Constituent Parts of a Theory of Spectacular Acts of Public Violence
For some time now, I’ve been trying to work out how to explain what I take to be a new period of spectacular acts of public violence. (This is the clumsy term that I’ve arrived at, “spectacular acts of public violence,” chosen because existing terms like “mass shooting” are insufficiently expansive.) Some people accused my most recent attempt as overly esoteric, perhaps deliberately obscure. I assure you that I’m not trying to be arch. If this topic has inspired me to write in a different register than my usual, it’s only because I find this topic a unique challenge. If I’m right, the dynamics I’ve identified will shape the decade to come, in a way that I find particularly chilling. If I’ve been difficult to follow, that difficulty stems from a deeply sincere attempt to use specific intellectual tools to better map a chaotic system of potentially immense violence.
After decades of unusually low levels of such violence, we may now be returning to conditions similar to those of previous eras where such acts become distressingly common - notably, the turn of the 20th century, with the wave of anarchist assassinations from 1881 to 1914, the Haymarket Affair, and the Galleanist bombings, as well as the “Days of Rage” of the 1970s, including the Weather Underground, the Symbionese Liberation Army, and FALN (the Puerto Rican separatist movement). This is ultimately a quantitative question, and I’m sure some will express appropriately quantitative skepticism, but we’ll have to see; the question, as usual, is what’s to come. Mass shootings and similar events are now so normalized that it can be difficult to sort out whether we’ve slipped into such an era, but my fear is that recent violence will spread and grow, that in fact each act will serve as an accelerant for the next, as the cascading violence will help the people who commit this violence see their work as part of some broader movement that gives them the meaning they seek.
This is, in fact, my overarching argument: that where we are trained to see public violence as the outcome of ideology - those anarchist assassinations, 9/11, Oklahoma City, Anders Breivik, Yukio Mishima - in the 21st century, a certain potent strain of political violence is not the product of ideology but rather an attempt to will ideology into being through violence itself. To create meaning in a culture steeped in digital meaninglessness by the most destructive means available. The 21st century school shooter (for example) does not murder children in an effort to pursue some teleological purpose; the 21st century school shooter exists in a state of deep purposelessness and, at some level and to some degree, seeks to will meaning into being through their actions. This is part of why so many of them engage in acts of abstruse symbolism and wrap their politically-incoherent violence in layers of iconography; they are engaged in cargo cult meaning-making, the pursuit of a pseudo-religion. The tail wags the dog; acts we have grown to see as expressions of meaning are in fact childish attempts to will meaning into being through violence.
Conservatives will of course go on saying that Tyler Robinson was an antifa soldier trained in a George Soros-funded BLM terrorist cell. I’m profoundly uninterested in trying to talk anyone out of that. My point, which you will either accept or won’t, is that someone who scrawls an Italian antifascist slogan onto a bullet casing and also “If you read this, you are gay, LMAO,” as well as obscure video game references… this is exactly who I’m talking about. Clearly he had some sort of ideological urge, some sense that his violence should contain meaning, but his impulses and influences are incoherent; indeed, that urge has been inculcated in online communities that are defined by nothing so much as, well, nothing - the all-consuming lol lol lol of contemporary sad-young-man online culture, forum after forum dominated by an endless race to the bottom of nihilism and self-hatred. I’m going to guess that Robinson has not read deeply in the works of Camillo Berneri. I think, instead, that he saw some quotes pop up randomly in the same frenetic and directionless Discord servers where he lived the rest of his life and thought they would be cool things to write on a bullet. This is the ethos of what I call the Heavenly Aeroplane.1
The kind of spectacular public violence I’m discussing is not the product of ideology; it is the chaotic process by which a system, in the absence of purpose, manufactures the raw materials of cargo-cult ideology, Potemkin ideology, masks of deeper meaning, effigies of religious passion, false gods, unreal heroes.
Of course, conventional analysis will continue to seek meaning in, well, meaning, in ideology, in philosophy, in the assumption of some deeper purpose, and in so doing will obscure the danger ahead:
Contrary to the assertion of Trump and some Republicans — particularly those seeking to create a committee to “uncover the force” behind the “radical left” by probing a slew of “entities driving this coordinated attack” — Westwood says there’s no evidence the shooting was “coordinated” at all or even that there’s a “national appetite” for coordinated political violence.
