Generational Cannibalism

The Boomers ate their children. We get to eat the consequences.

Everyone is born into duties they did not ask for but have nonetheless. Son to father. Daughter to mother. Citizen to nation. Man to God. And every generation owes a duty forward: to pass on a civilisation intact, hopefully better than it was found, to invest in the young and to make way for them as their forebears did for them.

What happens when a generation fails in that duty? When the intergenerational chain breaks?

What happens when Boomers eat their children?

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(This piece is best read listening to Noel Harrison’s Windmills Of Your Mind)

Myths and symbols are very important. Reality is a complex thing. For each man to venture off alone and try to understand reality is a foolhardy endeavour. Stories, history and art collectivise this labour. Compressing a kind of civilisational memory into a digestible format. The stories we inherit from the past are not just material descriptions of events once passed, but eternal patterns that play out in the present.

One such encoded civilisational memory can be found in Hesiod’s Theogony

The Theology, through telling the story of the gods, outline the foundational myths of the Greeks. I am no classical scholar, and will leave the intricate details to others, but for our purposes I wish to focus on the war between the Titan Kronos and Olympian Zeus, the war between father and son, the Boomers and Gen Z.

But Rheia was subject in love to Kronos and bore splendid children, Hestia, Demeter, and gold-shod Hera and strong Hades, pitiless in heart, who dwells under the earth, and the loud-crashing Earth-Shaker, and wise Zeus, father of gods and men, by whose thunder the wide earth is shaken. These great Kronos swallowed as each came forth from the womb to his mother's knees with this intent, that no other of the proud sons of Ouranos should hold the kingly office amongst the deathless gods. For he learned from Gaia and starry Ouranos that he was destined to be overcome by his own son, strong though he was, through the contriving of great Zeus. Therefore he kept no blind outlook, but watched and swallowed down his children: and unceasing grief seized Rheia.

Kronos devoured the Olympian gods. Fearing the eventual overthrow that is destined for every generation, he chose to devour them, committing an act of “Generational Cannibalism” in a foolhardy war against time to preserve himself.

Sound familiar?

Kronos Devouring His Son - Francisco Goya

It’s no secret that intergenerational relations are getting worse. To a growing number of Boomers, young people are avocado toast socialists, who have given up and aren’t even trying to save for the future. To Gen Z the Boomer seems increasingly out of touch, describing a world that does not exist, fighting battles that seem irrelevant whilst ignoring others that feel existential.

Of course the old have always thought the young to be weak and opulent while the young see them as stagnant and out of touch. It is alleged that Napoleon said "During revolutionary times, never trust a man over 40 — they simply will not be able to grasp the situation." and Aristotle says of the young: “They are passionate, hot-tempered, and carried away by impulse…And their desire for both these is greater than their desire for money, to which they attach only the slightest value, because they have never yet experienced want”

Generational Conflicts have always existed, but what was once a cultural cliché has gained momentum. The hostility is increasing to a point of “Intergenerational Warfare” in which generations see each other not only as having different cultural dispositions but as political and economic adversaries.

Young people feel they’ve gotten a raw deal, and in many ways they have. Australia’s debt is now reaching a trillion dollars, which debt represents those from the past using the labour of future Australians to pay for their living standards.

Over the past 30 years we have seen an extreme policy of mass Third World migration to the West. Most of these migrants are low-skilled workers, who ultimately compete against the young Australian for their wages, not the established professional. It is Young Australians who have to compete with migrants for rental properties and Young Australians who suffer the most from the social fragmentation multicultural policies have created.

Gone are the days where a firm handshake and nice haircut can get you a start in your career. Rather, the future is locked behind a minimum of 4 years of credentialisation in educational institutions that care less about the formation of young Australians and are more about cramming as many international students in as possible, standards and quality of life be damned.

Corporate and governmental diversity, equity and inclusion policies also disproportionately affect young people, specifically young men. When a quota is implemented for any one of these categories it is the young man starting his career who loses his job or isn’t hired in the first place, not the high-flying experienced male executive.

COVID, ALIENATION, SAFESCHOOLS, CREDENTIALISM, AI, SAFETY CULTURE, HOUSING PRICES, OVEREGULATION, INFLATION, DEBT, MASS MIGRATION, THE LONGHOUSE, GENDER WARS, DIGITAL HYPERGAMY

In so many ways the modern world has become a conspiracy, a prison against youth, specifically against the impulses and natures of young men.

Young people have been put behind the eight ball in countless ways, and at the risk of reducing this piece to a litany of grievances, I won’t elaborate on them all.

Increasingly as a civilisation we have adopted a series of policy trade-offs that sacrifice young people’s future for older generations.

