thing.” - but I think for the most part and among a sort of middle-class secure and still kind of collectivist environment, and remember it was the Federal Government that was on the right side of this fight. Right? Also, I don’t know if you know anything about Emmet Till who was, in 1955, who was killed in Mississippi. But he was this kid from Chicago and this had a huge impact. Again, if you were born in 1945 he was only a couple of years older than you. He was a fourteen year old kid from Chicago who went to visit family in Mississippi and was killed by these two white guys, and horribly disfigured. And this is his mother and she insisted that there was an open coffin at his funeral so that people could see what they did to her son. I mean, he was unrecognizable. I won’t show you THOSE pictures but you can find them yourselves. And this was the kind of thing that made everybody - nationally - go “Whoa, wait a minute.”

So there was an instinct towards a better society. Maybe not universally, but generally. And there you have, in 1959 and 1960, you have John F. Kennedy running as President of the United States. This new young sexy kind of funny handsome rich guy, with his young sexy beautiful wife, and they’re young and they don’t look like any presidents that came before and he’s kind of a war hero and he’s positioning himself to be on the right team, right? He’s a Democrat and he’s a big society kind of guy and he wants younger people to invest in society and remember, again, if you were born in 1945, you were fifteen. And this guy just looks cool. He looks sexy. And his wife looks cool and sexy, too. This was the first First Couple that actually had sex in the White House, I think.

And this is the speech that he gives as he assumes the office. He says: “In the long history of the world, only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger. I do not shrink from this responsibility, I welcome it. I do not believe that any of us would exchange places with any other people or any other generation. The energy, the faith, the devotion which we bring to this endeavor will light our country and all who serve it - and the glow from that fire can truly light the world.” I mean, it’s stirring stuff, right? It’s like Henry the Fifth’s “Band of Brothers” speech. And then he caps it off with this. “And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.”

Well, that’s collectivism, right? That’s it right there. Don’t take, give. And if you’re fifteen or sixteen this can be an inspiring idea. Yeah! We’ve seen how bad it can get, obviously there’s room for improvement here. And especially in terms of civil rights. And so this is what giving back to the country looked like. These are middle-class white suburban kids, who grew up with all the privileges and benefits of America. But they were also trying to come up with ways of using that agency to improve society. And obviously, not everybody. There were a lot of people who weren’t doing this. But the mood of the country was close enough to this for this to make sense. So if you’re one of these kids, what do you do? Well, you go to a Native American reservation in New Mexico and you teach kids English and math. Or you go to the South and you register poor black people to vote. And even voting is an endorsement of the system itself, right? You try to improve society on a real grass-roots level. And it’s not JUST because “I’m so wonderful, look at me, I’m a nice white person who’s going to help you” - although sometimes that’s the case. But generally, it’s motivated by the fact that this is also MY country and if we all live in the same house and your room is on fire, that’s still part of the house.

And so there was a real optimism to this, right?

And so by the time you get to the 1963 March on Washington … and I know there’s a, there seems to be a kind of schism in popular culture now with younger people. It’s like “Well, we don’t like Martin Luther King anymore, now we like Malcolm X.” You can like both, you know. It’s not like the Beatles or the Stones, it’s not a brand. They were very different and they had very different philosophies about the civil rights movement and all that, but to reduce it to just who’s “cooler” seems a little shallow. And anyway, we’re talking about collectivism here, and if we’re talking about working within the system, Malcolm X never really had any interest in doing that. And that’s fair enough. That was the whole point of Malcolm X. Malcolm X was working very deliberately outside of the hegemony, while King was working inside to try and change the hegemony. Sort of. Inside the hegemony, and they both contributed hugely to the movement but from diametrically opposed perspectives. Right now, the reason I’m talking about King and not Malcolm X, is because this is still part of the collective. Malcolm X was not interested in working through the collective, which is fine, but it’s not the same philosophy. Malcolm X was asking “why are we trying to work within a system that has never worked for us? The only way that we’re going to be able to improve our situation in work and in life is to work autonomously and separately from this bigger racist system.” And that’s a perfectly reasonable argument. King’s argument was “No, the way we have to do is this we have to work together to change our definition of what society is and our place in it.” And they’re both good arguments, but if I’m arguing for the collective good of government and society, then Malcolm X’s argument - as good as it is - doesn’t help me. I mean, I’m not trying to say … You know, the temptation, when people say “Oh, sure, you like King because King doesn’t scare you.” It’s like “No, I’m just talking about collectivism here.” And in that light, this march in 1963 was a hugely optimistic gesture. Right? I mean, if you can get this many people, in 1963, and it wasn’t all black people, and if you can get all these people there to march in support of civil rights, that means that the collective spirit of the culture is shifting towards a more inclusive society. I guess.

