Generational Agitation

Compounding the Competency Crisis

The Competency Crisis, as described by Harold Robertson in Palladium Magazine, is the coming inability to maintain complex systems ranging from airliners to public utilities like that of our water and sewage systems. Robertson highlights how with the current federal and corporate push for ESG, Diversity, and proscribing competent White workers from workplace advancement or employment over the less qualified, our society is heading for a disaster that is happening right before our eyes.

One of the points he also addresses is the issue of the young.

As older men with tacit knowledge either retire or are pushed out, the burden of maintaining America’s complex systems will fall on the young. Lower-performing young men angry at the toxic mix of affirmative action (hurting their chances of admission to a “good school”) and credentialism (limiting the “good jobs” to graduates of “good schools”) are turning their backs on college and white-collar work altogether. 

America’s complex systems will fall on the young to take care of and manage with an increased likelihood of failure, especially as America’s youth today are the most diverse, and are also the least connected to what came before. Generational knowledge isn’t being passed down. A son does not take up his father’s trade, and generational agitation and resentment helps further the divide between a grandfather’s skillset and his grandson’s.

There is a lot of what can be called “Boomer Hate” on both the political left and right. Some of it is most assuredly justified, as they had led themselves into the delusions of egalitarianism and hippiedom that had fundamentally changed America. However, one can’t help but look at their lifestyles, their elderly grip on power, and one can understand that the quality of life that came with their Post War upbringing and feel somewhat indignant that such a high trust and functional society doesn’t exist at all today.

To be fair there is a lot of “Young New Thing Bad” memes for boomers too.

This Boomer Hate, both astroturfed and organic comes with a nasty little feature: a desire and a deliberate pushing away from our relationships and connections to our elders. How many us make an effort to understand what life was before our time, or to see what our grandparents and fathers did as a trade or employment? My grandfather worked in manufacturing, was a traveling repair man on hire for numerous companies ranging from Ford to Xerox, instructing others on how to properly maintain their equipment. Even now into his mid-eighties, my father still calls him when having trouble with a car or appliance problem.

One of the major shifts that has come with a growing divorce from tradition and family has been the agitation between the generations. No longer are we the ThirtySomething’s that once dominated 1980s airwaves, nor are we the Alex P. Keaton’s of the world, let alone the grunge and matrix-obsessed kids of the 1990s. Technology, and the decreased standards of our familial relations, has led to the kids of the 2020s seeing their world entirely through the digital lenses of their phone screens. Numerous reaction videos to classical music or films made fifty years ago indicate there is no real living tradition for most people with respects to what came before.

One needs to only look at the growth of fatherlessness across all racial groups in America in the last sixty years, the fall of religion, and wonder why there is so much spite and envy towards the boomers, a word that has transcended its original generational signifier to someone who just isn’t with “the times.” (For example I’ve been called a Boomer for not being on TikTok and if that’s the way it works I’m #TeamBoomer.) This of course doesn’t address the one critique of boomers that is well-deserving, which is the political presuppositions that aided in getting us to where we are now.

These things compound the crisis of our rapidly fracturing polity and our rapidly fracturing infrastructure. The constant aversion to previous generations, save for some aesthetics, leaves the future in the hands of those clueless and entitled. There is a tweet that highlights this perfectly:

We are so unlearned in comparison to our peers of previous generations. We no longer have access to a classical education, and our national mythos is reduced to glib memes from foreigners who just moved here, talking about General Sherman and the destruction of the South. Just as our history has been destroyed from generational agitation and immigration, so have our skills to manage everything from web services to pipes.

Robertson’s dire predictions of the competency crisis are sure to come as we witness it everywhere from Jackson, Mississippi to Washington D.C. But for those of us with intact families or a desire to learn what came before us, we cannot have this generational agitation where we look at our elders or even our youth with outright disdain. We must be willing to be humble ourselves and ask our father and grandfathers what skills they have and what they can pass down. With time, as the complex systems around us fail, knowing programmers, welders, masons, and mechanics will be all the more important.

Losing out on the opportunity to learn a family trade or tradition opens a potentiality that could lead to greater losses in your immediate future. Hatred for the past in the midst of our decline leaves one vulnerable to the spirit of the age. So if the opportunity arises, why not ask a boomer what he might able to teach you before he passes on.