The Baby Boomer generation is animated by a mythic worldview in which progress necessitates the tearing down of all boundaries, hierarchies, systems of belief, restraints, and controls upon the ultimate good of self-expression.

“The empires of the future are the empires of the mind.’”

–Winston Churchill

“A dream you dream alone is only a dream. A dream you dream together is reality.”

–Yoko Ono

Between 1945 and 2024, the rulers of Britain, the USA, and the West more broadly, were arrested by a set of moral visions—a kind of collective dream—which came to dominate all their thoughts and actions. These visions were also inculcated in the minds of the people over whom they ruled by robust mass propaganda methods to create a moral unity between the elites and the governed. 

This unity, which had persisted from the end of World War II, had begun to break down by 2016. However, at the time of writing, which is marked by political polarization, both sides continue to cling on to some remnant of the old moral visions. 

I will call this collective mindset the Boomer Truth Regime because its lifespan coincides with that of the Baby Boomer generation. 

Myth is truer than history, or at least it matters more. The stories people tell about themselves, how they view themselves, and how they justify their own actions to themselves have a greater impact on how people regulate their behavior than whatever can be offered by the raw facts. Despite the protestations of historians, it is Shakespeare’s Richard III who is remembered and not the real man, just as it is Winston Churchill’s version of World War II that is remembered and not what actually happened. A myth is deeper than mere narrative, it is something that prefigures discourse and operates on a level “underneath the mind.”  

In every society, in every epoch, a hegemonic mode of thought will be all-pervasive such that its non-adherents will be branded as heretics, pariahs, or madmen. This is something stronger than mere ideology or worldview; it is rather an almost hermetically sealed system of a priori assumptions and values that govern how men and women relate to the world around them and to their history and culture. This we call a “truth regime.” The phrase was coined by the French philosopher Michel Foucault in 1976:

Each society has its regime of truth, its “general politics” of truth—that is, the types of discourse it accepts and makes function as true; the mechanisms and instances that enable one to distinguish true and false statements; the means by which each is sanctioned; the techniques and procedures accorded value in the acquisition of truth; the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true. 

A truth regime prefigures and conditions not only what is thinkable but also, and perhaps more pivotally, what is unthinkable. 

The Italian esotericist Julius Evola suggested that studying the myths as opposed to the raw historical facts of a given people will reveal some essential aspect of them. In Revolt Against the Modern World, he wrote:  

What matters in history are all the mythological elements it has to offer, or all the myths that enter into its web, as integrations of the “meaning” of history itself. Not only the Rome of legends speaks clearer words than the historical Rome, but even the sagas of Charlemagne reveal more about the meaning of the king of the Franks than the positive chronicles and documents of that time.

Thus, for example, King Arthur more properly embodies chivalric ideals than any historical medieval king. There is the real historical Winston Churchill and the myth of Churchill; there is the real historical Adolf Hitler and the myth of Hitler, and so on. Truth regimes can be short or persist for very long periods. The truth regime of the Soviet Union lasted less than 70 years, while what the philosopher Arthur O. Lovejoy called the Great Chain of Being “carried on for many centuries by many great and lesser minds” and “constitutes one of the most grandiose enterprises of the human intellect.” For the purposes of analyzing the Boomer Truth Regime, the myths are more important than the real historical facts.

My aim is not to refute the myths of the Boomer Truth Regime because, for the purposes of this analysis, the actual truth of this or that aspect of it does not matter. The nature of myth is such that it is unfalsifiable insomuch as it is less a statement about the world but rather a moral imperative to act in the world. Georges Sorel put it well when he said:

Myths are not descriptions of things, but expressions of a determination to act…. A myth cannot be refuted, since it is, at bottom, identical with the convictions of a group, being the expression of these convictions in the language of movement; and it is, in consequence, unanalyzable into parts which could be placed on the plane of historical descriptions.

In his Substack newsletter, Imperium Press publisher Michael Maxwell does a good job of teasing out the full implications of what Sorel is saying:

A myth is not merely a description. It may involve description; it may appear to be composed of propositions; it may tell you about a state of affairs in the world—but so does a scientific theory or a court transcript. Those are not myths—a myth is much more than a description. Sorel tells us that a myth is an “expression of a determination to act.” A myth expresses a determination, which is always aimed at a goal or purpose. And a goal or purpose presupposes a will. When you act wilfully, you are aiming at something. And this aiming, willing, purposive action embodies a command.… And like a command—which can neither be true nor false—the myth cannot be refuted. 

The myth of the Great Chain of Being was a command, in the end, to obey the authority of the king. The myth of communism was a command to strive to bring about the fulfillment of Karl Marx’s prophecy. I will discuss presently what the myth of the Boomer Truth Regime commands. 

The point is, however, that any rational presentation of “the facts” will do nothing to shake any true believer out of their convictions since their belief is both nonrational and future-oriented. One who believes totally in the myth of King Arthur, for example, will not be swayed by evidence from burial sites that he did not exist, because the practical application of the belief is a moral imperative on how to act towards a particular goal in the here and now, in this case, a fulfillment of chivalric ideals. 

