Kronos and the Baby Boomers

In Hesiod’s Theogony, the Titan Kronos is portrayed as the most savage of the primordial gods. Fearing the prophecy that one of his offspring would overthrow him, he devoured each child the moment it was born: “And great Kronos swallowed them as each came from the womb to the knees of their holy mother” (Hesiod 459–461). This act of cosmic cannibalism was more than the cruelty of a tyrant; it was the very image of power that consumes rather than yields, authority that refuses to pass on its inheritance. Kronos became the archetype of generational tyranny, the devouring father who confuses preservation with destruction.

The Greeks did not separate this image from a deeper truth. Kronos was not only a Titan; he was time itself. The resonance between Kronos and Chronos was no accident. Time is a tyrant because it devours all things: men, nations, and even gods. Mircea Eliade noted that the ancient myths reveal archetypal patterns of being, and in Kronos we encounter the most terrible pattern of all, that every order, in its fear of death, consumes its heirs to stave off succession. Julius Evola, writing on the cycles of decline, likewise saw in the figure of Kronos the fate of a civilization entering its autumn: an order clinging to power through the annihilation of the new, unwilling to let the principle of renewal take hold.

This image is not limited to myth. It is an ever-recurring truth of history. Civilizations, when seized by the Kronian impulse, turn inward upon themselves. They refuse the risk of renewal, and instead they consume their youth, their traditions, and their resources to extend a reign that is already doomed. The serpent devouring its own tail becomes the state devouring its future. Just as Kronos swallowed the Olympians to delay his overthrow, so too do modern powers devour the generations to come in order to extend their own supremacy.

Here the myth becomes prophecy. In the figure of Kronos we see mirrored the conduct of the baby boomer generation. They inherited a golden abundance, yet rather than prepare its renewal, they consumed it. They feared not a rival Titan, but their own children, whose future they devoured through economics, culture, politics, and nature itself. Like Kronos, their reign is not the triumph of strength but the desperation of those who cannot face succession.

The baby boomer generation did not rise from hardship but was born into what Hesiod would have called the Age of Gold. After the Second World War, America stood alone as master of a shattered world. Europe lay in ruins, Asia burned with defeat, and the United States possessed two thirds of the planet’s industrial output. The Marshall Plan exported prosperity abroad, while at home the GI Bill and vast public investment created a middle class of unprecedented scale. Never before in modern history had such riches been concentrated in the hands of the young.

The material reality of this inheritance was staggering. In 1950 the median home price was just over twice the average annual salary. Today it is six to eight times greater. A year of college tuition at a public university cost less than two hundred dollars, affordable even on a part time job, while today students graduate shackled by lifelong debt. A single income could sustain a household, while stable jobs offered pensions that ensured security in old age. Energy was abundant, food was cheap, and a shared moral framework still bound family, faith, and community together. To be born a boomer was to dine at the banquet of Olympus itself.

But abundance is never neutral. In every traditional order, prosperity was consecrated by sacrifice, bound to the sacred duty of stewardship. Wealth was not meant to be consumed for itself but renewed through discipline and handed on as patrimony. Mircea Eliade reminds us that all societies grounded in myth required rituals of renewal, lest fortune degenerate into decay. The Olympians themselves only triumphed because they overthrew Kronos and restored the cosmic balance.

The boomers, however, did not consecrate their inheritance. They consumed it. What had been entrusted as a patrimony was treated as a feast without end. Cheap homes became speculative assets, education became an industry of debt, and the wealth of the land was burned without regard for tomorrow. Their golden inheritance, instead of being guarded, became the first course in a long banquet of decline. In their hands, the blessings of Olympus turned to the hunger of Kronos, and the devouring began.

If the boomers inherited a banquet, their first act was to transform it into chains for their heirs. Housing, once the threshold of family life, became their first act of devouring. In 1970 the median home price was just over $17,000, roughly two and a half times the average annual income. Today the median price exceeds $400,000, six to eight times the average wage. What they bought cheaply, they sold dearly, and in that inflation of land and shelter they swallowed the very ground upon which future generations might build their lives.

The same hunger consumed education. In the 1970s a year at a public university cost less than $500, an expense that could be met by summer work. Today tuition often exceeds $10,000 a year, and the average graduate carries over $30,000 in debt. The promise of higher learning, once nearly free, was converted into a contract of servitude. The young were seduced with illusions of prosperity and bound with chains of usury. Each signature on a loan agreement was another child swallowed whole, another Olympian trapped in the belly of Kronos.

