Permissive upbringing and affluence sensitized young activists to achievement ideology’s costs

Evidence

This generation has probably grown up with more psychological understanding, and with a more liberal upbringing and more permissive attitudes, than any that has preceded it … If we take, in addition, the fact that this generation is the first to have grown up under economic conditions of greater ease, and has therefore been under less psychological pressure from the labour market than its predecessors, then a hypothetical connection arises which may allow us to explain the peculiar sensibility of the young activists. They have been sensitized to the costs, in terms of individual life-history, of a society marked by competition for status and achievement, and by the bureaucratization of every area of existence. These costs appear to them to be disproportionately high in relation to the potential technological advantages involved … It may well be that the decay of parental authority and the spread of permissive methods in education have made experiences possible for children growing up, and required them to find their bearings, in ways that on the one hand must inevitably come into conflict with the standards of an ideology of achievement, but on the other hand converge with the technological potential available, which society has not yet released, for leisure and freedom, satisfaction and pacification. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2652

Categorization

• XREF: This is the Frankfurt School’s familiar thesis of repressive desublimation and the psychological roots of the 1968 student movement; connects to Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man. — connects to: Affluence and permissive upbringing produced the student rebels’ new sensibility; Marxist theory neglected childhood-family effects on political personality — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 332; Perceived status marginality drives authoritarian parenting more than objective class (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Perceived status marginality drives authoritarian parenting more than objective class #corroborates (0.78)
• Identity crisis makes adolescents susceptible to totalistic ideological groups #expands (0.72) — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 4120
• Marxist theory neglected childhood-family effects on political personality #corroborates (0.70) — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 332