To be honest, my year of birth is often placed somewhere between Millennials and Gen Z because demographers have been unclear on exactly when and where the two generations begin to diverge. The consensus is that it has to be somewhere around 1995 and 1999, but there are no definitive agreements on the precise year. This does not bother me at all because I was always of the view that individual generations of people do not constitute an identifiable people’s community, let alone a Totality. The Totality is a multiplicity of different groups and that includes the young and the old, regardless of their age range. This article in the latest edition of American Affairs as of late appears to have arrived at similar conclusions:

“In a time in which generations struggle to understand each other, everyone, young and old, is nevertheless in agreement that something has happened to the young. Young people are now consistently more distressed than our elders, a fact whose daily confirmation through experience is the only thing keeping us from recognizing its utter historical perversity. Youth has been stripped of its natural tendencies to energy, autonomy, and subversion. In our turning away from life, the generation christened with the albatross of the alphabet’s final letter has become a picture of something altogether foreign to the typical condition of youth: quiet resignation, despair, premature exhaustion. Recent studies of youth well-being have generated data points to this effect so hellish as to strain belief. The CDC reported this February that in 2021, 10 percent of high school students reported attempting suicide within the previous year, around twenty times the national average. (This was not an artifact of the Covid pandemic: the figure for 2019 was 9 percent). A full quarter of high school girls reported having ‘made a suicide plan,’ while 30 percent seriously considered attempting suicide. A high schooler may, of course, answer an official questionnaire about suicide in a mood of despair, boredom, fascination, ridicule, or unseriousness; and though a full 3 percent of high schoolers reported suffering injury from a suicide attempt, the suicide rate among those aged fifteen to twenty-four remains lower than any older age group. Yet a question deeper than whether they ‘really mean it’ arises. Young people, especially girls, seem less attached to the idea of living than anyone can remember.

This distress does not appear to be subsiding with age: last school year, 47 percent of university students reported having screened positive for a mental disorder in their lifetime, while 44 percent actively screened positive for depression, 23 percent for major depression, and 37 percent for a clinical anxiety disorder. A staggering 28 percent reported self-harming in the past year, while 29 percent had taken psychiatric medication during the same time. Nor is the malaise limited to anxiety and depression. In 2019, the American College Health Association, taking 2010 as its baseline, recorded a 57 percent increase in bipolar disorder, a 100 percent increase in anorexia, a 33 percent increase in substance abuse, and a 67 percent increase in schizophrenia among undergraduates.”

There is no doubt that today’s young people are living in a world that older generations have trouble comprehending. The perceived generational disconnection represents a phenomenon in which it is all too common to view the national educational system as being completely isolated from what goes on in the national economy and national government. In America, the suspicion has been cast upon the increased smartphone usage and the dependency on Social Networking platforms to access information that would have otherwise been acquired from outside the Digital Realm. Since young people are not the ones behind Social Media (which implies that the flow of information is being disseminated by the Totality), Social Networking deserve to be viewed as a source for some of the mental health problems among the youth. The rise of the Digital Realm presents an impasse between those who grew up in the periods before the Digital Realm and those who grew up under its shadow.  

Granted, how certain can someone be if these trends are occurring only in America? As the author of the American Affairs article reported:

“There is truth in all of this; the securing of a productive entente between human life and digital technology may be the most pressing social question of our time. But contemporary generational analysis tells us little about how to reach it. In fact, it tells us little about Zoomers at all. None of the analysts have sufficiently explained why and how American young people were primed for such a swift emotional implosion when life was digitized. This failure becomes particularly glaring when we realize that not everywhere on earth has seen a technologically induced explosion in youth despair and neuroticism. Twenge’s arguments to the contrary are unconvincing. It may be, as she writes, that since 2012, reported teenage loneliness has doubled in Europe, the English-speaking countries, and Latin America, and has increased by 65 percent in Asia; and that the smartphone shock seems to have generally increased youth distress throughout the nations of the West, especially in the Anglosphere. But the mild increase in distress (from 15 to 20 percent) among thirteen- to fifteen-year-old Swedish boys after 2010, which she uses to prove her point, seems hardly worth the graph, especially when compared to their female compatriots and their American counterparts.