Ideals, by their nature, are seldom, if ever, reached. “The fact that the myth has not been fulfilled is, in fact, its strength, because a command once fulfilled … no longer has any force,” Maxwell goes on to write. “The incomplete task—better still, the impossibility of the task—does not dissuade the true believer, but positively energizes him.” 

The primacy of mythic belief is especially apparent during the period in the West’s history since 1945, which has been marked by mass media. Viewed from the outside, it looks like an era of mass hypnosis. This was recognized by Edward Bernays as early as the 1920s in his classic book Propaganda (1928), and later by Jacques Ellul in a book of the same title in 1965. However, the classic statement of the near-permanently bedazzled Western mind was in the French Marxist Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle (1967). 

Debord’s “spectacle” is not a collection of images; it is a social relation between people that is mediated by images. The spectacle cannot be understood as a mere visual deception produced by mass-media technologies. It is a world­view that has actually been materialized, a view of a world that has become objective.

Understood in its totality, the spectacle is both the result and the goal of the dominant mode of production. It is not a mere decoration added to the real world. It is the very heart of this real society’s unreality. In all of its particular manifestations—news, propaganda, advertising, entertainment—the spectacle represents the dominant model of life. It is the omnipresent affirmation of the choices that have already been made in the sphere of production and in the consumption implied by that production. 

In both form and content, the spectacle serves as a total justification of the conditions and goals of the existing system. The spectacle also represents the constant presence of this justification since it monopolizes the majority of the time spent outside the production process. 

In 1970, in his celebrated essay, “Ideology and the Ideological State Apparatuses,” the French Marxist Louis Althusser drew out the full implications of the spectacle by showing the process by which these imagined and fundamentally ideological relationships between individuals and material reality are not only made concrete (i.e. given a material reality of their own) but also come to be so all-pervasive that they function as self-evident truths, “common sense,” and unquestioned assumptions.

The Boomer Truth Regime can be seen, in one sense, as the total supplanting of older pre-war truth regimes. The intelligentsia of the postwar nongoverning elite, which is to say the “operating brain” of the ruling class, internalized the insights of Bernays, Ellul, Debord, Althusser, and Foucault and utilized them to create a new truth regime. 

This was not done in the service of a new Marxist state as Debord or Althusser might have hoped for, but rather—to stick with the Marxist lexicon—by Capital in its struggle against Labor. The European and American (overwhelmingly white and male) labor force had dreamed of workers’ rights and higher pay, which they received for a very brief period in the 1950s and 1960s. As British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan declared in July 1957, they “never had it so good.” 

The ruling class responded by promoting feminism, civil rights, and mass immigration—all of which were fully instituted by 1965—in a successful bid to crush the political power of the predominantly white and male labor force. The defeated were then pacified and (in some cases literally) drugged by a cocktail of cheap food, mass entertainment, pornography, and other such “spectacles.”

The story of World War I was the bourgeoisies final defeat of the old aristocracy, together with its old outmoded, discredited, mocked, and despised chivalric values. The
story of World War II was the final defeat of Labor by Capital. The genius of the Boomer Truth Regime is in its ability to depict all this obviously top-down set of processes as being natural, bottom-up, representative of “the will of the people,” for liberty, and against oppression.

In essence, the Boomer Truth Regime is a dualistic moral system, the two sides of which can be symbolized by two paradigmatic Englishmen who represent its negative and positive aspects: Winston Churchill and John Lennon.

Churchill is the negative side, defined simply as the Not-Hitler and the outcome of World War II. This is a belligerent anti-fascism that pledges to “NEVER SURRENDER” against the ultimate evil of fascism, no matter the material costs.

Lennon is the positive side, represented by the countercultural revolution of the 1960s, and is defined as a breaking down of all old boundaries, hierarchies, systems of belief, restraints, and controls upon the ultimate good of individual self-expression. It is expressed fully in his famous song “Imagine,” in which he wishes for an end to countries, organized religions, and the distinctions between all people. Another song by Lennon, “God,” written in the same year, teases out the full implications of this worldview:

I don’t believe in magic

I don’t believe in I-Ching

I don’t believe in Bible

I don’t believe in Tarot

I don’t believe in Hitler

I don’t believe in Jesus

I don’t believe in Kennedy

I don’t believe in Buddha

I don’t believe in Mantra

I don’t believe in Gita

I don’t believe in Yoga

I don’t believe in Kings

I don’t believe in Elvis

I don’t believe in Zimmerman

I don’t believe in Beatles

I just believe in me

Yoko and me

That’s reality 

This is the ultimate positive statement of Boomer Truth by Lennon. Anything that would seek to constrain this vision always becomes “fascism,” the boundaries of which are policed by the Always-Churchill, Not-Hitler side of the ledger. In this way, every political leader since Churchill is a rearticulation of Churchill re-fighting Hitler. Every enemy of the West—Joseph Stalin, Ruhollah Khomeini, Slobodan Milošević, Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden, Muammar Gaddafi, Bashar al-Assad, and Vladimir Putin—is Hitler reborn.

