Many of my ‘Boomer’ generation will fondly remember the iconic magazine art produced by the gifted American Illustrator, Norman Rockwell, whose imaginative Saturday Evening Post covers captured the quintessence of American life during the 1930s, 40s, and 50s. I grew up at the tail end of Norman Rockwell’s America, a world which has long since evaporated into the mists of our nation’s social history. And while it wasn’t a perfect world it was nevertheless a time of relatively stable family life and national cohesion. In that society men worked hard in the mills and factories while wives and mothers anchored their families and neighborhoods by their at-home presence. Neighborhoods were true neighborhoods, not cookie cutter subdivisions or gated compounds. Over 90 kids lived on my block alone. We all played (and fought) together, walked in batches to school, or sneaked off to the nearby drug store soda font. Small independent ‘AG’ grocers and butchers within easy walking distance dotted the landscape. At dinnertime a mass migration ensued, each to his or her own home for the family supper.

Though we didn’t realize it at the time, it was the end of an era. America reigned as the world’s industrial power. We produced goods and services on a scale never before imagined in human history. But dark forces were already at work in the higher echelons of corporate and governmental power, forces bent on subjecting ordinary Americans to mass mind control techniques intended to enrich and empower a few at the expense of the many. The purpose of this covert social engineering experiment was to re-wire our brains and emotions and root out that annoying American trait of ‘individualism’ which was grounded in the nuclear family. Therefore the family, long the primary unit of social unity and moral authority, was to be gradually edged out of its vaunted position by a gaggle of ‘expert authorities’ in government and education. The large private corporations cooperated in this transfer of power away from the family unit by undermining the economic independence of individuals, especially fathers, and reducing workers to dependent wage slaves.

Thus World War II became a kind of benchmark after which we were no longer truly free and sovereign citizens but rather unwitting captive specimens in a nation-wide social science laboratory. And so we ‘Boomers’ were raised and educated in an increasingly corporate dominated ‘collectivist’ social framework where enterprise and independent thought were being slowly but surely squeezed out by a new ethos based upon institutional conformity. ‘Company men’ and ‘team players’ became the new social and economic paradigm supplanting the former ‘independent farmer’ mindset. In fact, the self sufficient family farm itself was in free-fall by 1950 alongside countless rural communities withering on the vine.

I chose World War II as a benchmark for several reasons because it marked a transition on many fronts. By 1945 the American republic of Washington and Jefferson had fully transitioned, by fits and starts, into an undisguised American empire. In flagrant rejection of George Washington’s advice to “avoid foreign entanglements,” the nation stepped up as the de facto reincarnation of the former British empire (to which two world wars had joined us at the hip). Consequently, American leadership was forced to accept the exigencies of empire which included the creation of a vast security state and expanded intelligence operations. Thus in 1947 the CIA was created alongside the NSA and Defense Intelligence Agencies because an empire can no longer afford to be insular in its thinking.

Col. Lawrence Wilkerson ably points out that the one thing an empire requires is some kind of pervasive enemy to maintain its own posture, and to justify the considerable expense involved in maintaining a permanent security state. But as both our external enemies, Germany and Japan, had been subjugated by the end of 1945, the rising American empire needed to quickly find a new foe before taxpayers became restless with massive and bloated Pentagon expenditures. So like any good politician, President Truman did a quick pivot and declared our former war ally, the Soviet Union, to be our new enemy. The Cold war thus became the new existential crisis designed to keep the populace narrowly focused on the perils to freedom and democracy, made more palpable by the Soviet’s acquisition of the nuclear bomb, which we ourselves had secretly developed and deployed against civilian populations.

The ensuing Cold War arms race thereby represented a godsend for the now firmly entrenched military industrial complex. The pacifist American republic still extant in the 1920s and 30s faded like a forgotten dream. To be sure all the external functions of a democratic republic continued as before, elections were held but the soul of our sovereign nation had morphed into that of an empire with all that such a structure implied. The necessary permanent crisis, a Cold War, would serve the empire well for the next 45 years.