The Kirk killing, he says, is part of a trend of “lone wolf” violence that lacks any organizational backing and often plays out with an “isolated individual” struggling with mental-health issues and “without a coherent ideology.”
The New York piece where this quote appears reassures us that more violence will not necessarily come from Kirk’s murder, that we don’t need to worry because this was not an ideologically-motived attack, driven by Robinson’s membership in some coordinated violent campaign. But what if that’s exactly why we will see more violence? Because while organizing a coordinated group of likeminded ideologues who are willing to risk their lives to inflict violence for a cause is actually very hard, we already have a nation stuffed with directionless men soaked in violent pop culture, convinced that they have no future and obsessed with their lack of economic and sexual privilege?
Strange Attractors
Several people were confused by my repeated use of the term “strange attractor” last week, and an emailer accused me of throwing it in just because it sounds deep. But I think it’s actually a potent concept for understanding contemporary acts of spectacular public violence.
A strange attractor is a concept from chaos theory. An attractor in dynamical systems is a set of states toward which a system tends to evolve, regardless of where it starts. For example, a swinging pendulum eventually comes to rest at the bottom - that resting point is an attractor, in this case a fixed attractor. Whatever the initial conditions (the position and angle and velocity of the pendulum), the final outcome is the same (the pendulum at its natural resting point relative to gravity). This is, naturally, why it’s called an attractor. There’s also loop attractors, where the system starts in various initial states but eventually converges to the same loop. Think of one of those desk toys where you pull one ball up and gravity causes it to hit another ball which then transfers the energy into the next balls until another one swings up and is then brought down by gravity and hits one of the other balls…. A strange attractor is more complex: it arises in chaotic systems where the system’s behavior never settles into a simple point (fixed attractor) or loop (limit cycle), but instead follows a fractal pattern2 in phase space3.
Strange attractors are deterministic; they aren’t probabilistic like quantum mechanics but rather follow Newtonian mechanics. But they’re still unpredictable in practice: the system follows precise rules, yet its long-term behavior can’t be predicted in real-world scenarios because tiny differences in starting conditions explode into huge divergences.4 They call this “sensitive dependence on initial conditions,” AKA the “butterfly effect.” Strange attractors are determined by fractal geometry; that is to say, the paths and patterns they trace are not smooth shapes but infinitely detailed, self-similar structures. You can keep diving further and further in, you’ll keep seeing the same thing, but it will never resolve into one simple or easily-interpreted whole.
The classic example is the Lorenz attractor, the famous butterfly-shaped figure from weather models.5 It’s important to point out that while a Lorenz attractor might look like a loop, it’s not, at least not in the same sense as a true loop attractor. A loop attractor (AKA limit cycle) is perfectly repeating. Again, think in terms of pendulums, like one in a grandfather clock. Once started, that pendulum will always swing back and forth with the same rhythm; in phase space, its path is a smooth closed curve, one orbit forever traced over and over. But strange attractors like the Lorenz attractor never exactly repeat. The Lorenz attractor has the two “wings” or lobes you see here, and the trajectory loops around one lobe for a while, then unpredictably jumps to the other. Even though it looks like a butterfly-shaped loop, if you zoom in, the path never closes but rather keeps spiraling into new positions without overlapping perfectly. It’s the classic symbol of a chaotic attractor because it’s sensitive to tiny changes: two paths that start under almost the exact same initial conditions will diverge dramatically.
And that’s the core metaphorical point, that’s why I’m drawn to the strange attractor as a symbol of the coming violence I’m predicting and its motiveless motives. If you plot the evolving state of a chaotic system in phase space, the trajectory doesn’t collapse into a single point or neat loop. Instead, it wanders forever inside a complex, fractal-shaped region. That region (infinitely detailed, never repeating, yet confined) is the “strange attractor.” So, literally, a strange attractor is a geometric representation of how chaos organizes itself: unpredictable in detail, yet confined within a bounded structure. That’s what I’m saying is happening or will happen. Every individual instance of spectacular public violence in this vein can be easily dismissed as the expression of madness or ideology or whatever else you’d like. But the modern internet-diseased mind’s will to violence, I’m arguing, is a strange attractor - it is an attractor because disparate initial conditions (the various demographic and biographical details of the next shooter or bomber or guy who drives a truck into a crowd) lead to the same violent outcomes (thus an attractor), but it’s a strange attractor because those outcomes are disparate in obvious ways (the specifics of their crimes, the motivations internet sleuths identify after the facts). If you tried to analyze these attacks in traditional terms, you couldn’t understand them, because the ordinary work of deriving motives from ideology doesn’t work. What I’m asking everyone to do instead is to notice the pattern that is never a perfect loop but which is unmistakably a pattern nevertheless - and to reckon with how dangerous this all is, if I’m right.
