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Last week, The Wall Street Journal ran a front-page exposé, with more being published in their weekend edition. It was run under the fold, eclipsed by the headline about Putin declaring martial law (the second article seems to have been removed from the website by the next day). The Journal‘s revelation is that large numbers of government officials, spread across multiple agencies, made millions off of well-timed stock trades coinciding (i.e. preceding) government action on the pandemic.

On the same morning I read the WSJ article, I took in a blog post by Science Fiction author Sarah Hoyt. Because I read the articles together, I synthesized their respective subjects together. So, now, you get to hear my version.

… and Statistics

Ms. Hoyt’s post begins with a statistic taken from Mike Rowe’s podcast that (as she originally repeated it) “80% of men [are] not working.” It’s a shocking claim and one that I didn’t quite believe was possible. Indeed it isn’t quite accurate. As one of her commenters clarifies, the podcast actually says that for unemployed men, only 20% are attempting to find new employment. In other words, it is 80% of unemployed males that apparently have no interest in working. Even adjusting the figures, thought, the shocking figure still makes her point.

There are a huge number of people, and more-so men, who have simply dropped out. Dropped out of the workforce and maybe dropped out of society. Heap this atop the recent concern over “quiet quitting” – the, nominally, fully-employed who have dropped out – and the impact on both the economy and society is undeniable. In an earlier post here I talked about whether this dropping-out was rationally based on the disincentives being built into the Western business climate. Recall that this was partly inspired by another Sarah Hoyt post, where she talked about the business environment facing writers today.

In her October 20th post, she focuses on male/female relations. Any rational observer must conclude that our respective drives to create the next generation are a key element to what makes society function. She focuses on the pressures upon both men and women to forsake their traditional roles as the core of a family unit. I agree with much of her analysis but it is also but one facet to what has been termed “The Great Resignation.”

Now Ms. Hoyt is apt to write a lot of prose and she lets her writing take her where it will. I say this in light of her profession as such meandering verbosity is the opposite of what it takes write professionally. On the other hand, a lack of writing discipline maybe shouldn’t be surprising for what is essentially a private diary (except open to public reading). I do it too. Said style, as my readers well know, does tend to make “posts” overly long and sometimes difficult to follow. Long meandering posts on the great problems of the day also have a habit of teasing the reader with the prospect of providing a clear explanation or possibly even a course of action. In the end, most of the time, they are just long.

For her conclusion, Ms. Hoyt suggests we straighten up and fly right, returning to the conservative values that made this country, Western Civilization, and indeed the world – great. It’s a call to the young and not-fully-committed to undertake the hard work of being a contributing member of mankind. It is also a call to the more mature among us to make sure that the values of our forefathers are passed along. I, of course, agree but I’m also not sure this is going to fix what ails us.

Paper Copy

Let us open up that Wall Street Journal.

Their article about this apparent investment malfeasance, at our highest levels of government, hit me harder than most of the stories in the recent news. As bad as it all can seem, what’s worse here is that I know in my gut nothing will come of it.

Oh yes, some committees may be formed to review the situation but in the end it will be decided that there were no clear-cut violation of ethics. Maybe, just maybe, if the public really rises up, there might be one or two officials thrown to the wolves. I as I wrap up my post, now a few days later, it doesn’t seem like “the public” really bit on this article. “Highly-placed officials get rich while the rest of us struggle”?, we respond. “Tell us something we don’t already know.”

Maybe it always was so. If we generally trust those who run our government, we probably don’t mind them doing a little “somethin’ somethin'” for themselves as long as it is in the course of looking out for the rest of us. Maybe it’s only when they seem to be getting rich while also screwing us over that we actually get upset. In the context of the pandemic, a good chunk of us do still feel that our rulers had, mostly, our best interests at heart when setting pandemic policy. Heck, most of us probably don’t know enough to form an opinion one way or another. That a handful seemed to have got rich in the process (or maybe not) – we don’t know what to make of that.

