Boomeritis: A Novel That Will Set You Free is a polemic

Polemic

A polemic is a variety of arguments or controversies made against one opinion, doctrine, or person. Other variations of argument are debate and discussion...

al 2002 novel

Novel

A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....

 by American

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 philosopher Ken Wilber

Ken Wilber

Kenneth Earl Wilber II is an American author who has written about mysticism, philosophy, ecology, and developmental psychology. His work formulates what he calls Integral Theory. In 1998, he founded the Integral Institute, for teaching and applications of Integral theory.-Biography:Ken Wilber was...

 principally designed to explain Wilber's integral theory

Integral Theory

Integral Theory is a philosophy posited by Ken Wilber that seeks a synthesis of the best of pre-modern, modern, and postmodern reality. It claims to be a "theory of everything," and offers an approach "to draw together an already existing number of separate paradigms into an interrelated network of...

 and to explain his concept of "Boomeritis". Wilber characterizes this as the deadly combination of a modern liberal, egalitarian worldview with a deep unquestioned narcissism

Narcissism

Narcissism is a term with a wide range of meanings, depending on whether it is used to describe a central concept of psychoanalytic theory, a mental illness, a social or cultural problem, or simply a personality trait...

 commonly held by Baby Boomers and their children.

Summary

The protagonist

Protagonist

A protagonist is the main character of a literary, theatrical, cinematic, or musical narrative, around whom the events of the narrative's plot revolve and with whom the audience is intended to most identify...

, "Ken Wilber", is a brilliant MIT

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a private research university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. MIT has five schools and one college, containing a total of 32 academic departments, with a strong emphasis on scientific and technological education and research.Founded in 1861 in...

 student studying artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence is the intelligence of machines and the branch of computer science that aims to create it. AI textbooks define the field as "the study and design of intelligent agents" where an intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its...

. Ken believes that the future of evolution

Evolution

Evolution is any change across successive generations in the heritable characteristics of biological populations. Evolutionary processes give rise to diversity at every level of biological organisation, including species, individual organisms and molecules such as DNA and proteins.Life on Earth...

 includes the departure of human

Human

Humans are the only living species in the Homo genus...

 consciousness

Consciousness

Consciousness is a term that refers to the relationship between the mind and the world with which it interacts. It has been defined as: subjectivity, awareness, the ability to experience or to feel, wakefulness, having a sense of selfhood, and the executive control system of the mind...

 from the physical

Nature

Nature, in the broadest sense, is equivalent to the natural world, physical world, or material world. "Nature" refers to the phenomena of the physical world, and also to life in general...

 realm, or "meatspace", and the transhuman

Transhuman

Transhuman or trans-human is a term that has been defined and redefined many times in history. In its contemporary usage, “transhuman” refers to an intermediary form between the human and the hypothetical posthuman.-History of hypotheses:...

 merging of human intelligence with cyberspace

Cyberspace

Cyberspace is the electronic medium of computer networks, in which online communication takes place.The term "cyberspace" was first used by the cyberpunk science fiction author William Gibson, though the concept was described somewhat earlier, for example in the Vernor Vinge short story "True...

.

Ken attends a series of lectures at an institution called the Integral Center (an obvious stand-in for the real life Integral Institute

Integral Institute

The Integral Institute is a think-tank founded in 1998 by American author Ken Wilber. The purpose of the Institute is to gather and attempt to integrate the various viewpoints found in a number of major fields of knowledge...

) which guides him towards a more expansive understanding of evolution and existence

Existence

In common usage, existence is the world we are aware of through our senses, and that persists independently without them. In academic philosophy the word has a more specialized meaning, being contrasted with essence, which specifies different forms of existence as well as different identity...

. These lectures are interposed with explicit descriptions of Ken's sexual fantasies

Sexual fantasy

A sexual fantasy, also called an erotic fantasy, is a fantasy or pattern of thoughts with the effect of creating or enhancing sexual feelings; in short, it is "almost any mental imagery that is sexually arousing or erotic to [an] individual"...

 with another character, Chloe.

The concept of Boomeritis

According to Wilber, "Boomeritis" describes a pathological

Pathology

Pathology is the precise study and diagnosis of disease. The word pathology is from Ancient Greek , pathos, "feeling, suffering"; and , -logia, "the study of". Pathologization, to pathologize, refers to the process of defining a condition or behavior as pathological, e.g. pathological gambling....

 belief system

Belief system

A belief system is a set of mutually supportive beliefs. The beliefs may be religious, philosophical, ideological or a combination of these.The British philosopher Stephen Law has described some belief systems as "claptrap" and said that they "draw people in and hold them captive so they become...

 that afflicts Baby Boomers in particular. Boomeritis, in his view, is characterized by relativism

Relativism

Relativism is the concept that points of view have no absolute truth or validity, having only relative, subjective value according to differences in perception and consideration....

, narcissism

Narcissism

Narcissism is a term with a wide range of meanings, depending on whether it is used to describe a central concept of psychoanalytic theory, a mental illness, a social or cultural problem, or simply a personality trait...

, and aversion to hierarchy

Hierarchy

A hierarchy is an arrangement of items in which the items are represented as being "above," "below," or "at the same level as" one another...

. He believes that this attitude carried over to the so-called Generation X

Generation X

Generation X, commonly abbreviated to Gen X, is the generation born after the Western post–World War II baby boom ended. While there is no universally agreed upon time frame, the term generally includes people born from the early 1960's through the early 1980's, usually no later than 1981 or...

.

Wilber claims that he intended the novel to exhibit the traits of extreme post-modernism — irony

Irony

Irony is a rhetorical device, literary technique, or situation in which there is a sharp incongruity or discordance that goes beyond the simple and evident intention of words or actions...

, self-reference, noetic flatness — and thus to function as a literary reductio ad absurdum

Reductio ad absurdum

In logic, proof by contradiction is a form of proof that establishes the truth or validity of a proposition by showing that the proposition's being false would imply a contradiction...

, assisting people, especially Baby Boomers

Baby boomer

A baby boomer is a person who was born during the demographic Post-World War II baby boom and who grew up during the period between 1946 and 1964. The term "baby boomer" is sometimes used in a cultural context. Therefore, it is impossible to achieve broad consensus of a precise definition, even...

, in overcoming the post-modern mentality.

Published reviews

• "Boomeritis & Me: Not Just a Book Review" by Elizabeth Debold, What Is Enlightenment?
  What Is Enlightenment? (magazine)
  EnlightenNext is an international magazine devoted to spirituality, culture, and the growing integral movement, published quarterly by EnlightenNext, a nonprofit organization. The magazine, which first appeared in 1992, was founded and is still guided by Andrew Cohen, an American guru of...
  
   Issue 22 (Fall-Winter 2002)
• "Philosophy, yes, but as a novel, no" by James Lough, The Denver Post
  The Denver Post
  -Ownership:The Post is the flagship newspaper of MediaNews Group Inc., founded in 1983 by William Dean Singleton and Richard Scudder. MediaNews is today one of the nation's largest newspaper chains, publisher of 61 daily newspapers and more than 120 non-daily publications in 13 states. MediaNews...
  
  , September 22, 2002
• "Boomeritis" by Don Lattin, The San Francisco Chronicle, June 16, 2002

Posted critiques

• Lower Versus Higher Energies: A Critique of Boomeritis by Patricia Herron
• Boomeritis or Bust... by Chris Cowan, August 24, 2002
• Twenty Boomeritis Blunders by Jim Andrews, November 15, 2005