More importantly, an axiom only needs a few exceptions to become inadequate. A recent literature review has found no evidence for a smartphone-induced mental health crisis in Hungary, the Netherlands, and (strangely, though this is the one counterexample corroborated by Twenge) South Korea. Youth self-harm rates in Sweden and Denmark actually fell after the introduction of the smartphone. In Japan, frequent Instagram use is associated with decreased symptoms of distress among young adults, though Twitter has the opposite relationship. As the shock of the digital subsides and 2010s-style techno-pessimism grows stale, we have a chance to realize that, over the broad surface of the earth, different forms of life subsist. The world is thankfully larger than the American high school, though not overwhelmingly so.”

Both the author and I are in agreement that certain trends associated with the national educational system are responsible for those effects. In The Third Place, I argued that the rise of the OECD-Type Student Economy that matured in the 1970s played an instrumental role in curtailing the passions of youth. The OECD-Type Student Economy emerged as a reaction to the implications posed by the 1960s Counterculture and the determination by the Liberal Capitalists to ensure that a youth movement on the scale of 1968 would not only be incapable of achieving worldwide reach but also be rendered unable to organize into anything coherent.

“A large study from the early 2000s found that most mothers restricted their children’s outdoor play, with 82 percent citing ‘safety concerns, including fear of crime, as reasons for doing so.’ By 2021, the CDC found that 86 percent of high schoolers experienced ‘high parental monitoring,’ defined as a student’s parents knowing ‘most of the time or always . . . where they were going or whom they would be with’—a rate that was remarkably consistent across racial groups. Katie Julian has also noted that ‘parents today spend significantly more hours caring for children than parents did 50 years ago,’ despite an increase in hours worked outside the home. Between the 1970s and the turn of the millennium, children ‘lost about 12 hours per week in free time.’ Parents lose out in this new order; so, too, do their overmanaged children.”

What is very interesting about the article is that the author, citing Christopher Lasch, maintained that the roots of the OECD-Type Student Economy began in the late 19^th century. This is significant insofar as national educational systems did not become standardized until around the turn of the 20^th century.

“Parental supervision, however, is not the only—or even the primary—form of therapeutic control. More important is the ongoing overreach of what we can call the therapeutic system—a disjointed and pious apparatus of well-meaning mental health professionals, social workers, and school administrators in symbiosis with the state—into both private life and civic institutions. Christopher Lasch, always more interesting as a historian than a cultural critic, traced the emergence of this system to the professional-class reaction of the late nineteenth century, but noted that it did not become hegemonic among the middle class until after the coming of the Cold War. It has remade the world of the young in its image, eroding their capacity for spontaneous organization and self-government, in favor of stage-managed dialogue, sterile ‘extracurriculars,’ and arbitration mediated by school administrators. Along with the ‘urban renewal’ campaigns of midcentury came the clearing away of the messy and enchanted world of children’s culture, with its recessed treehouses, deep politics, and ‘codes of oral legislation’ for everything from contract enforcement to property disputes.”

Such behavior is acceptable in a Liberal Capitalist Parliamentary Democracy, wherein the purpose of the national educational system is to churn out compliant Private Citizens of a Civil Society that is beholden to the Market/Mixed Economy and the Parliament that supports it with vast Quantities of Kapital and Schuld. It is also permissible in a World Wide Web (WWW) where the Digital Realm is merely an escape from the Real World rather than a medium to coordinate actions back in the Real World.     

When transposed into a Conservative Socialist Council Democracy, this behavior is counterproductive to the purposes of the SSE, the VCS Economy, the Council State, and the National Intranet. The Student Body loses the ability to govern themselves as part of the Student government, which translates into their inability to participate in the political processes of the Social Forums on the National Intranet and the Chambers of the Council State. In the VCS Economy, the effects of Economic Socialization (ES) are weakened, resulting in lower possibilities of Students getting together to form Small Businesses, Workshops, and Cooperatives that might someday leave the Student Tournament and enter the VCS Economy’s Tournament as part of the workforce. Add the issue of families being overburdened by countless other things and there is no way any political-economic governance is going to be reliable or effective.

