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Millennials can be forgiven for thinking it’s never gonna happen, but even the Baby Boomers are going to die eventually. Presumably. Although they seem determined not to. And with them will go any trace of memory of World War II.

Indeed, what we are seeing, on a mass scale, is an oddly unsettling spread of amnesia about World War II. People are forgetting that Nazis were neither fun nor successful, that fascism was no barrel of economic laughs. Forgetting that the US once saved the world and its own tottering, oligarchic fortunes at the same time. Forgetting about democracy and human rights and the role of the UN. Forgetting that genocide is not a good idea, even if you really want to engage in it. Forgetting that World Wars don’t work out all that well for the people who start them.

And even as we collectively slowly forget, boomers and Xers try to bring back their favorite bits of the post-World War II era. The manufacturing, or the middle class, taxation rates high enough to pay your national debt, or US dominance, or the New Deal, or democracy, NATO, or what have you.

Ah well, post-World War II era, we knew you well.

But see, the Millennials didn’t know you at all. Because Millennials came of age in the sucky 21st century. And the Millennials outnumber the Boomers now. The times they are a’changing.

Millennials have not lived during times without computers. They’ve grown up with the Internet, mobile phones, and social media. They’ve grown up with a surfeit of intangibility in their lives. Ephemera. Things that don’t last. Texts. Emails. Posts. Bits. Pieces. Moments.

Manufacturing jobs in the US were going away before Millennials were even born.

The Reagan Revolution got rid of those jobs, slowly but surely. They’ve never known the manufacturing economy Trump seems to long for. They know more about IT (information technology) than assembly lines. In fact, they may know more about IT than about anything else.

Millennials have been bits and bytes and pieces of data for voracious consumption by data brokers and advertisers and big tech for as long as they can remember. Some of them pretentiously call themselves things like ‘digital natives.’ Others have been dubbed, not incorrectly, ‘knowledge workers.’

They know very little about heavy industry and a lot about creators and ‘influencers.’ They’re hard workers and hustlers but they don’t look at work the way the Trump generation and Republicans look at it.

The Republican view seems to be that everyone should WORK! The purpose of life is WORK! No benefits if you don’t WORK! No health care, no public assistance, no safety net, no nothing nada zilch zippo zero if you don’t WORK! For a CAPITALIST. Without a union. So that you can be exploited. And make money for Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg. You exist to make others really really really rich.

And so the Trump administration is hanging on to that idea, clinging to it like a barnacle. And yet – the centuries of defining yourself by that kind of work – ain’t coming back.

Millennials and later generations don’t have that idea. They have ideas about being their own bosses, creating their own things, defining their own lives. As far as they are concerned, Elon, Jeff, and Mark have done jack shit for them. The super rich been around for long enough that whatever innovations they may have introduced way back when are not impressive anymore. Who cares – not grateful.

The old ideas of working aren’t going to work any more.

Those ideas may well become obsolete. No reason why they shouldn’t. Current ideas about work didn’t exist before the Industrial Revolution, no reason why ideas shouldn’t change during an information revolution.

Here’s what’s probably coming up for the Millennials – and they know it:

Climate change. Migration. Declining birth rates and population reduction. Shift in global power from the ‘West’ (Europe) to the ‘East’ (Asia). Robots, AI, and god knows what other extreme technologies, collapse of the existing social and economic order.

The post-World War II US-led world order is not coming back. Which means changes, which means disorder, which means… nostalgia.

Industrialization was very very good for the industrialized nations.

And then the industrialized nations began, subtly, to decline. They started ever so discreetly to experience negative birth rates. And then, ever so not the least bit discreetly, to howl like enraged monkeys when their population numbers began to be rescued by folks from the not-so-industrialized nations. It’s been like listening to the Wicked Witch of the West scream in the Wizard of Oz movie “I’M MELTING!”

In some ways, the decline of the West, including apparently, its ideals, has been pathetic. It’s been sad to see the once-proud leader of the world whine and cry like a big orange baby. But not surprising. Whining and crying are what people do during times of loss, whether we’re the good, the bad, or the merely bewildered.

The technological revolutions that began in the 1990s hid a number of key facts about the then industrialized economies. The economies weren’t really growing like ‘normal’ after the Reagan/Thatcher revolutions. Instead, technology took off and rapid innovation brought continuous product improvements along with price decreases.

Millennials have actually never experienced a capitalist economy of the sort the notorious Milton Friedman based his ideas on.

Instead, wages stagnated and the rich got richer at the expense of workers, but standards of living increased due to technological advancements. Globalization also kept prices down even as it depressed wages. Technology and globalism were saving capitalism’s butt. Maybe they still will. There may be a couple of decades of steam left in the old industrialization notions.

But probably not. Ideas like a universal basic income are being floated because the time is coming for these types of ideas. For decoupling (so to speak) notions of human worth from notions of providing labor to capitalists. People can and will do other things. Technology can provide the labor.

The notions of work being rewarded commensurate with its value have already been decoupled from wage rates. Why not go all the way?

Things that were ‘normal’ in 1980 aren’t normal anymore. The 80s aren’t coming back any more than the 30s or the 50s or the 70s are.

I can’t blame anyone for being afraid of what’s ahead. Not the Boomers, the Xers, the Millennials or the generations after that. We’ve seen enough go wrong in the past 25 years to be justifiably apprehensive.

Let’s hope we have the moral fortitude to get and stay pretty fed up with authoritarianism, dictators, and fascism so that we don’t have to re-learn the lessons of history. Fingers crossed.

Tags: society