From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Tue Dec 24 2002 - 07:16:57 MST
spike66 wrote:
> Please, those who were there, and those who weren't
> but understand:
>
> What were the sixties about?
Well, I wasn't there, but if you want to know how the sixties look from
the perspective of today's average youth, like myself...
In the 1950s the GI Bill passed, permitting millions of young men who'd
fought in WWII to go to college, what had previously been a rare and
treasured privilege, now available to the masses for the first time.
Everyone was happy. For one generation.
They were happy, for that one generation, because something they'd come to
see as the privilege of the best was now available to them. The problem
came in the next generation, when all those college-educated parents,
riding on the boom of the 50s, tried to send their children to college as
well. Rather than being a privilege, college had become a necessity.
That's a fundamental transition, and in this case, not a good one. The
function of college slowly ceased to be providing knowledge of which
degrees were the mere outward indicator, and began to become the provision
of the degrees that were required for jobs. For the students, college was
a dreary grind rather than a rare privilege; they were going there not to
learn, or even to become part of the aristocracy, but to get an
unremarkable but necessary piece of parchment.
Where the fifties GIs going to college had cause to regard themselves as
going somewhere, the sixties generation of college-goers were in an
extended kind of high school, marking time before they were allowed to be
real adults.
Somewhere in the brains of all those young adults, a little switch
flipped. It was the little switch that said: "I'm physiologically an
adult, and yet I'm still being kept down. It must be time to rebel and
overthrow the tribal chief."
What mapped to that emotional concept of "tribal chief" was their parents
(of course); the college teachers; the government; the System; the
Establishment; critical thinking; self-control. It was a revolution in
the best traditions of Rousseau, rather than Locke; thankfully only
powerless junior adults were involved, so we didn't have the kind of
bloodbath that characterized the French Revolution.
The revolution failed. As evolutionary psychology had dictated their
original revolution, so too it dictated the aftermath. The baby boomers
got jobs, felt themselves to have a social position in society, and
decided that this must be adulthood. To this day, a large fraction of
baby boomers - I don't know whether it's a majority - still aren't sure,
on some inner level, that they're adults; they feel they've been faking
everything since sixth grade. I doubt that Vietnam veterans feel that
way, having handled the kind of crisis that leaves adulthood in its wake;
but there were never anywhere near as many Vietnam veterans as WWII
veterans. The baby boomer generation as a whole, I think, never really
grew up. Adulthood was what they wanted in the sixties. When they
finally got out of college they invested a tremendous amount of emotional
energy in convincing themselves they were adults; it was their turn now,
they were finally in charge. Well... it's an interesting theory, and I
wish them good luck with their mid-life crises.
As part of convincing themselves they were adults, the baby boomers lashed
out at their own memories of youth, the same way that as teenagers they
had lashed out at the System. I would say that they failed to get
anywhere with their idealism because they abandoned rationality,
self-discipline, critical thinking, the study of history, and realistic
assessment of the probable impact of any given strategy. But it's a lot
easier - and a lot more human - to say, "This idealism stuff is all
youthful folly; it's inevitable, really, when you're young; but now I've
given up ideals, so I must be adult."
It is easier to lose faith in idealism than to admit you were incompetent.
It is easier to say that stupidity is an unavoidable consequence of
youth than to admit personal responsibility for being stupid. Most of the
baby boom generation is likely sneer at anything that smacks of idealism
because that's part of how they've chosen to convince themselves they're
finally adults. I can see the disaster, but aside from teaching the next
generation evolutionary psychology, I don't see much that can be done to
fix it.
-- Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/ Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
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