[quote=Arraya]As secular as I am, I 100% agree with social conservatives that society is in decay. We have ALL the signs of it. At this stage, it is terminal. I agree, It is a values problem….. it’s having a value system based on economics. But many misplace cause and effect – they think the moral decay is causing economic decay – when it is the opposite. Modern economics has caused moral decay – because it is our value system.
[/quote]
Arraya, you make salient points here with which I agree. I’m a boomer, but over half my life has been spent in an environment in which personal contact with others has been deemphasized, and information sources are of a non-human nature. This change has given marketing professionals the keys to our brains. They’ve used this to determine what makes us tick, and utilized the that information to market directly to us, or to tailor a marketing campaign to our psychological weaknesses, in essence creating a market for goods and services.
Media has also given us a look into the lives of the “haves”, and the credit culture that resulted, in large part, from the Fed’s policy, caused us all to believe that we deserved it and could afford it simply because we had a legal way to leave the store or dealer with it. For half my life, I was well aware of my socioeconomic class because of my purchasing power; since then, it has taken conscious effort to remind myself that, although I have moved in a somewhat upward direction, I am still a middle-class working American. My experiences in the socioeconomic culture of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s enabled me to keep a firm grip in the years since then, while narcissistic consumerism and economic reality engaged in a tug of war for my soul.
People born from the late 1970s on were, essentially, christened into the Church of Consumerism. Unless their parents made a conscious effort to instill the same values with which many of them had been raised, such as earning your own way, not taking charity except in dire circumstances, living within your means (not your credit limit), saving a portion of the money you earn, and honoring your obligations, these children grew to adulthood entirely ignorant of the tools necessary to survive in the real world.
The introduction and subsequent wildfire-like popularity of reality TV shows served only to exacerbate the problem. Not only did children grow up believing that they were entitled to everything they wanted, but reality shows served as a source of learning communication methods and coping mechanisms.
You have a huge segment of the population, age 30 and below, who have been raised in this manner, and the segment born from 1970 through 1980 are at risk, depending on their early childhood experiences. They were taught that acquisition of money and goods was paramount, yet they were not taught any of the skills involved in acquiring money and goods, nor instructed in the NECESSITY of doing so.
Over the last 15 years, I’ve become immune to the looks on my friends’ faces when I opine that euthanasia of the elderly will be legal by the year 2025. It was probably not a coincidence that they were the same looks they gave me when I insisted that the fantastically healthy economy of the mid-aughts was anything but. As the economy got “healthier”, I became more and more concerned about the intensity of the “readjustment” we could expect in the near future. I also realized that we not only had spoiled our kids rotten, but had neglected to teach them, in word or deed, anything about caring for others, family obligations, evaluating non-monetary value, and the basics such as do not cheat or steal. In essence, we spawned offspring, but didn’t raise them. We taught them to want things, and that they deserved things, but neglected to give them even the most basic of the tools of acquisition. In a normally-functioning economy, many of these people will survive due to manpower demands. But in the opposite scenario, they can only rely on what they’ve been given in the way of survival skills. In the realities of this economy, it’s their conviction that they are “special” and above the rules, combined with a nonfunctioning moral compass, thanks to the parents who “raised” them.
It’s funny: Here on Piggs, there have been, of late, a number of links to articles about the lack of jobs for new college graduates. Time-permitting, I try to make a point of reading through the readers’ comments at the article’s close. I am shocked by the intensity of the accusations made by 22, 24, and 28 year-old recent grads, but not by the accusations themselves. Virtually every one states that, as far as they are concerned, they can’t get jobs because of the economy that the baby boomers messed up. There are obvious flaws in that line of reasoning, but not to people who were raised to believe that they were “special” without having to provide evidence, who were provided with everything they wanted, or who learned to manipulate when they did not, whose parents encouraged them to cheat under the guise of attaining academic excellence, and who forced school administrations to “adjust” their subpar grades, and who attended law school because they were guaranteed to get a $160K/yr job when they graduated. These people are totally self-focused and concerned solely with their own wants and needs. That, in itself, does not bode well for those of us over the age of 50, who screwed up the economy for them. Our goose is cooked.
[quote=Arraya] These riots are a prime example of feral consumerism. Or what early economic theorists considered the true “nature” of man – That of a ruthless genetic self-maximizer with no regard to surroundings, whose sole purpose is acquisition of resources for survival and sexual selection purposes – which is why we need a strong government(to protect from mans “natural” passions), with capitalism as the “bloodless” and “enlightened” competition system to channel these “natural” passions, of which all progress flows.
Interestingly, their rapaciousness is practically identical to the financial sector. Just pure ego-driven greed with no regard for law. It’s fascinating that the top and bottom of society are mirrors of each other. [/quote]
Arraya, some brilliant observations! I particularly like your use of the term “feral consumerism”, which captures the essence of not only the current events in Britain, but our socioeconomic behavioral model of the aughts. Even now, despite greatly reduced economic circumstances, there are those in whom this tendency appears to be part of their neurobiological makeup.
And I was particularly struck by the similarities you cite in your comparison of these angry rioters and the “stars” of the financial sector. But, after all, the “haves” (or “mega-haves”) were the role models for the “have-nots”. I think that the problem lies in the uncomfortable truth that the “have-nots” didn’t actually see or think of themselves as such. They were convinced of their “have” status until incontrovertible evidence emerged that they were not, an event dfor which they were not, in any way, prepared.
