A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America

by Bruce Cannon Gibney

So for one brief period in history, which overlapped almost perfectly with the Boomers’ childhoods, bottle largely replaced breast.

Studies confirm that breast-feeding positively impacts cognitive development/intelligence, significantly reduces the risk of diabetes, childhood obesity, and other illness, promotes better health in the mother, and strengthens emotional bonds between mother and child.

But no entire generation of children before or since was so influenced by formula, and in nutrition, as they were in so many other ways, Boomers were unique.

The other major area where Spock gave some very bad advice regarded that other great influence on Boomers, television.

RCA began mass production of televisions in 1946. Before then, almost no American homes had televisions. By 1960, 90 percent had TV.

the first Internet connections were established in 1969, but access didn’t become a household staple until the late 1990s, and even by 2012, more than a quarter of American households still lacked a broadband connection.

Not only did television reach more homes more quickly than the Internet, use was ver...

Data compiled in 2015 shows that TV consumed more than 50 percent of Americans’ free time, against just 13 percent for socializing and functionally 0 percent for pleasure reading

In a very serious way, from the Boomers’ childhoods onward, TV is what Americans do.

However, when TV first arrived, it was greeted as just another miraculous appliance, an innocuous electronic nanny.

Unlike media that came before, television is at once ironic, mimetic, unidirectional, emotionally rich, informationally poor, highly habituating, and demands a certain suspension of disbelief.

TV’s essential characteristics make it the perfect education for sociopaths, facilitating deceit, acquisitiveness, intransigence, and validating a worldview only loosely tethered to reality.

Televisual irony trains viewers to hold otherwise inconsistent views simultaneously, and it is no coincidence that in an era where TV is the most profound cultural influence, the trend has been from earnest to ironic.

Early in TV’s history, networks felt obliged to present controversial issues like the ones featured in Buckley/Vidal in a fair and balanced way (in the original legal sense, not the Fox News sense).

In 1987, FCC chairman Marc Fowler—himself a (Canadian variety) Boomer, and so oblivious that he dismissed TV as “a toaster, with pictures”—formally abolished the Fairness Doctrine.

Dialogue became diatribe aimed at an agreeable audience in the same period that Boomers consolidated their control of governments.

So for hours a day, people simply indulge in fantasy, forming habits that leak into other parts of life.

Causation may run both ways, but the fact is that people who watch commercial broadcast TV news are significantly unrepresented in the category of people highly knowledgeable on matters of current events, the mechanics of government,

“the weight of our evidence indicates there is a significant negative relationship between reading achievement and amount of television watched, even after IQ is controlled.”

So that was the Boomers’ upbringing—televisual, formula fed, and above all, influenced by Dr. Spock and his new style of parenting.

the subset born between 1946 and 1955 perhaps most of all—and some of the Boom’s worst examples do seem to have been born in those years,

VIETNAM AND THE EMERGING BOOMER

Hindsight now allows many Boomers to recall an antiwar prescience they never actually possessed, of an unjust war prosecuted by old men over the objections of the young.

In blood and money, Vietnam was modest for America. There were 58,307 dead and 303,644 wounded, death rates about half those of World War I and less than one-seventh of World War

As a group, the Boomers managed to be simultaneously for the war and against serving in it.

a far cry from the unstained moral crusade produced by the laundromat of Boomer nostalgia.

In other words, the bottom third or so provided about four-fifths of the manpower.

self-service at the cost of others (the poor, minorities), a casual attitude toward the law (e.g., Clinton’s representative manipulations), and actions contrary to social norms (e.g., failure to heed the nation’s call, breaking the law).

The net effect was that college deferments became an exercise of class privilege, and, given the overrepresentation of minorities among the poor, of racial discrimination.

So while many privileged students went to college, some of their poorer counterparts turned to crime. Several studies confirm the

If insubordination failed to communicate the displeasure of the rank-and-file with its orders, there was always the simple expedient of killing those doing the ordering.

The Department of Defense recorded 96 fraggings in 1969 and 209 in 1970; in total, Vietnam witnessed at least 551 fragging incidents causing 86 deaths and over 700 injuries.

During the lengthy recent operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, which feature no Boomer combat troops, there have been almost no fraggings or other attempted assassinations.

It wasn’t that the injustice in Vietnam had ended, it was that the peril visited on the Boomers had. Perhaps it had been about saving one’s skin all along.†

Vietnam had one final lesson for the Boomers: They could get away with their misdeeds.

Almost immediately after the war ended, and with Boomer voting power on the rise, dodgers were duly forgiven.

CHAPTER FOUR EMPIRE OF SELF

As a historical moment, then, 1967 is best understood not as a summer of love or a season of protest, but as Year One of the Self.

Instead, many Boomers dressed up indulgence as a moral crusade, just as they had with draft dodging and would again with tax cuts and their own military adventures.

training in televisual irony and suspension of disbelief.)

Comparing different generations at the same point in their respective life cycles, the young Boomers had notably higher rates of drinking and illegal drug use than preceding and succeeding generations—teenagers

As seniors, Boomers have pushed the rate of elder drug use substantially higher; as the government put it in 2015, “drug use is increasing among people in their fifties and early sixties.

As the Boomers came to represent a larger fraction of economic activity, the savings rate slid downward from 1975 until it reached its absolute low of 1.9 percent in July 2005.

Private savings have been in decline since the Boomers entered their prime working years.

In the case of the Boomers versus their parents, the statement is depressingly true. Boomers were more promiscuous, divorced more frequently, had more abortions, saved less, ate more, had more problems with authority, and so on.

These antisocial tendencies matter, because when Boomers ascended to government, personality quirks would transmute into national policy.

Vastly better suited to the sociopathic enterprise are feelings—guaranteed to align with the needs and desires of the moment, because they supply them in the first place.

Feelings would be the great enabler, allowing Boomers to undermine the whole edifice of fact and reason in favor of personal truth, expedient and final.

the Boomers were able to discount and dismiss the entire concept of expertise, scientific consensus, and elite opinion, previously a source of restraint on impulse gratification.

The Boomers’ anti-empiricism is recent—it is the revolution, not the tradition,