Industry too was sacrificed to the Titan’s appetite. Factories that had forged the arsenal of democracy were shuttered, not from necessity but from the worship of Mammon. Jobs were sent abroad, steel was abandoned for paper, and the fires of production were extinguished so that profits might multiply in distant lands. The nation that once built with its hands became a nation that speculated with shadows. Where their fathers had left them mills and workshops, the boomers left only casinos of finance, monuments to a wealth without substance.

The most insatiable act of devouring came through the national debt. In 1980 it stood at under $1 trillion. By the end of the boomer ascendancy it had surpassed $30 trillion, each borrowed dollar a mouthful swallowed from the future. Rather than reform entitlements or restrain appetites, they mortgaged generations yet unborn to extend their reign of comfort. Like Kronos, who consumed his children to forestall his overthrow, the boomers consumed the very wealth of their descendants to delay the inevitable reckoning.

But no Titan devours forever. Every banquet ends, and the belly of Kronos is torn open. In the ancient myth, Zeus and his siblings broke free, and the old order was cast down. So too will this economic cannibalism find its end, in revolt, in collapse, or in renewal. What was once patrimony has been consumed as plunder, and the children who remain must decide whether they will rise as Olympians or perish as sacrifices.

If the boomers devoured the wealth of the land, they also devoured the soul of the nation. Their inheritance was not only economic abundance but a cultural framework of continuity. In the early postwar years families were intact, divorce was rare, churches were full, and the arts still carried echoes of transcendence. This was the atmosphere into which they were born, a society still tethered to duty, community, and the sacred. What they received was not a void but a living tradition.

It was this inheritance that they chose to consume. Marriage, once the hearth of civilization, was fractured in the name of liberation. Between 1960 and 1980 the divorce rate more than doubled, while fertility fell below replacement. The sexual revolution promised freedom but delivered sterility, leaving behind broken homes and generations raised without fathers. Each severed bond of family was another child swallowed by Kronos, another root cut from the soil of continuity.

Religion too was offered up to the Titan’s hunger. In 1960 over 65 percent of Americans attended church weekly; by the early twenty-first century that number had collapsed to less than 30 percent. As Mircea Eliade reminds us, religion is not mere belief but the re-enactment of sacred time, the renewal of meaning through ritual. By abandoning this, the boomers cut their heirs off from eternity itself. The chain of memory that bound the living to their ancestors was broken, and sacred time gave way to Chronos, the devouring time that only consumes.

Culture itself was degraded into consumption. Music, literature, and cinema ceased to point upward and instead turned inward to appetite. The art of transcendence was replaced by the art of shock. Julius Evola condemned such creations as products of decadence, symptoms of a people that no longer looked toward the eternal but wallowed in the transient. Oswald Spengler foresaw this decline, noting that every great culture eventually ossifies into mere civilization: mechanical, soulless, and sterile. Under the boomers, culture ceased to be the organic expression of a people’s spirit and became a marketplace of novelty, endlessly producing but never creating.

The cost of this cultural cannibalism is more terrible than debt or inflation, for when the soul is devoured, there is little left to restore. The treasury can be refilled, but a hollow people remain hollow. Just as Kronos swallowed his children whole to forestall his overthrow, so too did the boomers consume their posterity’s identity, faith, and meaning. They left not continuity but fragments, not tradition but chaos, not culture but civilization without a soul. In this, the hunger of the Titan reached beyond the body and into the spirit, leaving a wasteland where once stood a people.

If the boomers devoured wealth and culture, they also devoured the political future of their descendants. The inheritance of 1945 was not only material abundance but the chance to shape a republic into an enduring order. Instead, governance under their watch became the art of postponement. Like Kronos, who swallowed each child to delay his overthrow, the boomers built a politics that consumed its own heirs in order to prolong their reign.

Entitlement programs reveal this most clearly. Social Security and Medicare were sustainable when many workers supported few retirees, but as demographics shifted the ratio collapsed. Rather than reform, the boomers preserved these programs unchanged, ensuring their own comfort while mortgaging the future. Each budget deficit was another Olympian swallowed, each delay another child devoured. Peter Zeihan observes that the math is inexorable: by the 2030s the United States will have more retirees than workers entering the labor force, a reversal without precedent in modern history. A system where the old outnumber the young cannot endure.

The same short-sightedness marked their treatment of the earth itself. Soil, water, air, and forests were plundered as though tomorrow did not exist. Cheap energy was burned without thought of renewal, rivers were poisoned, and the atmosphere altered, yet responsibility was always deferred for another election cycle. The land that should have been guarded as sacred patrimony was consumed as though it were disposable feast. Nature, like the unborn, was placed upon the table of Kronos.

