It has come as a shock that, even as the COVID 19 epidemic is still in progress, demonstrations and riots about issues unrelated to the epidemic itself would break out all over the world. At a time when individuals are still being urged to isolate themselves, there have been waves of demonstrations, riots, protests, assaults and destruction of property. The trigger for these events was, in the first instance, the killing of an unarmed man by Minneapolis police but the protests have gone far beyond the issue of police brutality and racism to matters such as indigenous rights, historical racism, colonialism and imperialism. The marches and demonstrations have also been infiltrated and to a great extent captured by opportunistic Marxists and anarchists which has escalated what were intended to be peaceful protests into violent clashes.
Racism has been, and
continues to be, a problem in the United States and the radical political groups who have exploited the death of Floyd, have been around for decades but what
accounts for such a massive conflation of issues, and the level of anger and violence
in these protests during an unrelated national emergency? And why have these events
spread to other countries such as France, Britain and Australia?
In answering this question
we must first recall that, even before the COVID epidemic, there were rolling
demonstrations regarding climate change and other issues on an almost daily basis
in Australian cities. Additional outrage over the George Floyd homicide – so graphically
recorded on video - plus the social disruption of the epidemic, provide part of
the explanation for this explosion of anger. But there’s something else.
What we have just seen is
the first mass manifestation of attitudes, beliefs and possibly the power, of the
Millennial Generation.
There are very few times
in history when a specific group of young people can be defined as a “generation”.
Generations were always something that were counted within families, not right across
societies. Perhaps the first named generation was the Lost Generation,
referring to the people who went through the First World War. Most famous is
the generation called the “Baby Boomers” who were the children born in the years
after World War 2. There have been attempts to define subsequent generations
such as Gen X and Gen Y but these categories are unconvincing because they do
not demonstrate a clear commonality in either time of birth or culture. The
Millennials, however, people who have grown up in the 21st century,
do constitute a definable generation because what creates a generation is not just
being born around the same time but the kind of world that they grow up in.
The Baby Boomers were a
distinct group because they grew up in a world that was culturally and technologically
very different from that of their parents. They were the first generation that
grew up with television, in some cases from infancy. They were the first generation
to be called “teenagers”, a demographic category invented by the business world
to sell youth-oriented products. They were thus the first generation of people
between physical maturity (puberty) and social maturity (adulthood) to have music,
movies and fashion designed just for them. The advent of plastics and
electronics led youth-oriented products such as transistor radios, portable
record players and cheap 7” records which in turn led to a huge industry in music
aimed at teenagers. Around that time, radios also became standard equipment in
cars which, added to emergence of drive-in theatres, and the fact that US
teenagers could get their licences at 16 afforded unprecedented freedom, and
privacy, to people who were no-longer children but not yet recognised as adults.
Plastics also enabled the creation of such things as light-weight surfboards
which led to surfing and beach culture - the Beach Boys were an unforeseen by-product
of fibre-glass Running through all this, was the constant reaffirming that young
people were members of a new generation, a generation which was destined to be,
and in fact already was, different from their parents.
That sense of being different
was enhanced by another critical factor. More Boomers completed High School and
went onto college and university that any previous generation. Boomers were very
often the first members of their family to go on to Tertiary education. This,
of course, enhanced their sense of being different from previous generations
even more. Now, having three years of social studies, psychology, politics or
literature under their belts, they felt intellectually superior to the parents.
They also felt intellectually superior to people in government, people in business,
in fact just about all authority figures. The problems in the world were not
due to historical forces or necessity, they were due to the ignorance, narrow-mindedness,
racism, sexism, intolerance, chauvinism, commercialism, militarism, prejudices
and contempt for the environment of the older generation. The Boomers of
course, under the guidance of a select view of enlightened older people, were
going to change all this. It was going to be the Age of Aquarius.
In this way the children
of the Baby Boom created flow-on booms in several sectors of society including
the music, fashion, and education industries, as well as, unfortunately, drugs.
Part of the cultural differentiation between Boomers and their parents was in
the attitude to drug-taking. To parents, drug taking (as distinct from alcohol
and nicotine consumption) was the lowest form of activity. Boomers however were
led to believe, again by older Influencers (I'm looking at you Cheech & Chong), that a dope-smoking world would be
a more peaceful one and that psychotropic drugs such as LSD and mescaline were
doorways to enlightenment. This led to significant social problems at the time which
have increased over time. It is worth noting that the drug cartels of Mexico
and Colombia, which are more powerful than the governments of their countries,
were created and financed almost entirely by middle-class Americans buying marijuana
and cocaine.
