Edward Snowden. the CIA / NSA Traitor, is either one of the very last members of Generation X. Or born in the first couple of years of the Millennial Generation.
His father and mother were either born in the last few years of the Boomer Generation or one of the first two years of Generation X.
Where they fall depends on your definition of the Boomer Generation. If the the Boomer Generation ended in 1963 the are solidly Boomers. If 1959 was the last year of Boomer births, then they were very, very early generation Xers.
Snowden himself was born in June 1983 which makes him either the last year of Generation X births or the second year of Millennial births depending on which definition of those generations you use.
The below interview with Snowden's father, who as a 30 year employee of the U.S. government, some, or all of it, as a United States Coast Guard officer, appears to place the father firmly in the Prophet Generation.
The Traitor himself appears to believe he will not be held accountable for his actions, which include federal crimes that include the death penalty. This is a very Generation X expectation. Obama is now talking about him as if he is a hacker, rather than a traitor, so there may be some validity to this expectation.
The Traitor also appears to claim he has acted from moral conviction which is more of a Millennial Generation type characteristic.
The traitor's first lengthy public video statement is also below.
Father's Statement:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=pl ... raQ#at=392
Traitor's ( Self Described Whistle Blower's ) Statement:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0hLjuVyI ... RzQNrthwmJ
CIA / NSA TRAITOR - Generational Affiliation/Characteristics
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Reality Check
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Re: CIA / NSA TRAITOR - Generational Affiliation/Characteris
Given that we are talking about an individual, we cannot really use Generational Dynamics itself to identify Snowden's characteristics until well after the fact and in the context of history since individuals of all archetypes may exist during all generational eras and since the influence of parents and other role models can override generational archetypes at the individual level. Basically, the problem is out of scope for GD. Furthermore, there is an implication inherent in GD theory that each cohort will transition into the next through a short period of blending and struggle as the older generation gradually makes way for the newer, since children can be born at any time during a generation rather than only on Day 1. As a result, generational archetypes can be unpredictably messy during transitions between cohorts. That's the sociological approach. For Edward Snowden, we need a psychological approach.
As it happens, I am coming to believe that the generational archetypes also hold at the individual level if viewed from a psychological standpoint rather than a sociological standpoint. The difference being that at the individual level, the archetype is very strongly influenced by home life and immediate social interactions and only weakly by the overall generational population, whereas a sociological examination tends to emphasize the aggregate characteristics of the population and have little useful analytical value regarding the discrete individuals of the population. I have been considering the personalities of everyone I know and everyone I meet and I have not yet found anyone that can not be described by the psychological equivalents of the existing GD archetypes even if their personal archetypes run counter to the assigned archetypes of their generational cohorts.
Basically, based on my observations it seems that if the parents' personalities both fit the Nomad archetype (for example), their children are more likely to match the Hero archetype than any other, even if the children are born into an Artist or Prophet generational cohort. The reason comes down to parenting styles. John hints at this in describing the GD Artist archetype when he says,"These kids grow up during the crisis war, and suffer a kind of generational child abuse. Like all abused children, they grow up to be indecisive and risk-averse." Abusive parents of any generation act very much like traumatized post-Crisis Heros and their victim children grow up to act very much like Artists. I see similar correlations between other generational archetypes and other psychological profiles. Where the parents each fit different archetypes, we can reasonably expect the dominant parental personality to be the prime influence with the other parent providing either a moderating or reinforcing secondary influence.
