Generation Saturn

I do not know if a civilization suffered so deeply for the avarice of a single cohort, as the West has from the Baby Boomers.

Saturn devouring his son by Francisco Goya

The myth of Saturn is one that is going to ring with new life for decades, centuries to come. A decrepit tyrant, fearful of losing his power and succumbing to age, murders and eats his children as they are born to sustain himself and to prevent them from being able to surpass him.

Oswald Spengler wrote of western man, that he is ultimately Faustian in character. Willing to forego everything, to leave behind any moral or hindrance, because he must have more. While this was true in his own day, and essentially up until the rot really began to take, I have come to the conclusion that the Faustian spirit is dying in the west, because it is precisely that all-consuming philosophy of egotistical consumption that is killing us.

America’s Height

The Faustian Man, I would argue, saw his apex in the aftermath of the Allied victory in 1944-45. The movements that sought to unify Volksgeist (people-spirit) into monoliths of power were defeated, decapitated, and burned by the twin powers of the Communist east and the Capitalist (Faustian) west. In the United States, and her culturally-adjacent allies, the freedom, ingenuity, and bounty of Imperium was theirs to enjoy.

In the grand scheme, America was at this time a united hegemon of culture and production. American technology, art and music were exported around the globe and the rest of the Western world, including our defeated enemies, were hungry for the fruits of Empire.

The whole of Western Europe was essentially gutted and rebuilt in the image of the conquering Americans. Governments were reshaped and the conception of a “United States of Europe” planted in envy of the hegemon’s model. The rebellious, self-reliant and self-interested cowboy spirit of America became the attractive, new way forward. The youthful, plucky, and idealist American Liberalism was full of confidence that with technology, science, and progress, anything could be achieved. This found it’s ultimate catalyst in the Space Race.

The Boomer Fiction

In re-watching the original Star Trek, the idealism and optimism imprinted on the young Boomers is on full display. Equality, endless bounty achieved by technology that is borderline supernatural, and the peaceful resolution of all conflict by a perfect representative government.

This is not only the fiction the boomers were raised with, it is the fiction they believe represents the world they live in, to this day. This isn’t even, at least at first, their fault. Boomers were born into the zenith of their nation’s power. They enjoyed plenty and hegemony. Their scapegoat onto which they offset all their moderate hardships, the Red Menace, was at arms’ length and didn’t really have the means to harm their daily lives without actually destroying the world via MAD. When the USSR dissolved, it seemed that the American way was the only, inevitable course of history.

For decades, the fiction of the Boomer worldview held up the sky, the government plied itself with very bland, agreeable Neoliberal/Neoconservative candidates bantering about a percentage of tax relief and so forth. The religious hardliners in the deep core of the country were mocked as old-fashioned and backwards, their infamous warnings of the “slippery slope” ignored. Even the hippies, with their ideals of personal liberation, opposition to power, and rejection of consumerism, were ultimately seeking freedom and plenty, just with the addition of a more leftist communal aspect, and even this failed to truly take hold.

The US of the eighties and nineties gorged itself in an orgy of excess, believing that it had overcome even it’s own internal racial and economic tensions. My father, for example, was brought up without giving a second thought to race, or even noticing it.

After all, this hegemony would last forever. The whole universe was going to become one big reflection of advanced technological liberalism because that is “progress.” Progress was never envisioned to have a finishing date, never considered that it might fail or that we might discover corners of the world that would be so foolish as to reject the freedom and plenty of America…

Saturn is Threatened

9-11 was not the bullet that killed the United States, it was a dagger in the lung that left us reeling and in pain. Until now, the Faustian spirit had been able to chug along relatively uninterrupted, but now the American worldview ran up against the brick walls they could not climb. The obstacles that no amount of technology or bootstraps can fix.

They ran into cultures that said “no.” That wanted no part of modernity, of Imperium. This had suited America just fine when these same fighters were engaged against the Old Enemy. But now these same fighters delivered a devastating rebuke against America, in the language which the future will very likely actually sound like, rather than the liberal idea.

Modern technology, wielded in the coldest and most barbaric manner possible. America took this lesson to heart, and learned it so well it spent my entire lifetime thus far trying to bring these regions of the world, and their resources, into the modern world at gunpoint, only to be entirely humiliated and driven out the minute their back was turned.

Now it is the 2020’s, and the American Imperium is fleeing back into itself. Our allies have been left high and dry. Our internal affairs are so chaotic and self-defeating that they has become the world’s laziest civil war. Offices of power from the Presidency all the way down to mayoral and councillorships are occupied by octogenarians who have been in power since the height of Imperium. The massive majority of wealth is concentrated in a (often literally) bloated population of the old and sickly. The youth cannot afford to even move out, nevermind begin and grow families.

The Sin of the Boomers

At this moment of deepest crisis, a sensible culture would be working feverishly to equip, guide, and elevate a young vanguard to seize the controls of Imperium and initiate drastic reform. A sensible culture would be placing the ultimate value on familial bonds, and the shared responsibility between the forebear and the descendent. The sensible culture would be furiously downsizing and stripping away excess apparatus to take pressure off of internal systems and vent economic and social damage. A sensible system would rotate out the old, and allow nature to take it’s course so that the nation and it’s people might endure at all, forget prosper.

America is not a sensible nation.

The young people of America have not only not been helped by their predecessors, since 2000 at least, they have been left astray, undermined, demeaned, and weighed down by the systems around them at every turn. Accumulating ludicrous debt to be trained for jobs that simply don’t exist anymore, without even a prayer of owning a home because of the hedge fund companies that are supporting their parents and grandparent’s luxurious habits. The youth have been left to single-handedly uphold a pensioner system that is suffocating the entire economy, nevermind the individual taxpayer. All the time, being told they have to “make their own way” as if it were still 1965.

Therein lay the sin of the Boomer, they really think it is 1965. If not literally, thought many do, the paradigm of idealized American liberalism and individualism is stuck in their minds. Their wealth, not only that they generated for themselves in the most prosperous economy in history, but also that generational wealth they were handed, is theirs. To spend on yachts, to spend on lottery tickets and alcohol and Botox to try and look 25 when they are pushing 70.

The Boomers inherited the global Imperium of the modern world, and burned through the coffers in a single lifetime. Now that the vaults are all empty, and they are still in power, they are accumulating debt like there’s no tomorrow because for them, there isn’t. Nothing comes after the Boomer, they don’t give a rip about their kids that don’t talk to them, just like they didn’t give a rip about their parents they invented the nursing home to put them in. An entire generation of Caligula, the mad emperor who was brought up surrounded by the opulence of the Imperial household and decided it was HIS to do whatever he wanted with, even burn it down.

This wildly irresponsible immaturity came to it’s head in the recent C0<id19 p*ndemic, where multiple-year-long lockdowns, untested medical procedures and all manner of injustices were meted out on the entire world for the sake of the oldest and weakest. The government, corporations, and non-governmental entities were happy to gain unprecedented power and crack skulls for the sake of “saving grandma,” and the Boomers were, and are, and always have been, happy to believe them and be pandered to. They deserve it, they’re entitled to it. If their children have to develop infertility, or unexplained lesions, or face crippling debt and unemployment, or simply watch as their future fades into a bleak grey sludge of tyranny for the sake of a few more months of life, then it’s a worthy trade.

Saturn sits on his throne, devouring his children shrieking in pain, but he pays them no mind. It’s his world, it’s his throne, it’s his right to keep it.