What we have established in this country down through the through the years since the Tokyo began writing about it, is this tremendous sense of the sort of frontier individual is, um what seems to matter most about the American is that he is an individual by God and just off by himself.

And and the frontier is out there and and I meet.

It's the Lone Ranger.

It's the hermit.

It's the mountain man.

It's it's whatever it is that defines that kind of experience.

Um, a lot of that accounts for the terrific capacity for American entrepreneurship, inventiveness, literary skill and all of that, that kind of stuff.

What we missed by that is the fact that where humans were people and we're made for each other, there is a sense in which society matters because we're we're part of it and we need to participate in it.

It's not gonna work all by itself.

And what happened in my generation, it seems, again and again, is people coming up to that realization and then just sort of something turning off and off.

They drift off into sort of separate orbits flying around.

It's kind of kind of unattached, uh, asteroids out there, Um, there needs to be, It seems to me, if society is gonna hold together that sense of social cohesion in which each of us as part of the community says I've got a responsibility to this is not a formal responsible is not law.

It's just that that I care about this society and I'm part of this.

Do you think this will You are generous.

I don't know.

I don't think I guess I used to think that maybe it would.

I guess I'm increasingly concerned that whatever the gravity is that holds, the asteroid in orbit is just beginning to dissolve.

And these people again and again are just sort of out there out there wondering tremendous creativity in tremendous talent in those people.

But if it's not somehow brought to bear with in a social context, I don't know what's gonna be the what's gonna be there.

It will not result.

I don't think t answer your question in the kind of leadership positions being assumed by that That decade of people in this, in this cohort of the population, I think of myself was just the beginning of this.

I'm at the very beginning of the baby boom.

And I'm at the very beginning of this.

This thing in the sixties not quite in it.

Because I graduated in 65 that I graduated in 67.

I would be in the in the heart of it, and that just leads to one other thing, which I think you've gotta pay attention to.

And that is the fact that the baby boom phenomenon is a vital this notion.

I remember hearing a demographer talk about that and saying I was born in 1931 and almost nobody else was.

I walk into rooms looking for jobs and say, You wanna work?

God, come on in work.

Well, I was born in 1944 and from then on for the next 10 years, just about everybody Waas So you walk into a room looking for a job and they say, Well, there's 400 people ahead of you.

How good are you?

Are you really the best of the 400?

Prove it be the kind of individual that stands out above all these others.

So obviously what?

That produces a tremendous pressure to be the individual and not to be part of the social cohesion.

Well, the demographers tell me, and I think they're right.

We never, ever, in the history of the world experienced anything like the baby boom the following World War Two, and we will never experience it again.

This is that sort of one time phenomenon and what we see in the sixties.

Maybe, as, as simply explained as saying, that's the maturing of that tremendous crush of population which finally didn't have the elbow room and finally needed to break out and say, I'm me in ways that no generation of Americans had ever had to do before.