http://www.generationaldynamics.com/pg/ ... #lab100304
So, where does that leave us with respect to Edward Snowden? My assessment is that his parents, when taken together, seem to have provided a strongly Nomad-like influence on him, thereby molding his individual behavior to be strongly Millennial. Given that he was burn during a Nomad/Millennial transition, we can expect his individual Millennial traits to be strongly reinforced by the incoming Millennial cohort with added secondary characteristics imposed by the outgoing Nomads, with the other archetypes being present in his life to a largely uninfluencial degree. From this viewpoint, I see Snowden as having some amount of rebellious Nomad motivations ("I disagree with this, so I don't care what the rules are; I am going to expose this") compounded with a large dose of the Hero sense of immortality ("sure, other people would go to prison for this, but I'll be okay somehow" and "surely some country out there that cherishes human rights will take me in"). The Millennial part of his personality profile could not grasp the logic that most Freedom-loving nations are allies of the US and will extradite him while the nations likely to take him in have horrible human rights records and will be eager to exploit every bit of classified knowledge in his head. This means he may be in for a very unpleasant future no matter what happens with respect to asylum or extradition. He has a Nomad-tainted Millennial personality and is living in a near-global Crisis Era; whether eventual hero of the people or victim of the State, his life is largely screwed and he has nobody to blame but himself.
As it happens, I am coming to believe that the generational archetypes also hold at the individual level if viewed from a psychological standpoint rather than a sociological standpoint. The difference being that at the individual level, the archetype is very strongly influenced by home life and immediate social interactions and only weakly by the overall generational population, whereas a sociological examination tends to emphasize the aggregate characteristics of the population and have little useful analytical value regarding the discrete individuals of the population. I have been considering the personalities of everyone I know and everyone I meet and I have not yet found anyone that can not be described by the psychological equivalents of the existing GD archetypes even if their personal archetypes run counter to the assigned archetypes of their generational cohorts.
Basically, based on my observations it seems that if the parents' personalities both fit the Nomad archetype (for example), their children are more likely to match the Hero archetype than any other, even if the children are born into an Artist or Prophet generational cohort. The reason comes down to parenting styles. John hints at this in describing the GD Artist archetype when he says,"These kids grow up during the crisis war, and suffer a kind of generational child abuse. Like all abused children, they grow up to be indecisive and risk-averse." Abusive parents of any generation act very much like traumatized post-Crisis Heros and their victim children grow up to act very much like Artists. I see similar correlations between other generational archetypes and other psychological profiles. Where the parents each fit different archetypes, we can reasonably expect the dominant parental personality to be the prime influence with the other parent providing either a moderating or reinforcing secondary influence.
http://www.generationaldynamics.com/pg/ ... #lab100304
So, where does that leave us with respect to Edward Snowden? My assessment is that his parents, when taken together, seem to have provided a strongly Nomad-like influence on him, thereby molding his individual behavior to be strongly Millennial. Given that he was burn during a Nomad/Millennial transition, we can expect his individual Millennial traits to be strongly reinforced by the incoming Millennial cohort with added secondary characteristics imposed by the outgoing Nomads, with the other archetypes being present in his life to a largely uninfluencial degree. From this viewpoint, I see Snowden as having some amount of rebellious Nomad motivations ("I disagree with this, so I don't care what the rules are; I am going to expose this") compounded with a large dose of the Hero sense of immortality ("sure, other people would go to prison for this, but I'll be okay somehow" and "surely some country out there that cherishes human rights will take me in"). The Millennial part of his personality profile could not grasp the logic that most Freedom-loving nations are allies of the US and will extradite him while the nations likely to take him in have horrible human rights records and will be eager to exploit every bit of classified knowledge in his head. This means he may be in for a very unpleasant future no matter what happens with respect to asylum or extradition. He has a Nomad-tainted Millennial personality and is living in a near-global Crisis Era; whether eventual hero of the people or victim of the State, his life is largely screwed and he has nobody to blame but himself.
Ray Henry (falopex)
Re: CIA / NSA TRAITOR - Generational Affiliation/Characteris
As I was typing up the previous reply, I had a flash of insight that I think I will need to explore. I offer it here for your amusement.
