All tragedies involve a noble hero with a fatal flaw

Including the tragedy of the Greatest Generation. C.S. Lewis understood that tragedy and foresaw it:

During World War II, Lewis realized that both the Allies and the Axis were abandoning the traditional morality of the Christian West and indeed of all sane civilizations. The great principle of this morality is that certain acts are intrinsically right or wrong. In a gigantic war among gigantic states, Lewis saw that modern science was being used amorally on all sides to dehumanize and annihilate enemies. When peace came, the victorious states would feel released from moral restraints.

There’s a reason the Greatest Generation, having so nobly fought through so many challenges, also gave birth to and reared the most narcissistic generation in human history. We Boomers are the fruit of the fatal and tragic flaw in the Greatest Generation, living out that release from moral constraints and, in the process, laboring to implement much of the moral philosophy of the enemies of the Greatest Generation. We’ve successfully killed far more innocents than Hitler, while institutionalizing narcissism on a vast scale. Our parents wanted things to be better for us than they had it. In the country that used to be England, what they’ve gotten is ruins.

The Western Confucian remarks: “If this blasphemy against “the greatest generation” were more widely known, neo-cons would be removing Lewis from their libraries.”