Now let’s consider the Millennials.
Just as many Boomers never knew a time without television, Millennials have never
known a time without the Internet. They have no concept of what life could have
been like before the Web, email, mobile phones, tablets and social media. Many
Millennials have never read a newspaper, and few of them now even watch
television, which raises serious questions about how they get their news. Like
the Boomers they have been consumers of goods and services aimed specifically at
their generation. The stand-out of course is the phone itself, which to older people
was a way of talking to someone, but due to the ministrations and, one might
say, machinations, of people like Steve Jobs, has become a machine for the portable
consumption of entertainment. It allows people to access entertainment in almost any situation, 24 hours a day. Phones are now as important to the modern
teenager as the car was to the Baby Boomers as a facilitator of social
interaction.
There is still a large music industry targeting young people though it is now compromised by the vast inventory of popular music that has accumulated since the
Fifties. It is not unusual, remarkably, for Millennials to listen to Elton John
and Queen – music that is 30 or 40 years old. That is the equivalent of
teenagers in the Sixties listening to jazz bands from the 1920’s – a highly unlikely
scenario. Commercial products and services aimed at Millennials include PC
games, consoles and console games, social media apps
and a burgeoning number online services which allow people to become personal
broadcasters. We must also include the burgeoning industry of medical and psychological
services aimed at young people. Millennials are more likely to be consuming
medication than any previous generation. While Boomers may have believed in the
benefits of cannabis, Millennials rely to a disturbing degree on anti-depressant,
anti-ADD and anti-anxiety medications, often from a very young age, despite the fact that they have less to be
depressed or anxious about that any previous generation of people.
This leads naturally to considering
the differences between Boomers and Millennials. The most obvious difference
between them is that the Boomer generation was infused with an optimism about the
future, albeit often misplaced. There was general prosperity in the world in
the Sixties, and people graduating from college in the Seventies had a pretty good
chance of getting a job. The Age of Aquarius never really came about,
except for the few hippies who moved to the hills and built mud-brick homes but Boomers have generally done well financially. The culture of the Millennials on
the other hand is utterly pessimistic. They have absorbed all the apocalyptic
theories of the environmentalists, and climate-change alarmists and anti-capitalists.
They are horrified by what they see as entrenched racism, xenophobia and
environmental neglect in Western Society and despair for its future. This, at first
sight, seems odd since they are the most nurtured generation in history. They
have gone through school with smaller class sizes, more individually-tailored
teaching and extra support staff than any previous students and have also been
spared many of the strictures of previous educational regimes such as corporal punishment,
compulsory competitive sport, even written exams. Could this nurturance itself have led to heightened anxiety and pessimism?
Despite living in quite
different technological and psychological eras, what Millennials and Boomers share
is a sense of being special and important. Just as the Baby Boomers were made
to feel special by having fashions and music made just for them, and people
telling them they were smarter and better than their parents, the very nurturance
experienced by the Millennials - the helicopter parenting, psychological hypochondriasis,
over-diagnosis of conditions such as autism and similar conditions, removal of anything
potentially disturbing from education materials - and a resulting trend of narcissism
that sees people take more pictures of themselves than anything else - has
imbued the Millennials with a sense of their own cosmic importance. Nothing
demonstrates this more than the sight of an entirely unspecial Swedish teenager addressing the
United Nations and upbraiding the older generation for destroying her life and
her future.
The difference between
Boomers and Millennials thus comes down to this: the Boomers regarded themselves
as victors. The Millennials both see themselves as, and identify with other
people who see themselves as, victims.
This year, children born in 2001, the first true Millennials, turn 19. They are now in the last year of their teenagerhood and will be entering the workforce over the next few years. In twenty years time they will be reaching positions in management and will be making important decisions.
We are now coping with the fact that many people in senior positions in society are the children of the Sixties who still carry inside much of the utopian/Aquarian baggage of that era –mistrust of authority, capitalism and even Western culture in general. What kind of world will be built by a people who get all their information from the Internet, have been in counselling since they were 12, whose photo collections consist of nothing but selfies, and have never read a book written before 1997? Will they have the ability to fix and reunify the fragmented world created by the Boomers, or will they sleepwalk down the road of good intentions into a dark world of self-defeating rage, intolerance and ideological totalitarianism?
