just read this review of ken wilber’s latest book. talking about the babyboomer generation (people born 1946 – 1960) wilber claims, that they have two distinguishing main characteristics:
pluralism and narcissism.
on one hand they are the first generation, who broke with traditions on a large scale and moved to a postmodern, multicultural, pluralistic understanding of the world.
but on the other hand they are extremly narcissistic, meaning extremly egocentric and garnered with a nobody-tells-me-what-to-do attitude.
sound familiar?
this of course is quite a confusing mixture: the non-conformist approch to not wanting change let affect myself. change gets demanded in the outside world, but as soon as it touches my personality change gets blocked.
was it their sheer numbers, which pushed the babyboomers into having to be superficially flexible, while remaining completely stubbornly self-absorbed at a deeper level? simply a survival strategy?
nevertheless the babyboomers are everywhere nowadays. after all they adopted the smart tactics of the long march through the institutions. our teachers, politicians and socialworkers all are babyboomers. authority-figures in birkenstocks! on the outside cool and understanding, yet still authority figures abusing their power.
we, the generations, who came after the babyboomers, had no other chance than to escape into anger (punks), irony (generation x), or lifestyle commodity (generation y)….