struggling with struggle
return the wolves to childhood
here’s a cheery little piece of dystopian hypothesizing from francis fukuyama in “the end of history.”
it’s been sort of niggling at something in my brain and i find a sort of uncomfortable truth embedded here that seems to link a number of ideas.
it really does appear to be one of those unfortunate calibration issues where humans seem to need to feel a certain amount of struggle/deprivation/injustice and it's all subjective such that a brearley girl in her posh high school in NYC experiences a lack of kale at the salad bar in about the same way that an african kid in a warzone experiences "no food this week" in terms of the sense of struggle it constitutes.
this has a wide range of implications, among them the particularly ironic one that
in a world of outlandish plenty, the children of privilege seem to contract an societal auto-immune disease that attacks them and everything around them.
it's some sort of civilizational hygiene hypothesis.
you have an immune system and it’s going to fight something. deprive it of pathogens and it attacks you instead.
past a certain point, the very fact of having nothing real to struggle against becomes oppressive and you go mad against the system that provided such bounty even and especially if it’s all handed to you on a silver platter.
the easier it gets, the more you freak out.
(for those unfamiliar, LARP = live action role play, a term once used for nerds who dress up as wizards and fight dragons but that has come into parlance as a slight on performative lifestyle types)
and then when it all goes wrong, they suddenly feel “oppressed” and ape at being in dire peril despite what frequently amounts to astonishing privilege. from soros scions to political progeny, it seemingly never fails; but this is not happening to the poor kids at home looking for jobs and trying to make ends meet. they are too busy seeking to make the most of any opportunities in front of them because, well, they’d like to stop being poor. they have real struggles. but the rich kids role playing at marginalization, well, they seem to be another matter.
it’s all too easy, so you need need to create struggles and rage against the machine that made you replete. (a particularly satisfying metaphor given what twerps that band turned out to be)
“i had to go check into the four seasons” is the new “homeless.”
i honestly wonder if they believe themselves.
it seems like maybe they might.
it’s an astonishing descent into self-deluding radicalism justified by persecution fantasies conjured and coddled into prominence as the expressions of overactive personal response to difficulty deprivation. the fact of having no real problems to fight against turns the silence into a scream as surely as anyone who is deprived of sensory input goes mad as a hatter and succumbs to elaborate all encompassing hallucinations in quite short order.
“Short-term sessions of sensory deprivation are described as relaxing and conducive to meditation; however, extended or forced sensory deprivation can result in extreme anxiety, hallucinations, bizarre thoughts, and depression.”
a little is a vacation, too much is madness. it’s just how humans are and the collective anxiety and phantasmagoric fantasizing can easily morph into a road to radicalism that seems (to the victims) “calibrated” because humans need a certain amount of struggle in the world and when they lack it, they stir some up.
marx himself was the son of a prosperous lawyer. engles’ parents owned entire mills. this sort of vanguard radicalism has always been a retreat for rich kids.
they seem drawn to it like bugs to zappers.
perhaps agent smith was right:
there are some unsettling parallels here to societies like saudi arabia where large scale UBI and "free" university led to huge masses of non-working, non-productive people who got "educated” with “free university.”
in saudi, some huge percentage of college students were religious studies majors. they got free college, got radicalized, and now they lay around feckless, jobless, and bored sponging off the state and stacking up like dry tinder for theocratic radicalism.
the secular religions and useless degrees of the modern western academy are little different, it’s just that in the US the students don't know they joined one.
the secular ideologies of DEI, watermelon green, and "protest" are just theocracy surrogates clutched at to seek "struggle" in easy lives devoid of challenge or accomplishment or meaning.
worse, everyone sits around endlessly self-absorbed and monomaniacally focused on these tragically over-amplified problems until they cannot see, much less think, straight.
it becomes depression and obsession and it lashes out as ill considered white knight fantasies and the championing of anything that makes them feel like they are “fighting repression” and “engaging in epic struggle” despite literally lacking the calibration to even know what those concepts mean.
and the revolution becomes desperately stupid.
this is not life, it’s the negative space where life should reside.
i mean, really extrapolate this out. consider what long days of doom scrolling and rage farming online and getting whipped up and egged on by professors picking up the speed wobbles of empty lives and exaggerating them is doing to their mental health, what the endless fixation and focus on these teensy travails instead of actual life is doing to their actual ability to live.
because endless monomania over such minutiae is the path and pathology of being unwell.
consider the possibility “not doing stuff” is not a symptom of depression but rather a leading cause and that, ironically, all this “activism” actually feels like doing something. it provides community and activity and seeming meaning. and so it makes them feel better. it feels like “cure.”
the irony that “getting some exercise and dating a bit and maybe picking up a hobby” would do this better is a bit thick. the odd and oddly prevalent demonization and vilification of these very things are just the sad crabs trying to pull any who seek to climb out of the pot back in. and maybe these children of over-privilege just need a little d.h. lawrence in their lives before they batter themselves to death raging against the fountainheads of plenty:
“I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself.
A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough without ever having felt sorry for itself.”
idle hands and idle lives really do invite mischief.
and maybe they just need some real problems so they stop cultivating some auto-immune version.
DEI, woke, all of it seems like invitation to self harm and self-sabotage.
but i wonder if it too is a symptom.
what if the root cause runs deeper?
in one of my favorite substacks that i ever wrote, i opined that: children to not need trophies, they need to be tossed out the door with a set of lawn darts and told to “go play.”
they need to figure it out, grow resilient, and learn the skills to interact with peers and govern themselves. unstructured play, trial, error, success, and yes (gasp) failure is what does that.
coddled kids get coddled minds. you’d never try to develop an elite athlete by telling them not to train hard or by making sure that all their contests were slanted, rigged, or non-competitive. there is not some magic where this works for children.
if, when your kids gets a C- on their paper your response is go yell at the teacher, the problem is you.
what, pray tell, are you going to do when they get out into the real world?
what are they going to do?
it appears that others are reaching this same conclusion. because it’s time. modern ideas about “everyone gets a prize” and “no one should feel bad” have wrecked childhood and it’s wrecking the children.
did we make the world too “clean”?
this takes us back to the hygiene hypothesis.
why are they woke? because they never had any real problems and parents drowned them in structure and safety. they are tearing themselves apart in auto-immune search for something to struggle against in an environment too devoid of useful battles. they fight the system that cossets them because it’s what presents itself.
if you want strong kids: forget gentle parenting and obstacle removal.
childhood is supposed to be hard, it needs to be hard.
and being left alone in a peer group full of people having these bad responses to deprivation deprivation can go really, really bad.
this sounds like a joke, but probably, it isn’t.
and like yellowstone, the effects will far outstrip anything imagined. rivers will change course and forests change character. woke will die and something far more conducive to flourishing will supplant it.
politics, ideology, and intellectual movements do not drive culture, they are downstream of culture, emergent from it.
the changes in society we desire start within the society.
we must build.
the rest will follow.
No need to worry. The way things are going, life is going to get much, much harder. The system will right itself.
Kids today have it too easy. I died once when I was five and my mother made me walk it off. ;-)