I think that you have probably identified an attribute of a thinking process rather than an evaluation of a specific source of information. I think boomers in the west lived in an era where trust as an honourable personality trait was almost always given to human authority figures. They were influenced by the massive Judeo Christian ethos on human character during their generational phase. People and institutions of authority were thought of as being inherently honest because they were largely the children of a religious culture that had trust as a viable social currency. The “trust quality” of the source of the information mattered when being presented with a new idea. That fact that those in influence often took advantage of this social currency is largely lost on them. The other aspect of the boomers experience was the difficulty they had questioning said authority, especially when it meant challenging anything that had religious overtones.
In terms of ideas with merit, what are you referring to? Are you suggesting that millennials are somehow better at “thinking”?
I think that you’re exactly right and it’s good to get to the real root that it’s a thinking process issue. Clearly there was much more trust in institutions and I think that is largely understandable because of all you identified plus the access to information was so much more limited. Seems like almost every source was aligned to show the world as black and white. So if you’re growing up and all three news channels, plus radio, newspapers and schools are all telling you the same narrative, it gets very easy to see the world a certain way and it gets VERY uncomfortable when you see evidence that shows you what you believed may have been a lie (or at least not close to the full truth).
Millennials seem to not care as much about whether an idea is coming from a “trusted source” like Tucker Carlson (or whoever a person considers to be a voice of truth) or a random tweet from an avatar handle that they don’t even know is a real person. This cuts both ways and obviously has its concerning elements too.
Here’s an example. I thought 9/11 was an inside job since a guy I barely knew who worked at a convenience store when I lived in Australia made some compelling points about building 7 I had never heard. I took him seriously because it was a good argument I hadn’t considered and led me to do my own research where I cared less about who the source was and just wanted to gather as much info as I could to reach whatever conclusion I thought the evidence pointed to. I tried to tell my family for years and they thought I was crazy. But now that Tucker is doing a podcast on it, they are totally open to the idea.
Could give so many examples like this just with my own parents. Again, I’ve seen many boomer exceptions and maybe I’m projecting too much from that experience onto an entire generation. But I’ve seen the same thing over and over again with older people in the churches I’ve been a part of all across the country too. Many just don’t have the courage to want to seek the truth if it will be too painful to upend the narrative that they’ve ran with their whole life about how awesome the US and Israel are in every way, for example, and how purely evil countries like Russia and China are. I think non-boomers see the world with much more nuance
