Fri 26 Jul 2002 20:14
Kw's great. reading end notes to boomeritis, a pdf sent out on the shambhala email list.

from
Eight Myths about Men [or other work]
by Warren Farrell, Ph.D.

Women are the more likely initiators at every level of severity of violence.íî

Men have misdefined power as "feeling obligated to earn money someone
else spends while they die sooner." Men who didn't earn money, or have property or status did not receive love, respect or sex from womenóor respect from men.
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So one motivation for men earning money or obtaining status was to "earn their way to equality" to women's love.

Thus, for men, reading a business book is also reading a relationship book (there will be no relationship if he doesn't have his business act together); and, for women, reading a relationship book is also reading a business
book. In brief, both sexes care about both love and security, but history has taught them to obtain it in different ways.


If men in reality earned a dollar for each 76¢ for the same workóa
patent but popular mythóthen any company that hired all men would soon be put out of business by a company hiring all women.


The more industrialized the community, the larger the gap between the male and female life expectancy.


As we have focused more on women good, men bad, our sons' suicide rate has increased and our daughters' decreased. Now boys in their early 20s are 6 times as likely to commit suicide as girls. By the age of 85, men are 1350% more likely to commit suicide.

[interesting- I do remember learning something like that, but that while males were more likely to succeed at suicide, females were more likely to be depressed]

[for anthony]
One of the fastest growing demographics in the US is the increase in the
last 20 years is the percent of single dadsófrom 10% to 19% of all single parents.  All fathers' rights groups are fighting for the same thingóto be more involved with the children. Most men prefer joint custody should there be a divorce. A man's loss of contact with his children and former wife is so devastating that men are 10 times more likely than women to commit suicide after a divorce. Men become deadbeats mostly when they feel mom has badmouthed them to the childrenówhen they feel they spend most of a weekend with the children overcoming distrust and then, once they've made a dent, the children return to mother again; they become deadbeats mostly when they feel they are valued only for their moneyóthat when they have the children they are expected to babysit and follow mom's values or be found wrong. Overall, men who have joint custody pay child support at more than the 90% level. When child support payments are awarded, men are twice as likely to pay as women. And we know that worldwide, children raised by single dads do better on every psychological, health and academic level than children raised by single moms.  



[on to postmodernism. Gergen is known to me from having a role (one of dubious value, it seemed to me) in Appreciative Inquiry)]

ëWhen a suburban Philadelphia woman dressed in army fatigues went on a shooting rampage in a shopping mall, killing and wounding several people before being captured, [Swarthmore College psychology professor Kenneth] Gergen insisted that society should apply a ìpostmodernî concept of justice to the case. In Gergenís view, this means recognizing that ìthe concept of the individual who chooses wrong loses tenability.îí The death of the subject, you see. Thus, blame ëshould not be attributed to the individual alone but to the array of relationships in which he or she is a part.í


[now, the generalized other]

That is, I have to be able to take the role of othersóand see how they see meó in order for me to see myself as well!


ìYou should pray that you do not do something great enough that a Boomer decides to write a biography of you, because it will not be about the great thing you did, but about your faults, your psychopathology, how you beat your dog and were suspected of having sex with a chicken.



intent on destroying greatness wherever it finds it so that, by comparison, its own self can triumph.î

[now, related to unschooling]
ìNow, the grandiosity of the Boomers had a specific effect on their children, and this grandiosity came in two waves, reflected in the Xers and Ys. Again, we are talking generalities, averages, and stereotypes here, so please remember that. But wave-1 of the Boomers (and boomeritis) was the retro-Romantic phase, the original Woodstock Nation, the celebration of ëoriginal goodnessí and the noble savage, the hedonic celebration of pre-conventional and pre-rational as if they were free and liberated (whereas pre-rational consciousness is simply a slave to purple and red impulses). The result of this first phase of boomeritis attitude in parenting produced Gen Xóyes, the so-called slackers: letting little Johnny ërun freeí actually let little Johnny rot. (Okay, you Gen Xers out there, donít get annoyed until you hear the whole storyÖ.) ìWhen the Boomers realized that this Romantic approach to reproducing their egos in their kids was not working, they went in the opposite direction from ëoriginal goodnessí (let little Johnny alone so to not repress his so-called original goodness) and switched to ëgrowth to goodnessí: run little Johnny ragged by working him morning, noon, and night: send him to pre-school, enrichment programs, around-the-clock supervised empowerment programs, music lessons and soccer games, SAT study courses, you name it. The result of this wave-2 boomeritis produced, not Slackers but Blasters, produced the Millennials.

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ìThe first wave of Boomer childrenóGen Xówere those that grew up in the retro-Romantic wave of Boomers (and boomeritis)óletís call it wave-1 or boomeritis-1.  Here, the idea was to let little Johnny do whatever he wanted, since as a child he was ëcloser to pure natureíóa type of noble savage that we should let alone so as to not repress his ëoriginal goodness.í This was the ërun free, run wildí phase of the Boomers (little Johnny was also left alone for another reason: he was a latchkey kid). The result, of course, was that little Johnny went to seed, and thus the result of ëlet little Johnny aloneí was the Slacker generation. Boomeritis in wave-1 celebrated its own grandiosity through its children by condemning the conventional waves and wallowing in the preconventional waves, which, as we said, let little Johnny rotóhence, slacker.  

ìNow, of course, what little Johnny the so-called slacker actually did, under the onslaught of this retro-Romantic Boomer egoóthis boomeritis-1ówas to adapt to these wretched circumstances by developing a very sophisticated intelligenceóskeptical, pragmatic, entrepreneurial, independentóand completely irreverent in the face of the false value system of boomeritis. Think David Spade or Janeane Garafolo, two of my alltime favorites. Gen X is a wonderful title for all this, but ëslackerí is misleading in that it doesnít give the underlying flavor of the brilliantly adaptive intelligence involved here: how better to confound boomeritis and its grandiosity than by developing a ëho-humí attitude in the face of all that self-proclaimed greatness?


ìWell, Boomers are not total idiots, and when they realized that this ënoble savageí approach to reproducing their egos was not workingóand that little Johnny left in his original goodness is a slacker (and they begin to realize this when little Johnny hit adolescence)óthen the Boomers in droves began to switch from ëoriginal goodnessí to

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ëgrowth to goodness.í Now it so happens that the ëgrowth to goodnessí model is the generally correct model; but when it became injected with the grandiosity of boomeritis, look out! Childhood was turned from a time of, well, childhood, into a time of aroundthe- clock preparation for adulthood and greatness: after all, how better to show that I am an amazingly great person and parent than to have kids that grow up to be amazingly, astonishingly successful. This, however, demands enormous workóstarting when the kid is a fetusóand with this, boomeritis-2 went into full gear. Where Gen X was left alone to rot, Gen Y was molded from the moment of conceptionóboth by the same boomeritis ego, but with a different method to the madness.

ìThe Millennials are now hitting adolescence and early college years. Again, we are speaking generalities and stereotypes here, but unlike the Xers, the Millennials donít want to slack the system, but succeed in it. They donít particularly chafe against the rules, donít totally yawn in the face of their parents, appear more generally happy with society and are ready to accelerate in it, and tend to trust the system, more or less. The extreme stereotypes here are not David Spade and Janeane Garafolo but Britney and Mandy and N Sync. Whereas the Xers, following the original boomeritis phase, had a huge distrust of blue and orange, the Ys tend to embrace blue and orange easily, and are happy to move on from thereóif they canÖ.


--------
before reading that I was focusing on the meaninglessness /
or rather, attempting to find a better way to slack the system. I should get back to that.


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