Just as few adolescents can ever believe that their parents have been through the same stages of attitude and development before them, so one of the more frequently recurrent fallacies has been people’s belief that their own age is without precedent, that some new order is coming to birth in which all the general assumptions previously made about human behaviour are becoming somehow outmoded. In few ages has this belief been more prevalent than in our own.
Christopher Booker , The Neophiliacs , 1969
I was born six months before the outbreak of World War II. Everyone knew there was going to be another World War, and the future must have seemed terribly bleak for little fellows born then, from the point of view of those who had suffered between 1914 and 1918.
But it didn’t seem to deter my parents. Life went on, as it goes on now. I happen to believe that the world is going to hell in a handbasket, but my block is full of little children, with more on the way, presumably. The parents, I suppose, are behaving exactly like mine – – they are blotting out the bad things and hoping for the best. Maybe we have always done just that, in the face of an older generation predicting doom and gloom..