An assassin whose express motivation is a confused mishmash of ideological fragments and video game references is just one asshole with a gun. The 21st century violent tendency among angry, directionless people whose brains have bathed in online nihilism? That’s the perfect, tragic embodiment of the strange attractor, in the sense that I mean. The act of violence itself is not the product of a coherent belief system; it is the chaotic process by which the individual attempts to construct one. The “antifascist” label and the video game tropes are not the cause of the violence, they are the disorganized, post-hoc rationalizations for a pre-existing state of violent kinetic energy. They are the cognitive debris that has been pulled into the orbit of the strange attractor. This individual is not driven by conviction, but by a profound lack of it. They have been starved of clear, socially-sanctioned purpose and, in that vacuum, have latched onto whatever ambient signals - political noise, digital fantasies, the uniquely dehumanizing meme cultures that men have built online around their shared hobbies - they can find to justify a self-selected purpose: destruction.
The Kirk murder, in this context, is not an act of political terrorism; it is a desperate, violent assertion of personal meaning by a pathetic, immoral agent operating in a system experiencing a collapse of meaning. The assassin is the ultimate product of a society that has become a cacophony of contradictory signals. Unable to process a single, clear purpose, the individual becomes a tragic automaton, compelled by a violent impulse and forced to invent a narrative that can, however briefly, make sense of the carnage. The ideology is not the map to the violence; it is the bewildered commentary on a journey that has already begun.
Disaffected, Internet-Poisoned Young Men as Society’s Lowest Inertial Mass
Young men are not the source of all spectacular acts of public violence, but they are massively overrepresented in the commission of those acts. I have said that this is because they have the lowest inertial mass in our culture, socially and emotionally and in terms of human value.
Inertia is an object’s resistance to being moved or accelerated. The more inertial mass something has, the harder it is to push around. That’s why it takes more effort to shove a boulder than a pebble. A perturbation is a small outside influence, a nudge, a vibration, a bit of drag, a gravitational tug. A massive, stable object tends to shrug off these nudges: a tiny gust of wind won’t budge a boulder. A light, low-mass object reacts strongly: the same gust easily sends a feather fluttering. So far, so simple, so obvious.
Objects with low inertial mass require less energy input to change their motion. Small random forces (friction, thermal motion, turbulence, background noise) create noticeable effects on them. High-mass systems act like stabilizers against small disturbances; low-mass systems amplify them. In my clumsy analogy here, mass translates to something like social capital or social value, communally-understand definitions of value that are derived from meaning-bearing structures that are now much harder to access. Young, internet-addicted men, denied access to the traditional guarantors of structural social meaning (the 9-5 job, the bowling league, the white picket fence, the Elk’s club, the role as a church elder) are like particles with low inertial mass, easily jostled into wild trajectories by the slightest nudge of online chaos, while those with self-respect, community, and rooted professional lives carry the heavy mass of stability, harder to shove off course into the embrace of chaos, nihilism, and violence.
The low inertial mass of internet-addicted young men is not a moral failing, though of course their violent acts themselves are; their low inertial mass is a predictable, thermodynamic property of a system in disequilibrium. Societal inertial mass is a product of emotional-physical friction - the weight of real-world commitments, the gravitational pull of family, the resistance of a stable career, and the physical bonds of community. The digital ecosystem, by its very design, systematically erodes these forces. It replaces them with a frictionless, high-speed flow of information and a series of algorithmic feedback loops that are infinitely more responsive to a momentary perturbation than the slow, grinding inertia of physical reality. The young men who have been most completely immersed in this environment have been denied the social heft and cultural mass that would have once anchored them. They are now, from a scientific perspective, points of near-zero inertia, lacking the mass to resist an external impulse. They are not the origin of the system’s chaotic signal, but its most perfectly tuned resonator,6 the ideal medium through which a single, meaningless act of violence can be rapidly amplified and re-transmitted, providing the system with the kinetic energy it needs to sustain its destructive orbit.