“Could the supposedly overinvested helicopter parents pick up the slack in the interim? Perhaps so—if the family itself was not rapidly weakening. The dual thrust of declining male incomes and increasing reliance on the therapeutic system (chiefly in the form of expensive childcare), described early on by Lasch in his 1977 Haven in a Heartless World, has likely contributed to this. The process has been swift: Twenge writes that “36% of [Gen Z] babies were born to unmarried mothers, up from 25% during the Millennial birth years.” The breakdown of the family, which so preoccupied midcentury sociologists as a problem peculiar to the black community, has now spread to all but the educated elite (the divorce rate is at a fifty-year low, entirely because the marriage rate is at an all-time low; in Massachusetts, the former has fallen by 32 percent since just 2011). Only 38 percent of zoomers grew up having nightly family dinners, compared to 46 percent of millennials, 59 percent of Gen Xers, 76 percent of boomers, and 84 percent of silents. Smaller family sizes have led 39 percent of Zoomers to report feeling ‘lonely at least once a week growing up,’ compared to similarly descending numbers across the older generations.”

“As young men and women anxiously retreat from each others’ lives and men drop out of the college circuit—soon two-thirds of college graduates will be women—we appear to be comfortably returning to premodern patterns of male success, in which the clear majority of men fail to reproduce, without a whisper of social upheaval. As Twenge writes, Zoomers are ‘on track to be the generation with the largest number of single people in US history and the lowest birthrate on record.’ It is easy to forget that the American birthrate was above replacement as recently as 2008. It is not so preposterous to think that the majority of Zoomers will not have children. At work here is a logic much deeper than material decline: it is the increasing inability of men and women to reach an attractive settlement of life.”

To tie back to my conclusions about the origins of Pan-Germanic Socialism, I also discovered that my generation is suffering from the very problems that the Ideology’s precursors, the Lebensreformbewegung (Life-Reform Movement), decried in the 19^th century. Why yes, the very same movement that would later become influential in the 1960s Counterculture!

“One last aspect of our collective arrested development must now be discussed: that its causes are, in part, physiological. Zoomers are the most chronically ill generation in modern history, and this despite the generational declines in smoking, drug use, precocious sex, and even fast food. Sleep deprivation and stress can explain some, but not all, of our mental and physical distress. The rapid proliferation of chronic health disorders since roughly 1970—autoimmune diseases, autism, allergies, obesity, dysbiosis and maladaptation of the human microbiome, among others—is necessarily concentrated among the newest members of society, and appears to be caused by a variety of environmental stressors: adulterated food, various toxins, perhaps some degree of iatrogenesis. Twenge, to her credit, notes that rising childhood obesity cannot be explained by dietary choices alone, and while she makes a plausible argument that the iPhone shock has led to a marginal acceleration in weight gain—’between 2012 and 2019,’ she writes, ‘the number of preschool and elementary school age children who were physically active less than half of days doubled,’ and the rate of increase in BMI doubled during the Covid pandemic—neither sedentism nor the post-2012 surge in sleep deprivation can explain the general trend. Over half of Americans now suffer from a chronic illness.”

Even so, I remain confident that the generation I know I am a part of, Generation Z, is fully aware that something is wrong in the world that improvements are needed. The problem is that the vast majority of them wander too much, constantly searching on the World Wide Web for their solutions. It is not like those search engine algorithms are helping them find things.  

