A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America

by Bruce Cannon Gibney

The national debt has almost tripled as a fraction of GDP since the mid-1970s, so that 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 percent annually, more or less indefinitely. The proceeds from that expanding pile of debt have been used to consume, not to invest, and so growth, already slow, will get slower still. Eventually, it will become impossible to sustain living standards by borrowing. And at some roughly coterminous point, the Boomers will be dead and the problem will belong to someone else. That someone else, of course, is statistically likely to be: you.

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

In 1899, “less sentimentality and more spanking” was the order of the day, according to G. Stanley Hall, president of Clark University, psychologist, and child-care authority. If children didn’t like it, that was beside the point. One did not ask a widget whether it approved of the means of its production. Why should children be different?

Rigor was therefore the dominant practice for American children until Benjamin Spock changed things in an instant. Spock was, like Locke, a trained physician, with a specialty in pediatrics. With the assistance of his wife, he produced The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care, first published in 1946, in time to guide Boomer upbringings. A best seller of tremendous proportions, it sold five hundred thousand copies in its first six months, and in the half century following its printing, was surpassed only by the Bible in sales (or so the story goes).4 A contemporary poll of American mothers showed that 64 percent had read Spock’s book,