Generations, "Niceguys," Darwin, Sheep and Wolves

Boomers and Xers: Respective Errors

One frequent criticism of the baby boom generation is that they thought that they were God. Having known many people of all ages, I knew only one person who actually thought that he was God. He was close to my age, and he stopped thinking that he was God when he got the right medication.

The good ones among baby boomers, originally, believed that the universe itself is divine, and that beautiful state of affairs can be had here. For this reason they fought for civil rights, human rights, social freedoms, peaceful instead of military solutions, and better treatment of the environment. There were others later who did bring in wrong ideas. These came to believe such things as that "there are no innocent victims" and "everyone creates their reality" (so abuse and victimize as many as you can, as it is them doing it and not you); "positive thinking good, negative thinking bad" (so ignore all criticism of your actions, however wrong they may be); and that self-esteem is a prerequisite for and a determinant of good behavior (it is neither).

Others, who were not hippies or New Agers and many of whom were not baby boomers, took these beliefs and used them to
silence the scientists and the environmentalists who knew of the coming climatic catastrophe, claiming that they were negative; to put America $10 trillion in debt, claiming that anyone protesting this was lacking in optimism; to destroy public service, claiming that unless one has everything he cannot be of help to anyone; and to make abuse the norm of man-woman relationships, claiming that those at its receiving end were causing it or were negative or were losers or were lacking in self-esteem. The wrongful beliefs were used to perpetrate a monstrous world-threatening evil, with most of this evil coming not from the Left but from the Right.

The evil that did come from the Left was political correctness. A prudish hysterical love-hating beauty-hating sex-hating ideology took over America's centers of education and much of its media. This ideology not only militated against love and beauty; it militated against democracy itself. With standard of public discourse being "nobody can say anything that can offend anyone," was banished meaning as well as sincerity from public discourse. Anything that means anything will be controversial; and anything controversial will offend someone. With political correctness, insincerity, prissiness and hypocrisy became not only the aggressively imposed norm of public discourse, but also of people's behavior, people's thinking and people's lives.

None of this of course is causally linked to the stated claim that baby boomers thought that they were God. This was a result of exploitation of wrongful beliefs by the American Right that would use anything to advance its rapacity, as well as of short-sighted thinking on the part of frumpy brainy women who wanted to lord it over other women without realizing the damage their actions did to women, to men, and to man-woman relationships. But there is an attitude common to baby boomers that is very wrongful, and it is as follows. They identify with their generational interest more than they do with anything else. And that is a problem for anyone who has to share a planet with them.

I would describe it as bad-neighbor policy: bad neighbor to those before them and those after them. When they were young, it was "trust nobody over 30." When they had children themselves, they saw them less as their future and more as their competition. This led them to be ugly bullies, beating up on their children and later beating down on people one third their age and claiming them not to be as enlightened as themselves when their supposed enlightenment led them to act in such a despicable manner. First they were socialist, and everyone had to be socialist with them. Then they were capitalist, and everyone had to be capitalist with them. Then they were religious, and everyone had to be religious with them as well. No thought in either case was taken to any other generation.

At any given time, the world contains people of all ages, who all have different needs. One must be mindful of all these if one is to create any kind of a livable world. With some great exceptions, the baby boomers failed to see this and acted accordingly. But people who are now living, including the baby boomers who are now living, have a chance to avoid and atone for this terrible mistake.

Generation X had a different problem. They bought into the World War II generation's claim that their children - the baby boomers - were spoiled evil brats who destroyed the supposedly great culture. This is another major error. Yes, the World War II generation won the Second World War; they also fought the Second World War for the other side. And the dogmatic heavy-handed authoritarianism of that generation is just as responsible for starting wars as it is for winning wars.

The fact is, if the Gen-X'ers were brought up in the 50s climate they idolize, they would have wanted something different as well. Many of them would simply not have survived such an upbringing; and if they did, would have more to say about it than they do about the baby boomers. So that while they worship their grandparents and see their parents with contempt, they know nothing of the reality that their grandparents created and in which their parents lived. It is a common practice for grandparents to be wonderful to their grandchildren when they had been horrible to their own children. And while the Gen-Xers are seeing the good face of the World War II generation, they have not seen its terrible face that their parents had - and still have - to endure.

A lot of these people are pining for "traditional values." They have seen Leave It To Beaver and Ricky Loves Lucy, but they know nothing of the reality behind these decoys. The 1950s were not "happy times," and 1980s were not "happy times here again." There were huge problems with both decades, and baby boomers had every right to seek a different way of life - as much as the people now have every right to reject the short-sighted 1980s ethic that brought about the current catastrophe.

For all these things there are real solutions. But they are no more about "positive thinking" or "self-esteem" than they are about blaming "the sixties generation" or damning the world "of flesh" and thinking that burning it will get one into heaven. The real solutions are not a matter of attitude or faith or psychology; they are a matter of applied intelligence. And it is this, and not any of the preceding, that has the chance of actually saving the world.


