Incisive as ever, Dr. Scarmoge! And lest we forget – in the “gifts that keep on giving” category – 2020 was a banner year for the biggest publicly known imposters…
Charles Hugh Smith’s article hints at something I’ve noticed: big generational differences in the degree to which people, on average, can see the imposter-ism:
I’m not sure what’s more remarkable: the depths of scammer perversity or the fact that some people can still be conned by claims of authority. . . . Most are seniors, of course, as the elderly still retain an easy-to-scam trust in institutions and officialdom as a holdover from an era before trust was unraveled by wholesale self-serving deception. [bold in original omitted, italics added]
I’m continually struck by the degree to which Americans from the Baby Boom generation tend to place blind faith in authority and in our rotten, imposter-infested institutions. This extends, quite notably, to trust in medical authorities.
Anybody else noticed generational differences in the way people have responded to the imposter-ism and corruption in Western society in recent years?
… it might be attributable to the fact that “we” were raised by parents and grandparents who transmitted to us the faith and trust that they had in (forgive the following non-pcness) men and institutions. Any information to the contrary was hard to come by during that time (e.g. see many examples in Charles Higham’s Trading with the Enemy, reading parts of this book will make you sick to your stomach when you realize that at the same time as it was “business as usual” American blood and treasure were being expended, along these lines see General Smedley Butler’s War Is a Racket).
Specifically, Prescott Bush was not prosecuted under the Trading with the Enemies Act because it was thought that severe damage to American morale would occur if the main supporter of the USO was found guilty of doing so. His company’s assets were seized in 1942 … “documents reveal that the firm he worked for, Brown Brothers Harriman (BBH), acted as a US base for the German industrialist, Fritz Thyssen, who helped finance Hitler in the 1930s …”. All of PB’s shenanigans have gone down the memory hole … as of June 2013 … for an example of this see USO to Dedicate the USO Warrior and Family Center at Bethesda in Honor of Prescott S. Bush
My (career military) father’s experience in Vietnam left him quite disillusioned. His advice to me was to love your country but don’t believe anything the government tells you.
In my case, I mostly absorbed a mistrust in authority, especially political authority, from my family and upbringing. Three out of four grandparents were from southern Italy or Eastern Europe – places not exactly renowned for traditions of honest, enlightened politics… That’s probably why I’ve always admired how the U.S. Founding Fathers (or should that be “Founding Non-Birthing Persons”?) managed somehow to come up with a constitution that contained checks on institutional power and how ordinary Americans actually took that constitution seriously, at least in the past.