The more that others engage in spectacular acts of public violence in an effort to secure meaning, the more doing so appears to the impressionable (those with lowest social inertial mass) to be a way to achieve meaning. And modern media contributes to this dynamic, particular in the form of the cliché of the killer who kills for attention. I’m here arguing that attention is not the first-order driver of this current wave of violence, but rather an epiphenomenon of the meaning-making impulse. You might argue that the distinction doesn’t matter, though I would disagree. Either way, again, the logic of the strange attractor: as more people act this way, more are inspired to follow, and they will explode in ways that are not fixed or looped but chaotic and yet still resulting in obvious meta-patterns observable when considered at the correct level of abstraction.
The Meaning Deficit and the Lotka-Volterra Equations
The Lotka–Volterra equations are a simple (at least in concept) mathematical model of how predators and prey interact over time. Canonically, theoretical examples are given in terms of rabbits and foxes.
If there are lots of rabbits, the foxes have plenty to eat, so the fox population grows.
But as more foxes appear, they eat more rabbits, and soon the rabbit population starts to shrink.
With fewer rabbits around, the foxes begin to starve, so the fox population shrinks too.
With fewer foxes hunting, the rabbits recover, and the cycle begins again.
Like I said, the concept is very simple. The equations, which become quite complex, describe this repeating “boom and bust” cycle. Neither species stays constant: they rise and fall in waves, each depending on the other. It’s not a perfect picture of reality (unsurprisingly, real ecosystems are more complicated) but it captures the idea that predators and prey are locked in a natural rhythm, each shaping the other’s fate. To apply the Lotka-Volterra equations to (the motivation to commit) acts of spectacular public violence is to see such events as natural, if terrible, functions of a distressed system.
In our model here, the prey is not people, but meaning and purpose. These are the resources on which a healthy, stable society feeds. A society flush with meaning produces an abundance of ideological structure, social connection, and clear paths for individual purpose. But this should not be mistaken for a simplistic or universal good. After all, if meaning and purpose were reliably socially desirable, why would societies ever evolve out of periods that are heavy in these virtues? Well, consider some examples of meaning-heavy social models: a Christian theocracy, forbidding premarital sex, divorce, and gay marriage, or fascism, demanding hatred of the other and the abrogation of civil rights, or traditional systems of hereditary nobility, which sequester wealth and power in the hands of the few, unavailable to ordinary people. These are systems with too much meaning, meaning that cramps, oppresses, enrages. At a societal level, an overabundance of purpose leads to a singular, dominant, and oppressive form of meaning, which we associate with repressive and traditionalist societies which squelch individuality and freedom.
For a more mundane example than fascism or theocracy, think of the 1950s: a society with an excess of structured, hierarchical, and rigid purpose. This homogeneity of meaning (the “organization man,” the nuclear family, a singular national identity) is the abundant prey population, and it is as vulnerable as all abundant prey populations. This very abundance, therefore, creates the conditions for its predator: the individual who is unanchored and alienated precisely because they are trapped or rejected by the singular form of meaning. To continue the example of the 1950s, the counter-cultural movements of the 1960s are not a cause of predation, but the initial, visible proliferation of the predator population itself, a direct response to the oppressive homogeneity of the prey. Counterculture arises because of the dominance of establishment culture and, thanks to the vulnerabilities inherent to systems that produce genuinely oppressed minorities, begins to feed. Over time, the predator population of counterculture culls the herd of establishment culture, and eventually the oppressive reality of too-much-meaning found in traditionalist societies gives way eventually to meaning-bereft cultures that produce unstable people who lack any grounding in social purpose, who have low inertial mass.
Spectacular acts of public violence, therefore, maybe be better understood less as a direct product of the lack of meaning but more precisely as products of the system’s violent oscillation between two extremes. As the rigid structure of the 1950s (for example) is consumed and broken down by this new, unanchored population in the 1960s (for example), the predator of purposelessness thrives. This consumption, in turn, eventually leads to a collapse of the rigid meaning structures, which starves the violence of its prey and forces a temporary quiet. But this is not a final state. The system, once devoured, then begins the slow, painful process of rebuilding a new, singular form of meaning, restarting the inevitable cycle. The mass shooter, the mad bomber, the bored assassin is a product of this oscillation, a biological mechanism of a chaotic system, an embodiment of the violent transition from one ideological state to another. The violence is the inevitable result of a system that cannot tolerate either a lack of purpose or its oppressive abundance and so perpetually oscillates between them. We are caught now in one of the liminal moments when the violent search for purposes rises into a vacuum of purposelessness, to repetitively bloody effect.