It makes sense to me that Generational Dynamics would be an evolution of similar psychological dynamics, right down to Crisis conflicts. If we go waaaay back to the beginning of humanity, we find roving tribes of proto-humans. Many of these groups would likely be too small at first for the sociological effects of GD to be identifiable, but all the same forces would still be at play. The distribution of archetypes would begin as being largely random, but as competition for food, shelter, and mates exerted their influence, personality types within each tribe would begin to become aligned. Individual aggression would escalate to intra-family abuse, then to stratified pack behavior. As the tribes grew bigger, the periodic conflicts would also grow bigger and more violent until, at last, the growing tribes would become big enough for sociological analysis to become meaningful and for Generational Dynamics saeculae and Crisis Events to become identifiable. Tribes become villages, then political entities, then kingdoms, then nations, empires, and supernations. All the while, Generational forces as evolutions of psychological forces would cause Crisis Events to become bigger and bigger in keeping with the growing population sizes and cyclical availability of resources.
We cannot escape Generational Dynamics because it describes statistically the very forces that drive us at a primitive individual level.
As an aside, it is also interesting to note that the sun undergoes a variable sunspot cycle that has an average period of about 22 years (half-cycle of 11 years on average). This impacts the energy sent from the sun to the earth which impacts climate. Assuming that solar activity exerts a scientifically significant effect on climate, this means that when solar-driven climate effects sync up with a Generational saeculum, similar conditions will tend to hold at the same points across multiple saeculae before drifting out of sync again, even though there is no direct causal link between the two. For example, we are seeing many of the same droughts and other climate symptoms in the US now during what seems to be the early part of a new Crisis Era as we saw at this time in the previous US saeculae (the Dust Bowl of the early Crisis Era 1930s) This may potentially have some influence on the intensity of particular Crisis Events. This is before including the effects of any human-induced climate change (or not), which is a topic waaaay beyond the scope of this board.
I continue to have great respect for Strauss and Howe for identifying these cycles in the US (and England, somewhat) and for John Xenakis for universalizing the theories into something that is globally useful and independent of culture or nationality.
It makes sense to me that Generational Dynamics would be an evolution of similar psychological dynamics, right down to Crisis conflicts. If we go waaaay back to the beginning of humanity, we find roving tribes of proto-humans. Many of these groups would likely be too small at first for the sociological effects of GD to be identifiable, but all the same forces would still be at play. The distribution of archetypes would begin as being largely random, but as competition for food, shelter, and mates exerted their influence, personality types within each tribe would begin to become aligned. Individual aggression would escalate to intra-family abuse, then to stratified pack behavior. As the tribes grew bigger, the periodic conflicts would also grow bigger and more violent until, at last, the growing tribes would become big enough for sociological analysis to become meaningful and for Generational Dynamics saeculae and Crisis Events to become identifiable. Tribes become villages, then political entities, then kingdoms, then nations, empires, and supernations. All the while, Generational forces as evolutions of psychological forces would cause Crisis Events to become bigger and bigger in keeping with the growing population sizes and cyclical availability of resources.
We cannot escape Generational Dynamics because it describes statistically the very forces that drive us at a primitive individual level.
As an aside, it is also interesting to note that the sun undergoes a variable sunspot cycle that has an average period of about 22 years (half-cycle of 11 years on average). This impacts the energy sent from the sun to the earth which impacts climate. Assuming that solar activity exerts a scientifically significant effect on climate, this means that when solar-driven climate effects sync up with a Generational saeculum, similar conditions will tend to hold at the same points across multiple saeculae before drifting out of sync again, even though there is no direct causal link between the two. For example, we are seeing many of the same droughts and other climate symptoms in the US now during what seems to be the early part of a new Crisis Era as we saw at this time in the previous US saeculae (the Dust Bowl of the early Crisis Era 1930s) This may potentially have some influence on the intensity of particular Crisis Events. This is before including the effects of any human-induced climate change (or not), which is a topic waaaay beyond the scope of this board.
I continue to have great respect for Strauss and Howe for identifying these cycles in the US (and England, somewhat) and for John Xenakis for universalizing the theories into something that is globally useful and independent of culture or nationality.
Ray Henry (falopex)
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