The Corruption of "Niceguys"

The Internet can be a useful place to watch social trends. For a long time, on discussion forums dedicated to relationships, there was a group of young men who called themselves "nice guys." These young men claimed that women only went out with "jerks" and used the "nice guys" for comfort and friendship, but never for a sexual relationship. I watched this group become more and more aggressively misogynistic, as they went from "women only go with jerks" to "women make irresponsible choices in partners" to "women are stupid and evil" to "women must be played, abused and controlled." This stance was then used by men's organizations worldwide to press their agenda of brutality and oppression. Which of course is precisely what the actual jerks wanted in the first place.

A wife-beater thrives on perception of women as stupid and evil. Such a perception allows him to indulge in unchecked unapologetic brutality against his wife and children; and if the woman attempts to leave, to claim her departure as further evidence of women being evil, and of the rightness of his behavior. Which behavior he then, in many situations, makes every effort to force on everyone around him, claiming that it represents true manhood or ethics or family values or righteousness. With males who had been originally sympathetic toward women having turned into haters of women, the agenda of the jerk was advanced by the "nice guys" without the jerk having had to lift a finger toward that end. The more people saw women as stupid and evil, the more the jerk gained in his ability to abuse women. So now, the jerks have been wanting to go all the way and take away from women all their rights, including even the right to vote.

The sympathies of the "nice guys" having gone form women toward wife-beaters, the backlash against women's rights gathered steam and steamrolled over protections against brutality and child sexual abuse. All this, of course, benefiting the jerks. The "nice guys" became the lapdog of the brutes whom they had rightly despised in the first place and an accessory to their evil ends. They were losers at first, ad they became losers again - though now, not losers for feminism, but losers for barbarism. Meawhile the abusers became even more of abusers as they were empowered by these people as abusers.

All this served dictatorial ends of those who wanted to see human nature as evil and to treat people accordingly. Bush, Taliban, Ahmabinejad, the Black Shirts, and others of similar character and agenda, blossomed through all these wrongs. And while many of those who shaped 1990s feminism were in fact misandrist and malicious, it is not them that got the wrath of the backlash, but rather the women who liked their men enough to be with them and were, by the men they chose, horribly punished for having made the error of liking them.

This tragedy of errors can only be resolved by people gaining a brain. If one sees life as a battle between men and women, with
every person made to be loyal to one or another chromosome - and not to humanity, to life, to their individual self, or to the people they love - then one has no business having heterosexual relationships at all. To abuse one's wife is to piss in one's own pond; to want one chromosome to dominate everything is to deny the contributions, wisdom, and achievements, of one half of humanity. Neither of these are actions of intellect any more than they are actions of ethics. And both ethics and intellect demand better treatment of wives and children than one advanced either by jerks who have always been jerks or by the jerks that the "nice guys" became as they developed such convictions.


Misrepresentations of Darwin

In "Darwin's Deadly Legacy," the author argues that evolution was the reason for the genocides and demicides of 20th century. Nothing can be further from the truth.

Anyone who has actual understanding of evolution knows that evolution is based on mutation, and that differences that crop up among specimen are the source of all richness of life. Anyone who has actual understanding of evolution also knows that life continues through ecosystemic balance among different species, all of which have adapted for the ecosystem and are necessary therefor. The two great lessons from evolution are therefore diversity and coexistence. Any ideology that militates against diversity, that tries to wipe out ethnic groups, that claims one race as being superior and all else as inferior, that destroys individuality and forces similitude, that wants to do away with "freaks" or "sociopaths" or "deviants," is a betrayal of evolution and its true lessons.

"Social Darwinism" that claimed that the culture that's best in war is superior and deserves to dominate, Nazism that claimed that Aryan race was superior race meant to rule the world, personality psychology that wants to do away with anyone who has a different idea than the time and the place, and similar abortions of ideologies, thoroughly misconstrue evolution. True understanding of evolution is diversity and coexistence, not malignant narcissism that seeks to wipe out everything other than itself.

Another major lesson of evolution is that there are many ways to get things done rightly. The tigers, the reindeer, the insects, the plants, and other forms of life, all are different adaptations, and all of them work. This refutes the Communist belief that Communism is the only way of getting things done rightly, as much as it refutes those in capitalism who think that capitalism is the only functional and ethical way.

Nowhere in evolution is there conceived such a thing as "the master race"or a superior culture. Nowhere in evolution do we see there being a single right way of life. What we see is different ways of getting things done, from which humans stand to learn. In nature, we see just about everything: Competition, collaboration, self-interest, altruism, lone-wolf approach, teamwork, patriarchy, matriarchy, and a huge variety of functional forms that are functional through different mechanism. True interpretation of evolution sees all that and respects it. The brutalist ideologies such as Social Darwinism, Nazism, Stalinism, and personality psychology, are not Darwin's legacy; they are legacy of ignorance and deception by those who would use anything and misconstrue everything toward that end.