The Lyapunov Exponent
The Lyapunov exponent (at least, as it was taught to me) is a way of measuring how fast two nearly identical situations drift apart over time.
Imagine you and a friend start hiking side by side, only a few inches apart. If the trail is smooth and predictable, you’ll stay close together. But if the terrain is chaotic, twisting, splitting, unpredictable, that tiny gap will grow until you’re on opposite sides of the mountain. A positive Lyapunov exponent means small differences grow quickly, and the system is chaotic. A negative Lyapunov exponent means differences shrink, and the system is stable (like a pendulum coming to rest: no matter where you start, you end up at the bottom). The Lyapunov exponent is thus a kind of “sensitivity meter” for systems; it tells you whether small mistakes or disturbances get erased, stay the same, or snowball into total unpredictability.
Now imagine we had the information necessary to calculate a Lyapunov exponent for a self-reinforcing series of acts of spectacular public violence, an elegant measure of this system’s predictability. In the theory we’re developing here, a society with a clear, shared purpose would have a Lyapunov exponent approaching zero, and small deviations in individual behavior would not lead to catastrophic, unpredictable outcomes. But the system we’re observing has a dramatically positive Lyapunov exponent. The individual, purposeless act of violence is not an isolated incident but rather a minute, initial perturbation. Because the system is in a state of terminal chaos,7 this small perturbation causes trajectories to diverge exponentially. The violence of a single, confused individual, seemingly an insignificant event, is amplified by the system's inherent instability, leading to cascading and unpredictable consequences (societal fear, political polarization, subsequent acts of violence) that could never have been predicted from the initial conditions. The individual mass killer himself is not a cause, but a proof; his act provides the system with a kinetic measurement of its own terrifying and profound unpredictability.
The grim certainty of a positive Lyapunov exponent means that the system is no longer governed by its grandest political narratives, but by its lowest-level noise. We are entering a state where the societal trajectory is not defined by policy or ideology, but by which random, unanchored individual next provides the minuscule perturbation that will send the entire manifold spiraling into a new, unknowable orbit. The signal is no longer at the top, but is rather buried in the entropic static of the digital substrate, waiting for a low-inertia vessel to broadcast it to the world and in doing so spread this empty, bloody gospel.
Self-Organizing Criticality
Strange attractors occur in systems that inevitably settle into unpredictable and yet still cyclical patterns of behavior. The Lotka-Volterra equations depict a simple, oscillating dance between two populations. The Lyapunov exponent tells us whether a system will trend towards order or chaos over time. But even together these cannot fully account for the scale and suddenness of how various disparate acts of violence could potentially result in a chain reaction leading to a much broader, more terrible climate of ubiquitous destruction. This is where the concept of self-organized criticality becomes paramount.
Self-organizing criticality is a concept that explains how complex systems like leaf piles, earthquakes, or even brain activity can naturally evolve into a state where small changes can trigger massive effects. The classic example is the mechanics of sand. Imagine slowly adding grains of sand to a pile: for a while, nothing happens, but eventually one grain causes an avalanche. The system didn’t need anyone to fine-tune it; it organized itself into this delicate balance point, called “criticality,” where it’s always on the edge of a big shift. What’s made self-organizing criticality a matter of endless interest to researchers is that these systems often show patterns like power laws and fractal behavior, meaning they look similar at different scales and have no single “typical” size of event.
Self-organizing criticality is a state in which a complex system naturally evolves to a critical point, a tipping point, in which the tiniest, most insignificant event can trigger a cascade of consequences of all sizes. It’s the law governing the sand pile: you add grain after grain of sand, seemingly with no effect, until one final grain (no more important than any other, inherently) triggers an avalanche that can consume the entire pile. The “propaganda of the deed”8 is not a political act; it is the addition of a grain of sand to an already-critical social system. The system's violence is not an isolated incident but an avalanche waiting to happen, a statistical inevitability. The system organizes itself into this state of perpetual fragility, a state in which a single act of seemingly purposeless violence has the potential to become an infinitely larger catastrophe. The coming chaos is not the result of a single cause, but the inevitable consequence of a system that has become self-organized into a critical, and therefore volatile, state.
