A GENERATION OF SOCIOPATHS: HOW THE BABY BOOMERS BETRAYED AMERICA
By Bruce Cannon Gibney
I have a favourite bit of wisdom from John Kenneth Galbraith. In The Age of Uncertainty he lays it down as a “firm rule” that “People of privilege will always risk their complete destruction rather than surrender any material part of their advantage.”
Galbraith was talking about the French Revolution and the failure of the aristocratic old order to reform itself, but his firm rule has been verified countless times since. In our own day I find it an adage that’s useful to keep in mind when considering things like what sacrifices we can expect people of wealth, power, and privilege to make in order to, say, combat dangerous levels of economic inequality or to fight climate change. The answer is no “material part of their advantage.” In other words, nothing at all.
Bruce Gibney takes the elite and makes them into an age demographic with absolute political power in this passionate polemic directed at what has been fairly dubbed the most spoiled generation in the history of human civilization. These are the children of the Baby Boom, who were born into a well-managed world of peace and prosperity and are leaving behind a toxic crisis of debt, collapsing infrastructure, and environmental destruction. Gibney has a nice image: “The Boomers inherited a productive family farm with a modest mortgage. In twenty years, their children will take over a crumbling estate leveraged to the hilt.” Fully aware of what they have done, they have no regrets. Indeed, they want more, to continue looting society’s till with no thought for a future without them. Their goal has been “to wring every last dollar from the system, and any investment that could not be fully realized within Boomer lifetimes was to be avoided.” The Boomers “simply ignore problems whose greatest effects will fall outside their lifetimes and are of correspondingly little concern.” So, for example, in terms of foreign and domestic policy “All that is required is to avoid wholesale military collapse during Boomers’ golden years, while continuing to channel the budget into retirement and health programs whose gains can be harvested today.”
As with the French Ancien Régime, the sociopathic or narcissistic Boomers cannot be expected to go quietly. Will they surrender any part of their material advantage? Not one bit. They’ve had a great run and now want to throw one hell of a retirement party, come what may. Any change, which will most assuredly be far too little, will not come voluntarily:
There is no surefire treatment for sociopathy at the individual level, and therapists generally wait around for a spontaneous remission. America doesn’t have the luxury of patient optimism and nothing about Boomer behavior or pathologies recommends anything less than coercion by the state, democratically authorized. Boomers have been getting their way for decades and expect to continue doing so. They are not about to swing open the doors of Congress to let in the forces of social orthodoxy, rainbows streaming down from heaven, doves rising up to meet them, and a chorus of hosannas all around. The Boomers are too old, and benefit too much from their policies, for any of that.
Gibney’s diagnosis for this kind of behaviour is sociopathy (ego-centrism, lack of concern for others, disinhibition) but we could just as easily call Boomers narcissistic assholes, an increasingly common label used to describe our present mental-health epidemic (see my reviews of books like The Narcissism Epidemic and Selfish, Whining Monkeys). The essential point, however, is that whether we’re talking about sociopaths or narcissists there is no cure for what is a terminal condition.
Complaints about the Worst Generation have been growing in recent years, and, for many of the reasons Gibney lays out, they are understandable. To some extent they are inevitable when living in a period of crisis and long-term decline. Still, I think the problem is inherent in human nature and systems of political power rather than characteristic of any particular generation. Yes, the Boomers are awful, a combination of being poorly raised (Gibney blames television and bottle-feeding) and having been spoiled by a historical moment that they opportunistically seized. What’s more, they’re getting worse. But most people presented with the same windfall would have behaved the same way.
Meanwhile, perhaps the greatest damage done has been to the cultural environment, the enshrinement of an ideology (sometimes rendered as neoliberalism) championing individual greed and short-term thinking over any sense of a common purpose (“there is no such thing as society”). Future generations will have a hard enough time living in a world the Boomers made in their own image. What will make everything so much worse is the fact that we may be trapped in their heads for a long time as well.
Notes:
Review first published online November 6, 2018.
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