Let’s agree, per argumentum, that the Boomers ruined everything. Why? According to the STBP (Standard Theory of Boomer Perfidy), because their sense of absolute entitlement led them to feather their own nests to the detriment of everyone who came after them.

But where did they get this sense of entitlement? From their parents, who had lived through the Great Depression, who knew through long years’ experience what it was like to live in deprivation and who therefore wanted their children to have everything they themselves had lacked.

So the Greatest Generation ruined everything.

But wait. If the Greatest Generation ruined everything because of their experience in the Depression, then we have to look at the causes of that, and … that’s complicated. According to one common theory, the chief cause of the depression was the concentration, in the 1920s, of too much money in the hands of a handful of plutocrats and their banks.

So Daddy Warbucks ruined everything.

Of course, others see the complicated and ultimately disastrous monetary situation of the 1920s as resulting from massive dislocations of the Western world’s economy that were among the aftereffects of the Great War.

So Gavrilo Princip ruined everything?

Someone needs to sort all this out, because I don’t see how we can proceed unless we have someone to point to and say, “You ruined everything.”