As for Communism, it is not based on Darwin; it's based on Marxism. Marx wrote The Communist Manifesto in 1848; Charles Darwin wrote On the Origin of Species in 1859. And while Marxian interpretation of human nature is being that to benefit the collective, while that of capitalism is self-interest, evolution shows that both are part of nature, and both would be found in people now and at any other time.

The fact that both are part of nature, means that both will be found in one or another form, anywhere, with differences in degrees among individuals, places and times. In places that have forbidden one or the other, the forbidden aspect will manifest itself sideways - typically in twisted, destructive ways. Thus, in places that have forbidden altruism or benefit toward humanity - such as for example America of 1980s - the other-interest manifested in intellectual, spiritual and interpersonal oppression that aggressively demanded to turn people at all levels into embodiments of the Reagan ethic and forbade all other possibilities under claims of them being commie or loser or dangerous or pathological or anti-American. And in places that have forbidden self-interest, the self-interest will manifest in corruption - as it did, for example, in the case of Soviet bureaucrats and black-marketeers who served their forbidden self-interest in corrupt and murderous ways under the lie of serving the state. For there to be complete, healthy humanity - for the benefit of people at both individual and collective levels - both of these directions - each of them part of humanity's evolutionary makeup - have to be acknowledged, accepted, and tapped into. And it is only through this that not only the fullness of human nature can be served, but also be able to produce what it has to offer the world - for humanity to supply, that is, what it is capable of supplying, and for its demands at all levels to be met through this supply.

If there are any existing belief structures that are supported by evolution, it is Buddhism that believes all life to be sacred; Wiccan and Native American spirituality that value the planet and what lives on it; environmentalism that recognizes the irreplaceable quality of the natural treasures; and those who see human potential and want to see it produce for humanity. The latter is the case both for people in capitalism and in socialism, each of whom understand half the picture - the first, self-interest; the second, humanity-interest - and see each other as hostile when they are in fact complementary in what they describe. What is not supported by evolution is the belief that life is evil and that it should be destroyed, both inside people and in the environment. This is the true reason for opposition of Islam and Christianity to evolution. Given the underlying beliefs, it can very well be said that life-affirming ethic of evolution is far superior in its principles and its honesty to the ethic of necrophilic apocalyptic creeds that claim to have "family values" as they aim for a destruction of all life on Earth before the children being born now have learned how to read.


Sheeps, Wolves: Any Other Species?

A common metaphor for human interactions in Christian and Christian-influenced areas has been that of the sheep and the
wolves. The sheep are seen as good, wolves as evil. My question: What about all the other species?

Nature contains huge variety. To claim that people can only be one of two species of that variety is extreme folly. What about antelopes and gazelles? What about tigers, lions and leopards? What about dolphins, reindeer, koala bears, mongoose, elephants, lemurs, birds?

The wolf-sheep paradigm wants to do away with all these, and such has in fact been the result of implementation of sheep-wolf thinking: A plundered planet and a culturally impoverished, homogeneized, humankind. The sheep-wolf thinking wants everyone to be at every level a sheep - and claim that, if one is not at every level a sheep, then a wolf. The foolishness that is behind this thinking is responsible for huge range of evils now faced by humanity.

In personality psychology, anyone who is not at every level its product is seen as basically inhuman and irredeemably evil. This is the case regardless of how much good the person does. The Orwellian concept of crimethink has been introduced through claims that people can be made criminal by their personality - that is, by their thinking. And with that, has been introduced a very real totalitarianism - not one of government, but one of whatever unchecked, unbalanced, and unaccountable groupthink, usurps the power to run the place and the time, to shape people, and to define people in reference to itself.

From the perspective of the rest of the world, sheep and wolves work together. The shepherd sends the wolves across the world to clear the land of all other species; the sheep come in and overgraze the place. That some wolves would start going after some of the sheep, should be expected. And yet such things are met with horror, which horror did not accompany the full-scale destruction of other, beautiful, species, all around the world, to make room for the sheep.

The worst evils in the world have come from the belief that people are, or should be, the same. This belief is responsible for genocide, jihad, imperialism, Stalinism, and demicides, witch hunts, and holocausts of all kind throughout the history of the world. The demand that people must at all levels be sheep is totalitarianism that goes all the way to the core of the people. As such, it is a betrayal of life, liberty, and all that the countries subverted by this con against their original purpose are meant to be about.

The sheep and the wolves are a false duality. One should be neither a sheep nor a wolf. One should think outside false thinking to allow more clarity. There are millions of beautiful species around the world, that are being brought to the brink of extinction by the sheep, the wolves and the shepherds. One should identify with these species and give them a real chance at a life, while also doing the same for the planet and its inhabitants.