So that’s June 1963.

And then also in 1963, in November 1963, you’ve got Kennedy. You know, November 22nd. Kennedy went to Texas, because he was going to run for re-election the next year, and got shot and killed in the back of his limousine. And again, if you were fifteen when Kennedy got elected, that means you were eighteen when Kennedy got killed, and that’s the first real kick in the teeth for that generation. It’s like “Oh. Huh. Maybe this isn’t going to be as easy as we thought.” And remember, this kind of thing was unimaginable. “Maybe this isn’t going to happen without some kind of struggle.” So Kennedy gets shot and he’s replaced by Johnson, who - I don’t have time to get into the details of Johnson, except to say that he was a very complicated man - but he wasn’t an inspiring president, certainly not in the way Kennedy had been. Johnson didn’t look like a movie star, he wasn’t especially funny. He was very good at domestic policy, he was on the right side of the civil rights movement, he led the “War on Poverty” and all of that sort of stuff, but he was also the guy who inherited and accelerated Kennedy’s involvement in Vietnam. And really it was Vietnam, more than the civil rights movement, that ended up fracturing America and I think still to a large extent - if you talk about American culture now, you can’t not talk about Vietnam.   

 

Also, as far as the civil rights movement is concerned, you’ve got the murders of Goodman, Chaney and Schwerner, who were these three civil rights activists. These two guys were from New York, Chaney was from Mississippi. And they were in Mississippi to register people to vote and they were killed and their bodies disappeared for a while and then were found and the FBI went in to investigate. That was 1964. And, you know, you’ve got Medgar Evers, another civil rights activist ALSO from Mississippi and also murdered in his driveway. In June 1963. And then you’ve got Malcolm X, who was killed in the Audubon Ballroom in New York - and that’s a more complicated story, I don’t know if .... There’s a really good documentary on Netflix called “Who Killed Malcolm X” and it’s WAY too complicated for me to teach now, but I recommend it. But a lot of violence.

Uh, OK. So 1964. 1964 is like, when … You guys are what, like twenty? About? Twenty-one? So, you know, the same thing. So the leading wave of this Boomer generation is stuck in the same position that you’re in right now. You’re adults, and you’re able to build your own communities, but you don’t have any money yet. Not really. I mean, your family might, but you don’t. And you’re not in government. And you’re not in any position to make any decisions as far as the country is being run. You’re just in that in-between stage. You’re not a kid anymore, but your not an adult with power yet. And in the mid-1960s, that’s where these kids were, too. You know, you could go to music festivals. And you could get an apartment in the city if you had the money. I mean, that’s what my parents did. My little hippie parents, my little hippie self. But essentially it was your parents generation that was in charge of things.