Every political leader since Churchill is a rearticulation of Churchill re-fighting Hitler. Every enemy of the West—Joseph Stalin, Ruhollah Khomeini, Slobodan Milošević, Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden, Muammar Gaddafi, Bashar al-Assad, and Vladimir Putin—is Hitler reborn.

By the same token, every hero of the West—Mahatma Gandhi, Albert Einstein, Simone de Beauvoir, Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela, Steve Jobs, Madonna, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Barack Obama, and so on—are reborn, whatever the actual facts of their lives or their real beliefs, to represent aspects of John Lennon’s ultimate vision of liberation from oppression. This mythical ideal is a world of realized and peaceful equality, in which the distinctions between people that were held in place by the bad old castes dissolve as they are revealed to be only skin deep.

In a forthcoming book, I will aim to reveal the processes by which the Boomer Truth Regime was established and seek to highlight the practical impossibility of the Boomer Truth Regime’s ideal of radical individualism. I have dealt with two unrealizable ideals of Boomer Truth in previous books: namely, its belief in democracy, in The Populist Delusion (2022), and its obsession with progress, in The Prophets of Doom (2023). While it is not necessary to read either of these books to digest what follows, they inform the analytical and methodological framework from which I am operating. Since these are important to understand, I shall briefly outline them here.

First, a core assumption of Boomer Truth is that political and social change are bottom-up processes flowing from the dreams, hopes, and desires of “the people” up to the elites. The Populist Delusion overturns this view and suggests that political and social change flow top-down from elites to the people. My analysis in that book takes this fact as a given, and the ensuing chapters will provide much real-world evidence for this basic claim.

Second, Boomer Truth asserts that political and social changes towards the vision outlined by John Lennon are “progress” and that anything that detracts from it is “reactionary,” retrograde, or backward-looking. The Prophets of Doom fundamentally rejects this linear-progressive view of history and assumes a pattern of rise and fall in history, taking epoch-defining empires as a central unit of analysis. I take as a fundamental given that, like all previous empires, the American empire, too, one day will fall. 

The entirety of the Boomer Truth Regime has played out in Pax Americana, which supplanted Pax Britannica in the postwar years. Pax Americana operated under a different set of guiding myths, even if Boomer Truth can be detected in embryonic form in the waning years of Pax Britannica. This is not to lay “blame” for Boomer Truth at the feet of the Americans—as we have seen, two of its icons, Churchill and Lennon, are Englishmen—but rather to recognize, as the French newspaper Le Monde famously declared in September 2001, “We are all Americans now.”

I will also take for granted several analytical tools developed in The Populist Delusion. For convenience, I will list the three most important of these below:

• Mosca’s Law: The organized minority overcomes the disorganized mass. In analyzing any social change, it is essential to look beyond the surface events and instead to identify the organizing principle and the group responsible for it.

To give one quick illustrative example, the myth of Rosa Parks is that she was simply a defiant black woman who would not give up her seat on a segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama. However, the reality of Rosa Parks is that she was an activist who worked with organizations such as the NAACP, was a noted Zionist (somewhat unusual in black activist circles), and had elite backing from the powerful lawyers Clifford and Virginia Durr, who had served in the administrations of Democratic Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry Truman. Far from being spontaneous, the famous photograph of Rosa Parks on a segregated bus was a choreographed publicity stunt: the man behind her on the bus, for example, was not an outraged Alabama racist, but a liberal journalist who worked for United Press International named Nicholas C. Criss.

• The Schmittian Exception: This is a principle named after the jurist Carl Schmitt whereby, in a time of crisis, power can make an exception to normal laws and rules. Schmitt’s other great political concept, the friend-enemy distinction, asks who the exception is made for. We expect to find power applying the law strictly, harshly, and without exceptions to its enemies while finding exceptions for friends. We’ve seen this often, as when liberal judges have persecuted Donald Trump while turning a blind eye to the obvious corruption of certain Democratic politicians or in the way the U.S. State Department may stay silent on the Israeli bombing of an Iranian consulate while harshly condemning the Iranian response. 

• Power Seeks to Eliminate Rival Castles: This is a concept taken from Bertrand de Jouvenel, which states simply that power cannot tolerate rivals to itself. Power will enlist clients in a “high-low” alliance against “middle” rival castles. However, should the power vested in such clients rise to the extent that they become rival castles, we should expect power to remove patronage and destroy them. A good example of this took place in 2023 and 2024, when “woke” college campuses in the U.S. turned decisively against Israel for its actions in Gaza. Billionaire Jewish donors responded by withdrawing funding and supporting activism to pressure Harvard into removing its first black female president, Claudine Gay.

Viewing 20th-century history through these three specific lenses will do much to shed light on how and why Boomer Truth developed along the lines it did. Sometimes clarity can come simply from asking the right questions. It has become fashionable in some circles recently to assert—even in the face of seemingly world-altering events—that, in fact, “nothing ever happens.” This is adapted from Jean Baudrillard’s concept of the simulacrum, but I believe what people really mean by this is that despite the momentous events of the past 80 years, nothing has truly challenged the post-war Boomer Truth orthodoxy. I believe that the West will continue to experience a malaise until the illusions of the Boomer Truth Regime are shattered as thoroughly as the Renaissance shattered those of the medieval era.