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Comment by CPLX | Hacker News Reader

An interesting revelation I had was realizing that culturally speaking all Boomers were conservative, they just picked different things to be conservative about.

Maybe that’s just an attribute of old people maybe not, I haven’t seen enough generations up close to have an opinion yet. We’ll see how my generation (Gen X) does I guess.

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Wanting to preserve what you have, even at the expense of others, is not limited to people born within certain timeframes.

By contrast, any system that relies on benefiting others at the expense of the self as a core foundation seems doomed to instability, by human nature itself. Requiring a class of expendable people, expected to deprive themselves for the benefit of the group, the utilitarian price to pay for the needs of the many.

It’s immoral and it’s just plain flawed design.

It's funny hearing the generation of the civil rights movement, free love, recreational drug use, and anti-war protests, to name just a few of their cultural achievements, described as "conservative."

Well, that same generation as a whole is probably accurately described as conservative now! After all, it's well-known that people become more conservative as they age.

That generation was a lot more divided into lefties and righties just like other generations, and those divides have largely remained (my dad as a lifelong liberal didn't become a conservative before he died at 70, his brother was a conservative, but was his entire life). However, the younger generations are currently less polarized (mostly lefties), which is why they come off as being more left than aging baby boomers.

Every generation is.

Note that liberal and conservative are not actually opposites. While are media often pretends they are, you can be both in different areas. People love to claim to be whatever makes them fit in.

Yesterday's liberals are today's conservatives.

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