And in America one of the things they were in charge of was the war in Vietnam. The problem there is that you guys would be the ones fighting in that war. You wouldn’t be making the decisions, but you would be the ones who were going. And it was a mess. It was a disaster. It was a bad idea from the start. And not only that, but later it was revealed that the U.S. Government kind of knew, from about 1966, they knew that they couldn’t win the war. They knew it. They did studies, they did reports, and they concluded that “Yeah, we’re not going to win this war.” But at the same time, they could not afford to quit, because they were America. And America doesn’t lose wars to a bunch of barefoot rice farmers in Asia. What kind of signal would that send to the rest of the world? We beat the Nazis, we’re not going to turn around and lose to these guys twenty years later. So they were stuck. And what that means is that everybody, from about 1966 or 1967 onward, all of the people that got killed or wounded in the war, they pretty much died for nothing. Because the government that sent them there knew - they didn’t know who was going to die but they certainly knew that they weren’t going to win. And the people that signed up in good faith to go fight - and yeah, people got drafted, but also people supported the war because they still believed in “America” and they still believed in “ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.” Well, one thing you can do for the country is join the army. Yeah, you could go to the south and you could register people to vote, you could join the army too. It’s all a contribution. And this was the kind of speech that was coming out of President Johnson. He said: “We do this” - and he’s talking about escalating U.S. military involvement - “We do this in order to slow down aggression. We do this to increase the confidence of the brave people of South Vietnam who have bravely borne this brutal battle for so many years and with so many casualties.” And then he gets to the central point. He says: “We do this to convince the leaders of North Vietnam - and all who seek to share their conquest - of a simple fact: We will not be defeated. We will not grow tired. We will not withdraw either openly or under the cloak of a meaningless agreement.”

OK, it didn’t work out that way.

1968, uh… Very bad year. Like the worst, the most cataclysmic so far. In the 1960s, anyway. I don’t know if you … there’s no reason why you should know this, but people have been comparing 2020 to 1968 as one of those years where the culture broke. There were riots and there was wholesale discontent and … Yeah, it’s the year that the culture broke. January you had the Tet Offensive, April and Martin Luther King is killed. May, you have riots in Paris. June, President Kennedy’s brother Bobby, who was running for the presidency and hopefully bring the troops out of Vietnam, he gets killed in Los Angeles. August you have riots in Chicago. October you have student riots in Mexico City, and they don’t even KNOW how many people got killed in those riots. And then in November, just to round things off, Nixon gets elected as the President. And the REASON Nixon got elected was because he said “I am going to stop all of this chaos. All right? We are going to go back to the order and stability of the 1950s.” That was the promise, he ran on “Law and Order.” And a lot of the older people - not so much the younger people - but the older people Nixon referred to as the “Silent Majority” said “Yeah, a little law and order sounds pretty good. Because this is not working.”

You know, this is what Chicago looked like in 1968. And I can go into reasons behind the Chicago riots later, if you want, but there's just too many details. But this is Chicago in 1968. This is Paris in 1968. This is Northern Ireland in ‘68. The Civil Rights movement in Northern Ireland directly inspired by the Civil Rights movement in the United States. And then this is the Black Panther Movement, outside of San Francisco. And the Black Panthers were following that autonomous self-governing philosophy we were talking about earlier, because working within the system clearly wasn’t working. They said “Look, we’re going to set up our own system. You guys aren’t helping, so we’re just going to do it on our own…” And it was because of the Panthers that gun laws were passed in California. And the reason those laws were passed in California was because black militant activists were buying guns, and that made the state government very nervous. 
This is AIM - the American Indian Movement - which was a Native American movement inspired by the Black Panther Movement, and then this group, in a weird way, scared or at least annoyed some people even more because these were white college educated upper-middle-class kids who decided to join the anti-war movement and start a terrorist organization called “The Weathermen.” Right here, “The Militant Weathermen Faction.” And what they did is they made bombs, essentially, and they blew up government buildings and banks and army recruitment centers. Mostly they robbed banks and issued communiques and posed a lot, but at the time… They also accidentally blew up their parents house - one their parents house - in New York. This was … if you ever go to New York and you’re ever walking down 11th Street, between 5th Avenue and 6th Avenue, you’ll see all these beautiful old townhouses on the south side of the block. All these old brownstones. Old building, old building, old building, old building, NEW building, old building, old building. And the reason there’s a new building is because these guys right here, the Weathermen, were in the basement making bombs and somebody touched the wrong two wires. And it blew up the house and it killed two of them, and so it was chaos. They went on the run, and became kind of underground celebrities for a while. 