No sane society would trade the young for the old, Civilisation is supposed to be a cycle of the old sacrificing for the young and the young then caring for the old in thanks to what was gifted to them.

But what was gifted to us? Chaos!

The Fall of the Titans - Cornelis van Haarlem

The struggles young people face are both unique and real, the level of anguish and aggression directed to those who seemed to be in command of such choices is understandable. If you yourself hail from that generation you may be rather annoyed with me after the above paragraphs. But fear not! Although I am in total agreement with the analysis of the conditions young people face, I am ultimately opposed to the solutions so often put forward.

I am against resentment, It is death. Self-preservation cannot justify barbarism, and to engage in “Generational Cannibalism” would make the youth no better than whom we criticise. We must sharpen our aim, and as young people be diligent to criticise things with clarity and specificity, lest in our anger (or laziness) we fail to describe the world accurately.

After all this generational conflict is not new; it exists as a recurring pattern; a baseline myth of our civilisation. Now returning to Hesiod, reading of the age before the Olympians we learn more about Kronos and his own father.

And he (Ouranos) used to hide them all away in a secret place of Gaia as soon as each was born, and would not suffer them to come up into the light. And Ouranos rejoiced in his evil doing. But vast Gaia groaned within, being pained, and she made the element of grey flint and shaped a great sickle, and told her plan to her dear sons. And she spoke, cheering them, while she was vexed in her dear heart:

"My children, begotten of a sinful father, if you will obey me, we should punish the vile outrage of your father; for he first thought of doing shameful things."

So she said; but fear seized them all, and none of them uttered a word. But great Kronos, the wily, took courage and answered his dear mother:

"Mother, I will undertake to do this deed, for I reverence not our father of evil name, for he first thought of doing shameful things."

So he said, and vast Gaia rejoiced greatly in spirit, and set and hid him in an ambush, 175 and put in his hands a jagged sickle, and revealed to him the whole plot. And Ouranos came, bringing on night and longing for love, and he lay about Gaia spreading himself full upon her. Then the son from his ambush stretched forth his left hand and in his right took the great long sickle with jagged teeth, and swiftly lopped off his own father’s members and cast them away to fall behind him.

Ouranos the father of Kronos also metaphorically devoured his children: “used to hide them all away in a secret place of Gaia as soon as each was born”. The evil of Kronos was not unique, the wheel of fortune turns and turns; Times may change but the nature of man remains.

Remember too that the Boomers were corrupted from above before they corrupted from below, the Frankfurt School was already at work when they were children. Yes they lived through the single most prosperous lifetime in human civilisation, but that was not without it’s own instability: the OPEC shock, the early-90s recession, the GFC tearing through their superannuation. None of this absolves them. As I said earlier self-preservation cannot justify barbarism. But Kronos, too, was a son before he was a father.

Think of the young men in the trenches of the world wars, that civil war of Western Civilisation, in which the aristocrats of the old world died in cavalry charges and the national structures of the old order were swept away by the revolutionary spirit that followed. We allowed the moral legitimacy of our civilisation to die in our own minds. In many ways, we have not recovered from the failures of that generation, and their sons - our grandfathers - suffered for it.

Ouranos set against Kronos. Kronos against Zeus. Father against Son.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Turning now to our own age, not every Boomer is Kronos. It is prudent for us to remember that Zeus set against Kronos had help from the generations that came before. Zeus was only alive because Rheia, Gaia and starry Ouranos conspired to keep him alive.

Some have already chosen to be Rheia. Some to be Gaia. To those of the older generation reading this and feeling the weight of it: there is still time to choose. You can devour the future to preserve your own comfort, or you can hide your grandchildren in the cave on Crete and arm them for what is coming. You can choose to set yourself against Kronos. The civilisation you inherited can still be passed on. But it will not pass on itself.

I can confidently speak for every young person about the joy of meeting someone from generations past who “gets it”, who has risen above the easy path and recognised the sins of their generation. Such people are to be honoured and treasured; I know I feel that way about those I know.

And to my own generation: refuse resentment. The deck is stacked against you and much of the “blackpill” is real. Yet resentment is the loser’s emotion, it drives you to inaction and guarantees the maintenance of the status quo. Zeus did not defeat his father by hating him. He won because he committed to action, because Rheia and Gaia chose him, and because he was worthy of being chosen. Be worthy.

I’ve often said to friends that it feels like something is waiting to be born, that we might live on a great precipice and that in the next few years something bold and new will emerge.

This reads as a passage of a man drunk on hope, but I truly believe that if we commit ourselves to grand endeavours in defence of our civilisation what might emerge from this moment will be civilisational renewal instead of managed decline.

A new Olympian Age, an end to this great ugliness.

As always friends, do you want to be pure? Or do you want to win?