A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America

by Bruce Cannon Gibney

I mean people who are antisocial in the clinical sense: sociopaths.

For the past several decades, the nation has been run by people who present, personally and politically, the full sociopathic pathology: deceit, selfishness, imprudence, remorselessness, hostility, the works.

Those people are the Baby Boomers, that vast and strange generation born between 1940 and 1964, and the society they created does not work very well.

Individually, these items are tragic vignettes. Stitched together, they produce a cohesive and unsettling narrative of a generation that—in the many decades it has dominated political and corporate America—squandered its enormous inheritance, abused its power, and subsidized its binges with loans collateralized by its children.

Rather, the argument is that an unusually large number of Boomers have behaved antisocially, skewing outcomes in ways deeply unfavorable to the nation, especially its younger citizens.

from these very same candidates, forever peddling the same magic beans of fantasy and excuse.

America suffers from its present predicament because a large group of small-minded people chose the leaders and actions that led to our present degraded state.

The only requirement was the exercise of the vote by a huge group, united by short-sightedness and self-interest: the Boomers.

Our results correspond to one of the few major studies of mental health issues in the United States, the ECAS, which found significantly higher levels of sociopathy in Boomer-age populations in the 1980s relative to other groups.

For purely selfish reasons, the Boomers unraveled the social fabric woven by previous generations.

a stew of philanderers, draft dodgers, tax avoiders, incompetents, hypocrites, holders of high office censured for ethical violations, a sociopathic sundae

a sociopathic agenda that serves them at the expense of their children.

What happened to the future? The Boomers did; they sold it off piece by piece.

By 2002, Reagan would have been wrong: A majority of Americans no longer believed their children would live better lives than their parents—and that was before the crash of 2008 and eight years of lackluster recovery.

The goal of American politics has been, until the advent of the Boomers, the creation of a “more perfect Union” and the promotion of the “general Welfare”

to “secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.”

A family with a statistically middling income can no longer afford the trappings of an actual middle-class life: the nice house, college tuition, decent cars, the annual vacation, appropriate health care, some prudent savings, and perhaps a little left over to pass as a legacy.

That life would require something like $100,000–150,000 in annual family income, depending on geography and taste, but actual family income was just $70,697 in 2015.

The difference between what is and what could have been is substantially the product of Boomer mismanagement and selfishness.

Family income in 2015 could have been around $106,000 to $122,000 (or $113,425 to be misleadingly precise).

Flushing Meadows, Queens. People passing from JFK to Manhattan, or watching aerial shots of the US Open,

remnants of the 1964 World’s Fair, which promised a world of flying cars, undersea colonies, clean energy, mass prosperity, cities on the moon, and more.

With the promises of the ’39 Fair (centerpiece: Futurama) already fulfilled, Americans of 1964 saw no reason why they would not soon enjoy the dreams of their own Fair (featuring: Futurama II).

What actually happened was that in 1969 Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon and in 1972 Gene Cernan stepped off, and that was it.

By the late 1960s, the earnest and industrious old regime was fading. The future would soon be reposed in the hands of a group altogether less competent and well-meaning.

Median income growth has been slow, then stagnant, and at times in the recent past, outright negative.

the rise in average, rather than median, incomes reflects that.

The divergence between mean and median reflects gains by the top end of the distribution.

Rather, it is the mass, democratically sanctioned transfer of wealth away from the young and toward the Boomers, the latter having adjusted tax and fiscal policies to favor the accumulation of wealth during their lives, at the expense of the future—a

Whatever you think about the 1 percent (and many of them are Boomers), their accumulations pale in comparison to the generational plunder of the Boomers overall.

People tread water by borrowing. As a fraction of gross domestic product (GDP), debt owed by American families has roughly doubled since 1980, and in nominal terms is over $14 trillion.

Government has done the same—indeed, this is a primary Boomer tactic to ensure their benefits flow while expenses pass to others.

the nation’s debt is now slightly larger than the nation’s total annual product, approaching $19 trillion by the end of 2015, and that figure is set to grow ~3 ...

proceeds from that expanding pile of debt have been used to consume, not to invest, and so growth, alread...

Their collective, pathological self-interest derailed a long train of progress, while exacerbating and ignoring existential threats like climate change.

The Boomers’ sociopathic need for instant gratification pushed them to equally sociopathic policies, causing them to fritter away an enormous inheritance, and when that was exhausted, to mortgage the future.

Boomer leadership engaged in concealment and deception in a desperate effort to hold the system together just long enough for their generationa...

Sociopathy is characterized by self-interested actions unburdened by conscience and unresponsive to consequence, mostly arising from non-genetic, contextual causes.

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (the DSM-V),

ego-centrism; self-esteem derived from personal gain, power or pleasure; goal-setting based on personal gratification; absence of prosocial internal standards

2. lack of concern for the feelings, needs or suffering of others… incapacity for mutually intimate relationships, as exploitation is a primary means of relating to others;

3. disinhibition [irresponsibility, impulsivity, risk taking] and antagonism [manipulativeness, deceitfulness,

sociopaths are selfish, imprudent, remorseless, and relentless.

But as a generation, the Boomers present as distinctly sociopathic, displaying antisocial tendencies to a greater extent than their parents and their children.

villainy expresses itself through the mundane depredations of tax policy and technical revisions to the bankruptcy code. These and other adjustments are insidious, all the more effective for being harder to see.

Disabled by sociopathy, Boomers also began abandoning reason itself.

sociopaths would be governed by feelings (though never ones of empathy),

private behaviors congealed into a debased neoliberalism, the sociopathic operating system that has dominated Boomer politics, Right and Left, for more than three decades.

Boomers’ ersatz neoliberalism emphasizes consumption over production, dogmatic deregulation instead of thoughtful oversight, permanent deficits instead of fiscal prudence, and capitalism liberated from the bounds of the state, though always free to replenish itself at the federal trough

Boomers’ vast numbers, which made the generation an outright majority of the electorate by the early 1980s.