In Part III of my series on Narcissism, Disintegration, Suicidality & the Fall of the West I argued that the confluence of material abundance and the decrease in childhood mortality post-WWII led to smaller families in which each individual child was imbued with enhanced parental emotional investment. In effect, the baby boomer generation were raised under conditions that tended to accentuate narcissistic character traits. The result is that the baby boomers are the most narcissistically involved generation in our history:
[Prior to the modern era] Most children were not the center of their parent's universe in their earliest years, usually having to share their parents attention with multiple siblings; they had to learn to share at an early age. Furthermore, children who enter a world in which deprivation and loss is an all too real threat have minimal opportunity to develop over-abundant narcissistic expectations; no parent could afford too much of an emotional investment in a single child when the risk of losing children approached 50% before age 5:
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After World War II, with the widespread use of antibiotics and vaccines, child mortality declined to <2%. The baby boomer generation became the first generation in the history of man which was born into a world in which the vast majority could be confidently expected to reach adulthood. After the horrendous blood letting of WWII, newly returned GI's and the women who had been left behind formed families at record paces, moved to the suburbs, and created a now (retrospectively) idealized life style which included ever increasing availability of material goods and an ever decreasing risk of the natural ills that man had always been subject to. Because there was less need to have many children in order to support one's old age (Social Security had an important part in this, as did the movement off the farms) and the expectation was that all the children would survive and thrive, the parents were able to make a much greater investment, emotionally and financially, in their fewer children. Children with few siblings were much more likely to remain the center of their parents universe for extended periods of time. Further, the natural inclination of all parents who love their children to protect them from the vicissitudes of life lead to parents raising children who had very little first hand experience of deprivation or disappointment. The extended time and the increased intensity of the child's position as center of the universe led to many baby boomers developing narcissistic pathology.
History is now repeating itself: (Free registration required)
China’s little emperors demand their due
China’s youth can get a bad press. In most accounts, they are the “Little Emperors” or the “Me Generation”, the spoilt and apolitical offspring of one-child families who are interested in fast cars, video games and designer goods but little else. At the main Shanghai store of Louis Vuitton there is a queue to get in at weekends – young women wait patiently in the rope line, as if they were trying to get into the hottest new LA club.
Yet the Me Generation is beginning to show its teeth. Simmering discontent about soaring house prices and the recent wave of strikes at car plants and other factoriesboth speak of the rising and sometimes frustrated expectations of younger Chinese, who want more from their lives than their parents could dream of. It is a phenomenon that could have all sorts of consequences for China’s future.
There are lots of good explanations for the strikes of the past two months, including low pay and a demographic shift that is reducing the number of young people entering the workforce. But there is also a generational shift at play. Chinese often talk about their capacity to chi ku, or “eat bitterness”, which helps explain their resilience amid the chaos and privations of the past century. But the generation born in the 1980s and 1990s has grown up among much wider prosperity, even in poor parts of the countryside.
Narcissists do not "eat bitterness" or easily sacrifice for the next generation. Read the whole thing.
The implications of this article are many and fascinating. Currently fashionable thinking has it that China will inevitably become a rival of the United States in the international arena. Some of their behavior, as interpreted by those who we pay to be paranoid, suggests that they are going to be military rivals. Support for this point of view include their accelerating military modernization and exponential increases in their defense budget (which is still dwarfed by the US defense budget) and the demographic picture of a large highly nationalistic country with a large surplus of males. One school of thought has it that any country with a surplus of males who have no acceptable avenue by which to gain status and mates is a country that will be prone to war-like behavior. This was probably true at one time and may still be true in some places, but large scale wars involving modern high tech armies are unlikely to occur ever again, thanks to the development of nuclear weapons making such affairs an existential risk for the contenders.
[Please note that our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been relatively small scale affairs if measured by the number of men under arms and the casualty counts; they are counterinsurgencies as opposed to wars between armies. In terms of costs, there is a complicated relationship between the cost of war and the number of casualties. The relationship is not linear but costs tend to increase with a commensurate decrease in casualties; it is expensive to wage war without costing too many lives.]
Narcissists do not go to war unless they either feel personally threatened or are convinced they can easily win without too much pain. Our invasion of Iraq was sold in exactly those terms and one of the reasons it became such a focus of opposition by the Democrats is that, in reality, it failed on both counts.
China will soon be the home to many millions of grown-up "Little Emperors" who will be loathe to risk their own well being in wars that are increasingly recognized as unceccesary and risky. This does not mean they will not be our rivals and that occasionally our interests will not clash, sometimes via proxies. However, it does mean that with a moderately intelligent policy toward China, in which we do not rise to the bait whenever it is dangled in front of us while preserving a clear sense of our own interests, conflict between the United States and China is much less likely than a long term mutually beneficial economic integration. China will almost inevitably become more free and more transparent, since their economic well being will depend upon it, and we will find ourselves with a chance to establish an evolving global rule set that benefits all those who accept the membership rules of the modern world.
In Demographics & Narcissism I opened my discussion with two contrasting quotes that defined and bracketed the evolution of the 1960's:
And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you - ask what you can do for your country.
My fellow citizens of the world: ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man.
Steven won't give his arm
to no gold star mother's farm;
War's good business so give your son
and I'd rather have my country die for me."Rejoyce" from After Bathing at Baxters Jefferson Airplane, 1967
Time will tell but just as American youth became unwilling to "ask what you can do for your country" I suspect the Narcissistic "Little Emperor" generation in China will find itself unwilling to "give his arm to no gold star mother's farm."
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