And at the same time, Vietnam is getting worse. I don’t know if you know what the Draft Lottery was, but basically if you were - if you were going to be drafted into Vietnam, the only way they could do it that at least gave the appearance of being fair was by picking birthdays. Right? So they would have a lottery every year, and if your birthday was December 7th in 1970, for example? You were number 12, which meant pretty much pack your bags. Because you were probably going to go to Vietnam. But if your birthday was, say, December 15th, your number is 320 and you weren’t going to go. And again, these are kids your age and its people MY age deciding which one of you was going to go fight in this war with no real clear agenda that you had nothing to do with planning. And go fight a war they knew they couldn’t win.

So, by 1968, why would you trust the government, you know? There’s no reason to. You’d have to be blind. Because this is what the government looks like, it looks like old people who want you dead. I mean, I know that’s fairly reductive, but then most kids in their early twenties ARE fairly reductive. And here are a couple of more cases to back that up. Nixon promised to bring law and order back to the country and I’m going to get us out of Vietnam in some way that doesn’t look like a defeat. Well, this is what law and order looks like. This is Kent State, which is a university in Ohio, and there was a march against the invasion of Cambodia in 1970, and somebody set fire to the ROTC building, and the State National Guard - which is kind of like a domestic army with the guns and helmets and everything - went onto the college campus and shot into a crowd of protesters and killed four students. Again, people your age. And this is Jackson State, which is a black college in Mississippi, and the police went in and killed another three students. So it would be as if the threat to you guys was coming from a French army or a French police force deliberately targeting University students. I mean, I suppose some of you could argue that that’s exactly your experience, but overwhelmingly not.

And then it turns out that the law and order president’s corrupt, Watergate and all of that. You don’t need me to go into all of these details, I don’t think.

So, at this point - if you remember Ian McEwan’s “Balloon” metaphor - by now any sensible person lets go of the rope. Because not only is the balloon not your balloon, the balloon is on fire. Capital-“S” Society doesn’t work. Society will get you killed. That’s all society’s good for. So you give up on the collective notion of society and you focus on “OK, it’s just about us. It’s just really about me. It’s every man and every woman for themselves. So I don’t believe in society anymore, but I still have faith in the money. In fact, I have MORE faith in the money because the money’s the only thing that’s going to get you through. This is America, and without money you’re pretty much fucked.”

And so the culture shifts from “us” to “me.” It’s what Ian McEwan said, “a good society is a society that makes sense of being good.” The hippie turns into the Yuppie, the Wall Street guy. And so this is the beginning of unapologetic rampant individualism. The divorce rate goes up and up and up and up and up, because if you’re not happy in your marriage, why stay married? And one of the things that happens because of that is that family structure gets broken. And when family structure gets broken, usually the kid lives with the mom and the mom has to work and so the kids take care of themselves. So this would be my generation here, the Generation X kids, where there really weren’t any parents around. The parents were gone, and you were pretty much just - I mean, that’s why so many … I mean, Kurt Cobain, right? That’s us, that’s my generation. You know, drugs, alcohol, guns. No parental supervision at all, because the parents were at work. Because they got divorced. Because they weren’t happy. The Silent Generation, I don’t know if you remember I talked about the Silent Generation, they did not get divorced. They might have been miserable. You asked before “did they want to conform?” Yeah, they wanted to conform, but that didn’t mean they were happy. You would be unhappy, but you would stay married because the needs of society are more important than your individual happiness. Well, by the 1970s that logic didn’t make sense anymore.