There is a moment when the ambient, low-level radiation of purposeless violence ceases to be mere noise and becomes the trigger for a terminal feedback loop. We appear poised at the event horizon of a cascade where the smallest act, committed in the absence of ideology, could initiate a period of truly ugly and spectacular public violence, a kinetic reaction that will reshape the social phase space with terrifying, unpredictable certainty. Do I know that we’re there, or heading there? No, not at all. Does it seem very plausible to me? Yes, yes it does. Hard to say. But I am haunted by the possibility.
I am aware that this name is bad and unhelpful and awkward. I’m afraid I can’t stop thinking it, and this whole line of thought of mine is “can’t stop thinking” stuff.
A fractal is a shape that shows self-similarity: zoom in and the pattern repeats at smaller and smaller scales. It’s usually created by repeating a simple process recursively; math teachers like to show how fairly simple functions can produce infinite complexity thanks to fractal effects. Think of the Mandelbrot set or a coastline. In a chaotic system (like weather, dripping faucets, heart rhythms), the path the system traces through phase space never exactly repeats exactly. Instead, it coils endlessly into a shape that has fractal structure - detailed, irregular, but bounded.
Imagine you want to describe a system, like a swinging pendulum. To fully capture its state at any moment, you need more than just its position, you also need velocity. A phase space is a mathematical space where each axis represents one of those variables, such as position, velocity, acceleration, perhaps the weight of the pendulum, etc. So instead of just drawing the pendulum swinging back and forth, you plot its state as a point moving through this abstract space.
As Lorenz famously put it, “When the present determines the future, but the approximate present does not approximately determine the future.”
That the Lorenz attractor looks like a butterfly and is related to the butterfly-flapping-its-wings thing has been good for marketing chaos theory but bad for actually understanding it.
A resonator, in a physical system, is a structure that amplifies a specific frequency of energy - not the source of the energy, but its ideal medium. In my theory, the perfectly tuned resonator is the individual who, having shed the physical and social mass that would have once grounded them, now possesses a vibrational frequency that perfectly matches the system’s most chaotic signal. The digital substrate has meticulously removed all the damping mechanisms (the social friction, the community ballast) that would have once prevented such a resonance. This individual does not merely perceive the initial perturbation; their entire being, stripped of purpose, is a void that is uniquely calibrated to resonate with it. The result is not a simple reaction, but a catastrophic amplification.
That is, the point where disorder or instability has grown so extreme that the system can’t recover or restabilize but rather unravels.
Propaganda of the deed is a concept rooted in 19th-century anarchist thought, referring to direct violent action that’s intended to inspire broader revolutionary change. Rather than relying on speeches or pamphlets, proponents believed that dramatic acts like assassinations, bombings, or sabotage could serve as powerful symbols, demonstrating that the state and ruling classes were vulnerable; once the masses saw how easy it was to kill the nobility and upper classes, they would be inspired to do so, the aura of impregnability of establishment power snapped.`
“My point, which you will either accept or won’t…”
I think a lot of people will be turned off by your physics analogies. For me they work, it’s the same idea as Asimov’s psychohistory in the Foundation series which is one of my favourite stories (the OG epic sci-fi story about what if humans were predictable en masse like particles in thermodynamics. Have you read it or did you come up with this independently?)
Anyway, physics analogies aside, to me your overall thesis here is so obviously true that for people to not accept it, it’s either motivated reasoning because it’s so bleak (the implications of extremely online young men are so far-reaching that better to pretend it’s not true, something Scott Alexander has written about) or its cynical partisans trying to score political points.
For anyone who cares about societal systems-level thinking written in an accessible way that isn’t steeped in Critical Theory, I don’t see anywhere in the current world writing on this better than right here. All these Ivy humanities departments looking for a way to have useful scholarship in the post-Social Justice era should hire you.
I grew up post WW-II when nearly every person had been in the War (mostly men) or worked in the defense industry (mostly women). My father who had been at Pearl harbor on 12/7/1941 spent 4 years in the Pacific. He married my mother , who was working to build planes in CA when he was demobilized. The 1950s provided a very coherent cultural generation for the most part. 1950s life was largely carried on in very patriotic venues ( American Legion baseball fields were everywhere). Then came Korea. Most of my college professors had been in WWII or Korea. The 60s generation came of age in reaction to that era. The Naked and the Dead was published in 1948. Catch-22 was published in 1961. We had people in the war who had coherent thoughts about war--Only about 25% of young men went to VN (college men got deferments until the lottery) The draft ended in 1975. I believe that is the significant point at which young men who now had choice moved into the world you describe. I don't think we ponder enough the change in men's lives after 1975.