But how did this transition affect the other parts of society, and especially that ‘Boomer’ generation which grew up in its shadow? The wartime Breton Woods accord established a new economic structure with the dollar as its centerpiece. The economic insecurity prior to the war became a post-war economic boom which in turn facilitated a rising consumerism and expanding middle class. Cities and suburbs grew even as rural communities dwindled causing a huge shift in the political landscape. But perhaps the most significant shift the war instituted was regarding the nuclear family. In many ways it changed dynamics between husbands and wives. Countless men returned from the front psychologically battered while many women had left home to work in the war industries. Not surprisingly the divorce rate which had been slowly climbing since World War I surged to unprecedented levels starting in 1946. As families started to fragment in increasing numbers government stepped in as mediator and even provider. And as more women entered the workforce, many through economic necessity, the Norman Rockwell ideal of America began to slowly disintegrate.

Despite the post-war euphoria and material expansion created by ‘fiat currency’ and ‘easy money’ policies, the children born in that ‘Boomer’ era nevertheless developed a high degree of insecurity. To understand why these Boomers as a cohort, not necessarily as individuals, would subsequently show so little concern for their own posterity, consider the environment in which they were raised. It was the height of the Cold War, an era in which nihilism was encouraged by the perceived threat of nuclear annihilation. This existential worry was compounded by other doomsayers who were proclaiming the mantra of global starvation. An entire generation was being bombarded with a bleak Malthusian message of overpopulation and resource depletion. Of course that whole narrative was a deceptive charade as many economists and demographers now admit, noting that the West in particular is now facing catastrophic population collapse.

But psychologically the official propaganda succeeded in inducing a negative ‘culture of death’ mentality where suicide, abortion, and euthanasia were framed not as moral evils but as social panaceas. Thus an entire generation was gaslighted into believing, contrary to what previous cultures has long held, that growth and life itself were something threatening and dangerous while sterility and ‘managed decline’ were the new means to mankind’s deliverance. White had become black, and black was now white. This was just one area in which Boomers became the first generation in perhaps the entirety of human history to be enmeshed in a web of psychological manipulation basically aimed at uprooting centuries of positive Western Christian values.

Additionally, we Boomers were overwhelmed with anxiety about external threats like Communist tanks and missiles, even as we were quietly being indoctrinated in a competitive brand of ‘friendly’ socialism by an elite education industrial complex. Various corporate and ‘democratic’ institutions likewise pursued their own narrow interests and agendas which consumed an ever larger percentage of the GDP, while not particularly attuned to the greater public good: the military industrial complex, a medical industrial complex, an entertainment industrial complex which all plugged their messaging into an information industrial complex functioning as the public relations arm of the burgeoning corporate/government apparatus. Without their knowledge or consent, Boomers had become the guinea pigs in a vast, industrial scaled social engineering experiment.

That generation was targeted in three basic areas which have produced profound social effects ever since, namely Education, Religion, and Entertainment (whose core ingredient is arguably Music). It was the capture of the public education establishment by social psychologists which transformed education in the first half of the 20th century. The most notable of these new education gurus was probably John Dewey whose progressive education agenda shifted the classroom focus from learning to social conditioning. Dewey’s goal was not to train students in the arts of debate, critical thinking, or independent thought but to mold malleable, socialized ‘consensus seekers’ who would effortlessly conform to the ideas and opinions of the larger group. Dewey writes, “Education consists in the ability to use one’s powers in a social direction… the mere absorbing of facts and truths tends very naturally to pass into selfishness.” Furthermore he adds, “It is one of the great mistakes of education to make reading and writing constitute the bulk of the school work the first two years… (the) mind cannot be regarded as an individual, monopolistic possession but represents the outworkings of the endeavor and thought of humanity.”

Dewey’s progressive education agenda shifted the classroom focus from learning to social conditioning, and the results were staggering. Literacy nosedived. Functional illiteracy among American children hovered around 2% in 1910. By 1980, despite mandatory universal education, the Department of Education estimated there were 24 million functional illiterates in this country! Yet John Dewey would proudly write, “I believe therefore, that the true center of correlation on the school subjects is not science, nor literature, nor history, nor geography, but the child’s social activities.” The first generation to be largely immersed in this revolutionary mode of education happened to be the Boomers. Not surprisingly as adults they proved to be more concerned with a ‘group consensus’ than with principled moral reasoning on many important issues.