And internationally, America’s stock was going down rapidly. It was humiliated in Vietnam, and within a couple of years the hostage situation in Iran - the embassy was overrun and the embassy staff was taken hostage and this is NOT what’s supposed to happen to America. This happens to other countries, other people. This doesn’t happen to us. I mean, there’s this Thomas Borstelmann quote: “America’s humiliation was complete. From all directions, it seemed, from Iran in the Middle East to Indochina in Asia, from Nicaragua in Central America and Angola in Southern Africa, the United States was retreating from its global empire of influence.”
OK, so the country was broken, right? The country felt broken. And broke, there was no money all of a sudden. So enter into all of this … Ronald Reagan shows up, with his slogan “Let’s Make America Great Again” - which seems awfully familiar - and Reagan made two promises. The first one was “small government” - this is an explicit endorsement of individualism. The government is not going to stop you from making money. That’s your business, we don’t want your money. And, at the same time, the government doesn’t owe you anything. You leave us alone, we’ll leave you alone. And the second promise was that America is going to have a strong military and is not going to be humiliated again. You know, we’re going to get back control of the Western Hemisphere and at the same time we’re going to get rich through completely relaxed deregulation. Essentially. This idea that it’s morning again in America. This was the campaign commercial, I remember this commercial: “It’s morning again in America. Today more men and women will go to work than ever before in our country’s history. With interest rates about half the record highs of 1980, nearly 2,000 families today will buy new homes, more than at any time in the past four years. This afternoon more that 6,500 young men and women will be married, and with inflation half of what it was just four years ago, they can look forward with confidence to the future. It’s morning again in America, and under the leadership of President Reagan, our country is prouder and stronger and better. Why would we ever want to return to where we were less than four short years ago?”

So what he’s doing here is promising HALF of the social contract, the security of Levittown for those that can afford it, without the taxation and collective responsibility that went along with that back in the 1950s. The promise of the 1950s, kind of, without … that’s interesting. It’s the promise of the 1950s without asking for things in return. You can have half the social contract. You can have the house and you can have the turkey on the table and the home heating system, and all we ask is that you leave us alone.

This is individualism, and we talked about this before so I won’t go into it too much, but: “The belief in the primary importance of the individual … A doctrine advocating freedom from government regulation in the pursuit of one’s economic goals … A doctrine holding that the interests of the individual should take precedence over the interests of the state.”

And, when you think about it, the job of the government is to function as a collective consensus that can take collective action, right? That’s the whole purpose of it. Ronald Reagan is an unapologetically anti-government president. One of his more famous quotes is “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’” I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of Margaret Thatcher, the Prime Minister of Britain from 1979, but she shared Reagan’s central philosophy and one of HER more famous quotes was “There is no such thing as ‘Society.’” So the idea was that we are breaking that apart. The whole idea of a collective progressive societal engine, or whatever.

We talked about “Power Distance” before, I just want to make sure you remember. Let me just read it again, because maybe in this context … “Between 1979” - and remember, that’s about the time Reagan and Thatcher’s philosophies were really coming into their own - “ Between 1979 and 2007, the top 1% of Americans grew by an average of 257%. Since 1979, the average pre-tax income for the bottom 90% of households decreased by $900 while the top 1% increased by over $700,000 (per annum) as federal taxation became less progressive.”

So this is when it started and it continues now. This redrafting of where the money goes in America. Which, I mean, I don’t want to go back to Malthus and population figures AGAIN, but it’s not hard to see the connection. As society started to really unravel, to go back to Strauss and Howe’s terminology, this became the spirit of the country. This “Wolf of Wall Street” kind of thing. That was the spirit of the 1980s. And if you remember, the hero in the “Wolf of Wall Street” was the hopelessly corrupt business guy - at least from the perspective of the narrative - and the bad guy was the FBI agent who represented the government and was trying to arrest the guy for corruption. The values had completely reversed themselves. And it’s funny to me how many of my students still look at that movie and admire the hell out of Leonardo Di Caprio’s character. That’s what I want, the yacht and the money and the whatever. But he was the bad guy. In the film “Wall Street”, which came out in 1987 and was kind of the “Wolf of Wall Street” of its time, “the point is, ladies and gentlemen, that greed - for lack of a better word - is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the revolutionary spirit.”