Even the structure of government was transformed into an engine of consumption. The promise of republican self-rule gave way to the managerial state, swollen with bureaucracy, deficit spending, and endless wars. Leaders ceased to embody principles and instead became custodians of decay, purchasing time with debt and distraction. Julius Evola described such rulers as the final mask of decline, those who mistake the management of collapse for statesmanship.

The result is a polity without vision, ruled by a generation that refused succession. Zeihan warns that demographics are destiny: the boomers left behind a shrinking labor force tasked with sustaining an ever-expanding mass of retirees. No arithmetic can reverse such a fate. Just as Kronos could not forestall his overthrow by swallowing his children, so too will this political order collapse beneath the weight of its own hunger. The Titan’s feast guarantees his own downfall, and what emerges from his torn belly will not be his heirs devoured but his heirs avenged.

Kronos devoured his children to prevent their rising, yet prophecy could not be denied. Zeus survived, was hidden from the Titan, and in time burst forth to overthrow his father and liberate his siblings. The myth teaches that devouring only delays the inevitable, and that every age of consumption is answered by an age of revolt. The question before us is not whether the children of Kronos will resist, but in what form that resistance will take.

One path is the archetype of Zeus, the direct and violent overthrow. History is littered with such reckonings: the storming of the Bastille, the collapse of tsarist Russia, the tumbling of monarchies under the hammer of revolution. Demographic stress often lies at the root of such uprisings. Peter Zeihan warns that by the 2030s the working generations in America will no longer be able to sustain the retiring boomers, a burden that may sharpen generational conflict into open rupture. Like Zeus hurling his thunderbolts, the heirs may one day rise not as petitioners but as conquerors.

A second path is the archetype of Prometheus, who defies power not by battle but by cunning. Prometheus stole fire from Olympus and gave it to man, creating a new order outside the will of the gods. So too might younger generations build new economies and technologies beyond the reach of their elders: cryptocurrencies that bypass the swollen financial system, parallel institutions of education and culture, and innovations that render the bureaucratic order obsolete. This form of rebellion, less violent yet no less profound, turns ingenuity into a weapon against decay. In it lies the possibility of outwitting the Titan rather than confronting him directly.

The third path is the archetype of Dionysus, the rebellion that dissolves rather than renews. When the burden becomes too heavy and hope too dim, people abandon duty for intoxication, turning collapse into a carnival. Rome in its decline, Weimar Berlin in its excess, or modern nations facing demographic winter such as Japan or Italy reveal what happens when the young choose not to fight or innovate but to drift into despair and indulgence. Dionysus does not overthrow Kronos; he joins the feast, consuming himself in ecstasy until nothing remains.

Julius Evola warned that collapse can become either a gateway to renewal or a descent into ruin. The difference lies in whether the few who remain upright seize the moment and embody higher principles. The heirs of Kronos must choose: to strike like Zeus, to steal like Prometheus, or to dissolve like Dionysus. What is certain is that the Titan’s feast cannot last forever. If the children do not rise with thunder or with fire, then they will perish in revelry, and the banquet will end not in liberation but in ashes.

The myth of Kronos is not a relic of the past but a mirror of the present. Just as the Titan devoured his children to preserve his reign, the baby boomer generation consumed the inheritance of their descendants. They inherited abundance but passed down scarcity. They were born into Olympus yet left their children in chains. What should have been consecrated as patrimony was squandered as plunder, and what should have been guarded as sacred was consumed in a feast without end.

But the myth also reveals a law that cannot be denied. Kronos did not devour forever. From his torn belly the Olympians emerged, and the Titan was cast down. The same destiny waits for every age of consumption. Peter Zeihan has shown that no society can endure when the old outnumber the young. By the 2030s the working generations will no longer be able to sustain the retiring boomers, and the arithmetic of history will have its way. This is the final equation of Kronos: a feast that devours the future until there are no heirs left to carry the burden.

What follows will depend upon the spirit of the children. They may rise as Zeus, overthrowing the old order with storm and fire. They may act as Prometheus, forging new systems and new powers beyond the reach of the Titan. Or they may sink with Dionysus into chaos, revelry, and dissolution. Julius Evola warned that collapse is never the end but the crucible. In such times the many perish, but the few who stand upright may become the axis around which a new world turns.

The banquet of Kronos is ending. Either his children rise as gods, or they perish as offerings to time. There is no middle ground.