>>2653854<New research published in the International Social Science Journal suggests that the relationship between personality and political beliefs in the United States varies significantly by age. The findings indicate that higher levels of neuroticism are associated with liberal ideology among young Americans, but this association is absent in older generations. This generational divide implies that growing up in a highly competitive historical period may play a role in shaping both the mental health and political orientations of American youth.This feels like such a weird assertion to make in the face of the Cold War. I suppose it makes enough sense that the current median of "the older generations", the average of which now being the youngest Boomers and oldest Xers, were the ones growing up through the 70s/80s to see the Cold War be in this weird limbo of heightened tension in proxy conflicts and media/rhetoric only to have it wind down during the latter half of the 80s. The thing is, until that point, during the whole duration of the Cold War, people were anxious of nuclear war, and that fear and paranoia was heavy, if not all-consuming for the many families of those that worked for the MIC, so it's very weird to say that younger people are more neurotic because they grew up "in a highly competitive historical period".
I'm not even trying to pull a Boomer-ism. If anything, the world we're seeing today is a return to pre-WW2 if not pre-WW1 norms
(actually the scarier fact), but I feel like it's a tough argument to say the Cold War, even in the latter days, was less competitive. I suppose that the older people are "less neurotic" because, despite the anxiety and paranoia of the Cold War, they lived their 20s/30s in the 1990s, when the Cold War ended, Communism melted away, and the US enjoyed being hegemon of a truly unipolar world
(for a fleeting 10 years); it's possible that, from their POV, the relief of the Cold War ending allowed them to forget the anxieties of the years prior and just remember that in the 70s/80s, they were having fun, struggling with jobs, getting married, and that all the threats of nuclear exchange was just bluster (which, ironically despite their neuroticism, younger people seemed to have internalized into the idea that nuclear war will never happen or is a trivial thing, which
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