And so this is sort of the dark hero and that was in a movie but these guys weren’t. I mean here, you’ve got Michael Milken, you’ve got this guy Ivan Bosky. You’ve got Donald Trump. And these guys were considered the kind of working-class millionaire heroes of their time. And Bosky went to prison, eventually, for insider trading. And Milken went to prison for insider trading. And Trump - and this is why the working-class part of working-class millionaire is important - he went to the White House. But for all three of these guys, it was the “Titans of Industry” kind of thing. We talked about heroes and myths, well… And it was all endorsed by the government and celebrated by popular culture. Grover Norquist who - I don’t know if you know him or not - he’s an economist and a second wave Baby Boomer, born in 1956, and he said: “I’m not in favor of abolishing the government, I just want to shrink it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.” So the government is the enemy. Which means, by extension, that the collective work the government - a well-functioning government is designed to do - is also the enemy.
By the way, this is what that looks like, that “power distance” thing? Share of national income. The graph starts in 1980, that’s when Reagan got elected. And the top 1% owned something like 10.5% of the national income. The lower 50% had maybe 20.5%? And look, if you look at these lines, that’s not an accident. There’s no fluctuation, really. It’s just pretty much a straight trend up and a straight trend down. And it’s basically reversed. Essentially, it’s reversed. And so now you’ve got this huge discrepancy between the top 1% and the bottom 50% (and there are a lot more people at the bottom than there are at the top) and if you go back here for a second … “In 2007, the richest 1% of the population owned 34.6% of the country’s total wealth and the next 19% owned 50.5%. In other words, 20% owns 85% and 80% owns 15%.”

So that’s what happens when you give up on the collective. And remember, it only makes sense to BE collective when everybody’s being collective. In that Ian McEwan story, one guy doesn’t let go of the rope in time. The balloon rises up and eventually he falls and he dies. If you want the collective, like they wanted back in the 1950s, you have a strong middle-class. Yeah, there’s always going to be some rich people and some poor people but stability’s at the center. And for me, I don’t know if you remember Hurricane Katrina. I mean, you weren’t old enough to be paying attention at the time, but you know about it, right? That’s what happens when you give up on the social contract. Right? I mean, New Orleans is an American city full of Americans, right? And there was a hurricane coming, and the infrastructure of the city was falling apart. And everybody knew. For days beforehand, they knew. They said “this hurricane is going to hit New Orleans and the city is going to flood. And people are going to die.” And the federal government - you know, the government, the Social Contract, the government - did nothing about it. Not really. They didn’t do much. And so the hurricane hit, and this American city flooded, and these American people died, and the government STILL did nothing about it. For days. Because they were the wrong kind of Americans. In fact, the only thing that DID happen is, there was a group trying to get out of the flooded city and the police were parked on the bridge separating New Orleans from the suburbs these guys were trying to escape to, and the police stopped them from getting out of the city. The police parked on the bridge because they were going to go into a middle-class white suburban neighborhood, and the police shot people trying to get out. Why did they shoot people trying to escape? They were trying to preserve order. At least that was the rationale. They said “turn around” and when they didn’t turn around they opened fire. Now, the police got in trouble for doing that, but that’s what they did.

And that’s the kind of thing that happens when you completely disenfranchise the people of the country. When being a citizen of the collective doesn’t offer you the security of the collective, or whatever. People keep saying things like “What’s going to happen if it gets really bad?” and it’s like “well, it HAS gotten really bad. We’re already there. You just mean what happens if it gets really bad for you.”