Zup,
in regards to the comments you made to the "Fuck you Dad" Piece there is a Book the behavioral scientist Konrad Lorenz published in 1973 called "The eight mortal sins of civilized mankind". In that he wrote:
"The break of Tradition. It’s caused by reaching a critical point where the young generation cannot longer culturally communicate with the older generation, not mention to identify. Because of this they treat them like a foreign ethnical group and approach them with national hatred. The reasons for this identification disruption lay within the overall lack of contact between Parents and their children, which shows pathological consequences already in the age of infancy."
I think it’s not so much Civilization that causes this but overall the big age difference between Parents and Children. [0] In the USA the Millennials are by now the biggest generation in Numbers and the boomers had 2.5 living children in average. In Germany, we have twice as many boomers as Millennials. Mother's mean age at first birth is 29,4 years old. That’s basically 30 and 30 year old ovaries are in a medical sense not different from 40 year old ovaries. The average age of the dad should be around 40 years old. That means when the Millennial reached his 20s, his father was already 60. There is a whole generation missing between them so the break in cultural commonalities is no surprise. That’s also why you see a lot of Boomer Parents who fell on their big fat dumb face with their cultural experiments end up taking some sort of revenge against their own children or rebel against their children in other ways. These people are culturally autistic.
And what kind of teenager can identify with his dad that is already as old as a grandpa would be. You can't aspire to be like your forefathers cause the only father figure is your dope boomer dad. Also the cultural aspect of the uncle figure is lost in the modern age. Through history you have many stories where a childless uncle figure, usually an old warrior or shaman, takes on the role of guiding a hero whose father fucked up. You can see this from King Arthur’s tales to Star Wars.
There is also a lack of inner-family checks and balances. If your dad is already an old fogey when you are in your teenage years, how high is the change that his father is still alive. And usually its the role of
Grandpa to keep the Father in check and often team up with the grandson rather than his son. I would probably have more in common with my grandpa then my dad. Today i don't see that. Today I see mainly middle-aged people that wanna pick winners and losers from the past by today’s standards and boomers complaining about the young. I'm myself a millennial in the latter half of his 20s, something I never ever do is complain about the younger generation. It just strikes me as something absurd.
link › youtu.be/V0C8JbEOPKc
James’ American Thoughts
To mark some correlations in your observations to American familial facts.
-Norms are no longer preserved and expressed by the family, but by an extra-familial, even extra-social authority.
-The idea of the extended family has been reduced to the nuclear familial, as per Genesis, which formed the foundational basis for this nation, being that the son always separates from the family and that the family is vested only in the father [1], which is a lie that quickly wears thin, placing the father and son inevitably at odds in an ever disintegrating society designed to destroy forest ecology, as clearly stated by the founding Puritans. This tension naturally expands feminine and maternal patterns of identity-reducing thought and anti-action.
-In America, war has been waged on the extended family since the beginning, but never so stridently as the mass media depiction of uncles as slackers, perverts and parasites—anything but a mentor, which is his traditional mythic role.
-The addiction to the worship of material enrichment beyond all reason, along with the elevation of the woman to the political sphere, inevitably leads to older parents, fewer children, the widening of the culture gap caused by technological change [which is abnormal for the human psyche] and fewer extended family members and centers, the family often living and dying in postmodern terms as an ever-negating test of wills between the lost [parent] and the unfound [child].
-Parental distortion is greater than grandparental distortion, as the consumer slave system of modernity places the most warping stress upon the person of parental age, less so the pre-productive child or the post-productive grandparent.
Notes
0. The unnatural age gap in parents and children is the direct result of modern living, with the expansion of this age gap subject to the increased pace of technological change which is the hallmark of civilized living and the antithesis of the natural state. Civilizations either collapse or degenerate and then collapse, based in part on this lineal distortion of cyclic life patterns. One cannot divorce modernity from civilization.
1. Increase Mather and Thomas White, 1678 and 1630 respectively.
Masculine Axis: A Meditation on Manhood and Heroism
Not to mention that welfare weakens the generational interdependence. The family as a work collective is a thing of the past.
Somewhat OT, but maybe not...
There is a huge gap in basic knowledge between the Millenials and previous generations—and that's a charitable way to put it. if I was not being polite, I'd say that today's Twenties are piss-ignorant.
I have a great deal of contact with the students at a local, expensive but non-selective, private university. In the course of casual conversation, I have run into two undergrads who could not identify MacArthur or Eisenhower (although one had lived in Colorado and "had ben through his tunnel"). Another one was not aware that Portugal was located in Europe, and did not know that a Colonel was a military rank. Most of them have no knowledge of any cultural Americana older than 10-15 years ago, with my references to Dr. Strangelove, Butch Cassidy, Cool Hand Luke, and Manchurian Candidate being met with stares of blank incomprehension.
These are college students, most of whom will go out into the world having accrued $160,000 in debt for their "education".
I'm sure they know many things I do not, such as the great works of lesbian poetry or how to play beep-beep games on their IPhags, so I guess my point is that there is such a gulf between the cultural reference points that it's difficult to have a cross-generational conversation about anything deeper than what to have for dinner.