But it was also their attitudes towards religion which shifted dramatically as they approached adulthood. Flooding into the public universities, the Boomers increasingly described themselves as ‘spiritual’ though not necessarily ‘religious,’ walking away from organized religion in droves. But that was a meaningless distinction since every person is ‘spiritual’ by virtue of his very nature. We can’t help being spiritual because we are made up of a body and a soul. But religion involves much more than simply pondering one’s existence or philosophizing about God. Religion is the communal act of worshiping divinity. It requires the active, organized participation in some kind of communal ritual worship of the deity. It is more than an act of internal reflection. Its proper object is God himself and religion becomes the means of our fulfilling this sacred duty to worship one’s Creator. Even though millions of Boomers turned up their noses at ‘organized religion,’ the reality is that there is no such alternative as ‘unorganized religion’ because the very term ‘religion’ implies and demands an organized structure. One may certainly have religious feelings out on a nature hike, but one cannot fulfill the true demands of religion in a solitary state. “Where two or more are gathered in my name, there I am among them.”

Again it was the divorcing of religion from education by an increasingly agnostic and atheist educational establishment that precipitated a crisis of religious indifference among the Boomer class. Faith was relegated to the private sphere on the pretext that it might offend the sensibilities of nonbelievers, the ironic twist being that it was religion that first planted and watered the seeds of mass popular education in the West. In the end it became a case of the child expelling its own parent from the halls of academia. Education, the natural child of religion, was systematically weaponized against religion. The more degrees a typical Boomer earned the less likely was he to persevere in any formal religious practice.

The third area in which the Boomer generation was targeted and most effectively propagandized was that of mass entertainment in general and music more specifically. Music speaks directly to the soul and thereby has an even greater impact than words or ideas. Plato and Aristotle both taught that the influence of music, for the good or the bad, on character was enormous. According to Plato, the revolutionary spirit always makes its first appearance in innovations on established musical form. And if ever there was a revolution in music one could never deny that post-war America of the 1950s and 60s witnessed the most tempestuous musical revolution ever. Although tamely prefaced by the 1920s Jazz age, jazz was violently eclipsed by Rock ‘n’ Roll which became the rocket fuel which propelled the sexual revolution to un-imagined heights. Rock is a kind of psychic-emotive cocaine, a gyrating ‘audio pornography’ expressly designed to bypass any natural reason filters and instead appealing directly to one’s base libido, “the expression of elemental passion” so said Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger.

Peter Kwasniewski noted “that, terminologically, ‘rock ‘n’ roll’ and ‘jazz’ were both euphemisms for sexual intercourse, or more accurately in their historical context, fornication.” He later observes, “Rock represents, at any rate, the total dissociation of the concupiscible appetite from the rule of reason; the subordination of reason and will to concupiscence or the desire for sense-pleasure.” It is no mere coincidence that this generational revolution in music accompanied the various other social revolutions of that era, invariably branded as some sort of ‘liberation,’ i.e., ‘women’s liberation,’ ‘sexual liberation,’ including ‘gay and lesbian liberation.’

But such ‘liberation’ actually leads one into the deep trap of being lashed to one’s lower passions by subverting the free will. It’s a bait and switch trap into which a huge number of Boomers were lured by those institutional pied pipers of post-war progressivism. The apparently innocent Norman Rockwell world of the Boomer’s youth had morphed into a carnival-like maze of mirrors where reality is easily confused with the illusion. In that Rock ‘n’ Roll induced state countless Boomers abandoned the true religion of their youth for PhDs and the Grateful Dead. In its place they revived a materialistic paganism, handed on to their unfortunate children.

One cannot really evaluate any generation objectively until they have become elderly. The Boomers have now reached that milestone. I think overall theirs is a generation not so much to be despised as to be pitied for having placed too much faith in those institutions which more often deceived than enlightened. Despite all their youthful mistrust of the ‘establishment,’ when the time came they blithely drank the Kool-Aid offered them with little resistance. Still, with humility it is possible to learn from one’s earlier mistakes. Religion may have lost its luster in our debauched society but it still offers a much better alternative to the despair which plagues much of today’s world. And the wonderful thing about God is that it’s never too late to turn back to Him in faith because He is always searching for the return of His prodigal children.

Francis J. Pierson +a.m.d.g.