JCC

The Boomers inherited a civilization built on centuries of collective sacrifice, with strong families, churches, traditions, and communities. But they came of age during a cultural revolution that increasingly taught them two things: personal gratification should take precedence over inherited obligations, and dismantling those obligations was progress toward a better world. In one direction, Edward Bernays helped lay the foundations of modern consumer culture by exploiting psychological desires, selling products as symbols of status, independence, and self-expression. We all know his famous 1929 campaign marketed cigarettes to women as "torches of freedom," that associated consumption with emancipation. The product itself was almost incidental to the point. What was important was convincing people that satisfying a manufactured desire meant a liberation from traditional norms. So, by the time the Boomers reached adulthood, advertising, television, and mass consumption had made personal gratification and self-expression central to American life, and it was everywhere. From another direction came whats loosely called Western Marxism, the Frankfurt School, the New Left, and later critical theories that, ensemble, interpreted Western institutions through the framework of oppression and domination. So all those family structures, and religion, and traditional morality, and education, and established hierarchies etc., all became coded as oppressive and in the way of real progress. The whole frame demoralized people to consider that overcoming these institutions was the way toward emancipation and a higher level of a complete way of life for everyone. Let’s run through the greatest hits. Antonio Gramsci explained how churches, schools, and other institutions maintained cultural hegemony. Theodor Adorno and his colleagues developed the F-scale in The Authoritarian Personality (1950), identifying rigid conventionalism, submission to authority, and sexual moralism as markers of authoritarian tendencies. Herbert Marcuse combined Freud and Marx in Eros and Civilization (1955), arguing that civilization could free itself from unnecessary repression and organize life around greater pleasure and erotic freedom. Apparently, we were going to get high and screw our way into utopia. Wilhelm Reich had pushed the sexual angle even further, linking sexual repression to authoritarian obedience and treating sexual liberation as a revolutionary force. Second-wave feminism brought these critiques of the West into marriage, and motherhood, and the family itself. Friedan critiqued the ideal of domestic fulfillment in The Feminine Mystique (1963). Kate Millett's Sexual Politics (1970) reframed relations between men and women through, you guessed it, political domination. Shulamith Firestone's The Dialectic of Sex (1970) did the same recipe here, identifying the biological family as a foundation of sexual inequality and calling for its revolutionary transformation. All of that reframing of the West as oppression didn't stop there. Nope. It of course extended to education, history, and Western cultural authority. Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970 in English) promoted critical consciousness as a means of identifying and transforming oppressive social structures. And Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth (1961), endorsed by Jean-Paul Sartre, called for revolutionary liberation from colonial domination. Post colonialism is a thing too, and we'll have to cover Edward Said's Orientalism (1978) which, oh you guessed it, challenged Western representations of other societies as instruments of imperial power. So yeah, some of these thinkers had different goals, and many opposed consumer capitalism. But they're all linked in how their ideas contributed to a broader cultural shift that reframed inherited Western institutions as bad and presented liberation from traditional authority as progress. So, consumer culture encouraged people to put their desires first, while radical critical consciousness and social criticism offered all the moral justifications anyone needed to be demoralized and reject any inherited obligations they had to future generations. One made tradition inconvenient. The result was that the Boomers had all the reasons they needed to pursue their own comfort while believing that abandoning traditional obligations was progress for society. Consider the disappearing family reunions, estranged siblings, and grandparents detached from their grandchildren. Nobody has to deliberately destroy the extended family. Enough people simply stop feeling responsible for maintaining it.