“In spite of all conditioning to the contrary, Zoomers do seem to believe that the world can change. According to Katz, 27 percent of Zoomers believe that the U.S. political system needs ‘some’ reform, while 40 percent believe that it needs ‘a lot’ of reform. She cites a study of Zoomer life goals that finds that, after a ‘happy marriage or life partnership,’ Zoomers rank ‘having a positive impact on the world’ above all other options, including, in order, career success, ‘having fun,’ realizing one’s potential, and having a good education. Twenge notes that three out of four Zoomers desire ‘significant changes’ in the ‘fundamental design and structure’ of the government. Both authors also document an emerging metropolitan hegemony in outlook among both Millennials and Zoomers, superficially anti-systemic in inclination or at least mood, which is subsuming the two-camp Kulturkampf of our parents. Commendably, Katz identifies a streak of “stagnatophobia” among Zoomers—we are afraid not of change, but of the possibility that things will continue on as they are.”

“Of course we know nothing of politics: we do not know its preconditions. None of us ever stormed a cemetery at the head of a teeming host of grade schoolers. Those who consider themselves high-octane activists would do well to consider that until around 1960, many American public high schools had a more energetic network of secret societies than any university existing in the developed world today. These were capable of remarkable feats of organization: in the Chicago of 1902, after football team captains arrived to practice and found, to their indignation, that they had been usurped by professional coaches—the failed drill sergeant and the Little League dad had yet to emerge as archetypes on the schoolyard scene—the societies initiated a wave of mass protests which lasted for six years, stopping only when the courts intervened. Between the Progressive Era and the Cold War, school boards and courts crushed these groups and replaced them with the supervised form of ‘extracurriculars’ which every student knows today, but as late as 1952, a single school district in Portland, Oregon, counted 280 such societies.”

Unlike the Millennials, my generation has not given up yet. I am certain that enough of them continue to remain restless to desire something better than the status quo. The challenge is whether they are capable of learning from the Millennials’ failures and avoid repeating those mistakes themselves. That remains to be seen, however.

“Nostalgia for the political age—usually expressed in the desire for some sort of ‘revolution’ and a return to the class organization of the early twentieth century—seems to have died with the millennials. Given their qualities, goals, and choice of tactics, their failure comes as no surprise. Zoomers are, at least, more honest; we seem to be interested in securing the basics of life, some personal settlement with a heartless world, and little else besides. There is dignity in this—a chastened, mercenary attitude is what the age demands. Where Millennials made poor leaders, Zoomers may yet make good followers. But we should not delude ourselves with the thought that we have broken with the fundamental attitude of the millennials. One of Katz’s interviewees put it well: ‘sometimes it feels like we’re screaming at these institutions to take care of us, at least together.’ This is the clearest articulation of the social contract of the therapeutic system that you will find among the young. Against it there have been no credible demands for autonomy or self-rule, political or material change.

In truth we have forgotten the very meaning of ‘change,’ because we are unable to reckon honestly with the current state of our living and to name the forces which made us this way. ‘Change’ for us is something abstract, something to be invoked only when it is impossible to imagine. It is a picture hung superfluously on the wall of a barrack whose confines we have mistaken for the edges of the world.

Still, we can at least say that we are on the right track. The spirit of the age is closer to that of Brezhnev’s Russia, numbed and deadened into stability, than it is to the tedious self-expression of Abbie Hoffman’s America. Residual skeptics will see the burgeoning desire to have one’s own garden—ashamed though we are to acknowledge its pull—and talk only of bourgeois capitulation. But since so much of the intercourse of national life is denied us and so many of the basic functions of the social order have frayed, any escape must proceed downward. Not into ourselves, no—there is very little to be found there—but toward the very fundamentals of life; ad fontes, to the source, as the humanists said. Activism, politics, and even high policy have become increasingly unintelligible, impotent before the deeper problems of the age—to say nothing of “ideas” or “philosophy.” Our age can only be one of preconditions. Our highest and only accessible task is to take stock of our resources and our technology, and through them recover the possibility of human development.”

Categories: Philosophy

Tags: Digital Realm, Economics, Education, Finance, National Intranet, Philosophy, Politics, Psychology, Socialist Finance, Socialist Student Economy, Technology, Third Place, Total Educational Effort, Total Mobilization, Work-Standard