If you still need an example, this is what the red-hatted MAGA people mean when they say “the system is rigged” against us. You and I have to work hard so as to earn not-even-enough to keep up with inflation. Meanwhile, the politically connected can front-run the Federal government itself, guaranteeing themselves an easy profit. Worse yet, they do so having destroyed businesses, crippled a generation of school children, and (arguably) mismanaged the very public-health crisis for which they did all this to us in the first place.

I guess my concern here is not so much the magnitude of the transgression. Indeed, it gets a little tiresome when half of what we see is interpreted as having civilization-changing importance. What I see is that, assuming that “everyone” decides that this is acceptable, what does that tell us about the depth of our societal disintegration? If a class of “rulers” are allowed to force everyone else into blind obedience for, in part, their own self-enrichment, isn’t that the very definition of the tyranny that we all say we fear? And if we are, in fact, enslaved by tyrants, should our priority remain as being good citizens? Why work hard, send our children to school, pay our taxes, if it is all in service to evil overlords that hate everything we represent?

Wouldn’t you drop out too?

Generation What?

One last point of digression. As I was reading along in Ms. Hoyt’s post, I got to a line that said “the last two generations, mine and the one before, never fully embraced the work and the rewards, never fully admitted there was a good to not being young and crazy anymore.” This made me pause, because I couldn’t quite match up the accusation with two generations in a row. I kind of assumed Hoyt was around my age but, of course, what do I know? To understand the point I decided I needed to pin down the generations to which she is referring.

Sarah Hoyt is a boomer. She’s probably almost as young as you can be and still be a boomer, but a boomer nonetheless. That makes the “two generations” the Baby Boomers and the Silent Generation. In my experience, though, the specific language of her accusation doesn’t apply to the Silents. I left the exercise even more perplexed that when I entered it.

One obvious explanation is if she doesn’t use the pop-culture classification of “generations” in the way that I just did. She may simply mean “people my age and maybe a decade or two older than us.” That could mean more of a Generation X/Boomer group… and that shoe would seem to fit. Then I thought about the context a little more.

It’s not exactly what her words are saying, but the gist of it all is that this “blame” is being laid upon those who reared the generations to follow. In other words, didn’t the Silent Generation created the GenX slackers and while the Boomers created the snowflake Millennials. The sins of the father, or something like that.

Gradually and then Suddenly

In this way, my first interpretation may be right – maybe we need to look back to that Silent Generation to see where we’ve gone wrong. Certainly, the degradation of our “Main Street” culture reaches much farther back than the 2016 election. The deprecation of values that we’ve embarked upon in our society really is multi-generational and, thus, runs so much deeper than what an election-cycle or two can be expected to fix.

Yes our loss of religion and traditional “American values” leaves a hole that could, presumably, be restored by a simple reinstitution thereof. Yet the corruption of those values was already underway, for many of us, when our parents and grandparents were in their prime.

Ostentatious displays of religiosity went first. This was followed by an emphasis on personal faith over the trappings of organized religion. To those youth raised in this environment, abandoning religion altogether becomes no big step, even if it would have been unthinkable to Grandma and Grandpa. Likewise marriage. The path from a more acceptable permissiveness in dating behavior, to the benefits of living together as a “trial marriage,” to eschewing marriage entirely is an obvious path – but one that would never could have happened all at once.

Likewise, and to my point, the “great resignation” has been a long time coming. A couple of generations ago, a man defined himself by his work. He found employment and vocation as a prerequisite to joining society. The ability to support himself and his eventual family was a price of entry. Wondering why we should bother to work at all was preceded by a generation or two who wondered whether or not we were simply working too hard or to the exclusion of properly living our lives. The final step from “don’t let a job rule your whole life” to “why work to the detriment of more important aspects of living” is no longer that big.

In this it was the Boomers and, yes, even the Silent Generation that set us on our trajectory. This is important (think like a rocket scientist) because a destination can be set by modest amounts of energy early on. Altering that destination requires more and more input of energy as time goes by and it eventually becomes impossible to return to a different course. You can’t change your mind and land on Mars moments before you crash into the Sun.

Game pairing: Big Pharma.