The inhuman generation

The conservative-leaning American newspaper Washington Times published a gunslinger entitled “The Inhuman Generation”, a heavy indictment of young people, branded as “inhuman”. The embarrassing example of a correct thesis expressed with the wrong arguments and targets. The author is outraged at the pro-Palestinian stance of so many young Americans, particularly students. He therefore concludes that they have become inhumane. Strange that they have realized this only now; the terrible affair in Gaza has lifted the masks and revealed the genuine feelings. The so-called left has found its favored ground again, the oppressed/oppressor divide. It is not difficult before indiscriminate massacres of a landless population. The so-called right-wing trots out its basic argument, the good, civilized, advanced West being attacked by barbarians, the symbol of which would be Israel.

If the new generations become inhumane, it is not their fault. Millennials and Generation Z are how the adult generation is shaping them, in America and the rest of the empire. The article deprecates that they have in their minds “diversity, equity and inclusion since elementary school. The social-emotional learning propagated by the left should have put them in touch with feelings and made them compassionate and understanding. Instead, it has made them insensitive and ignorant about humanity. It has led them to belittle human life and made them ignorant of atrocities, advocates of a culture of death”.

True, except that the “left” is only the executive apparatus, the purveyor of a worldview that would not succeed without the 'approval and funding of the ruling classes. “Awakened” liberal progressive ideology, neo-language, political correctness and the erasure of received heritage are dominant because they are embraced and imposed by the oligarchy. “Cultural” Marxism is one of the sources-not the only one-but principal and beneficiary is the minority of the very rich and very powerful who thrive on the division of peoples and the destruction of common values, levees to their domination. If we become inhumane, here are the culprits.

Conservative thinking shows all its limitations. Scratch the conservative and you find the liberal; moreover, the position is trivially defensive. Constructiveless whining. Right is that generations - not from today, but from half a century – “have grown up in a world where we deny the humanity of the unborn, suppress those lives and call it health care. We approve the murder of the elderly and infirm, calling it compassion”. Too bad that the related laws, the result of common sense formed over time, were not opposed, and then approved, accepted, sometimes vindicated, by self-styled conservative politics.

There is little point in pointing to “leftist professors who gloss over the murder of tens of millions of innocent people at the hands of communists, socialists and fascists”. The academic class has been placed in tenure in America in private universities designed to train the ruling class with the consent of the upper classes. Those who pay the players decide the music. They promote today's radicalism to (de)train docile, ignorant, unreflective, non-antagonistic generations, as in other times they preferred values compatible with the interests of the moment.

“Today's youth are taught moral equivalence in the name of pluralism and respect for the beliefs of others. They are taught that there are no objective truths. The left invents victims and suppresses personal responsibility. They manipulate science and call it fact”. But where were the conservatives, the moderates, the well-thinking people of yesterday when “the left” occupied the culture? Did they ever react to the fact that the ruling class-industrialists, business leaders, the top echelons of finance-put that “leftist” in the chair, at the head of newspapers, in publishing houses, in entertainment?

Having lost the game by renunciation, they shed crocodile tears. They sound the alarm after a slumber that began in the 1960s. The stable is empty, the oxen have changed masters. Ridiculous to exchange effects for causes and blame the youth after not lifting a finger to educate them, defend them, provide them with an alternative vision. Certain signals had been crystal clear for decades and were picked up, in the U.S., by intellectuals just as “leftist” as the attacking villains. Say anything Allan Bloom and The Closing of the American Mind, Christopher Lasch, with The Rebellion of the Elites and The Culture of Narcissism? Robert Hughes, the first to point out the drifts of political correctness and victimhood radicalism (The Culture of Whining) was anything but a reactionary.

The Pavlovian reflex of the American right snaps at the word socialism, throwing everything into the same cauldron. “National boundaries mean nothing. Social planning from cradle to grave is good. The advance of socialism, the death of privacy and growing malevolence in society are not threats to the future. Climate change and white supremacy are”. Of what advancement of socialism in the time of privatization of everything is unknown, nor do they seem to understand that the death of borders, identities and national communities is the consequence of globalism, the planetary (and proprietary) domination of the hyperclass that controls industry, finance, economics, governments, language, culture. Without wielding hammer and sickle.  Once again, when pointing to the moon, the wise man looks at the star and the fool at the finger.

They tear their robes because many young people in New York City, capital of the awakened, liberal and progressive, inclusive and tolerant world, “are indifferent or do not believe in the Holocaust”. We do not comment on the merits, however, we observe that the spread of ignorance, the destruction of historical and philosophical thought is the child of an education that for three generations has merely trained for specific tasks without providing culture or keys to understanding the world. It is not communists who are the beneficiaries of the faults of a generation bent over the smartphone, hyper-connected, uprooted from all belonging, to whom the most varied addictions are offered in exchange for political, civil, ethical disengagement. It was the U.S. “Deep State” that financed the forms of art, music, entertainment that led to mass deculturation. They, too, introduced synthetic drugs in the Roaring Sixties and Seventies. Those generations teach what they learned.

For the Washington Times, “the same people behind the boycott [of Israel], militant censorship, the culture of victimhood, abortion-on-demand and drugs on every street corner are the ones turning these young people into an increasingly atheistic Marxist force inside American society that belittles the value of human life”. Wonderful diagnosis lacking the history (the causes) and prognosis. Also missing is the recognition that Marxism is the natural child of real liberalism. Deprecating anti-Jewish sentiment, silent on the fact that the State of Israel is a geopolitical creation of Anglo-American elites as well as the tenacious will of Jews.

The neo-conservative prose calls out Christians, who “have been under attack by socialists for years. Even students who support Hamas are anti-Christian”. Marxism's faults with religions are enormous, but today anti-Christian is Western civilization. They are liberal-liberals who arrest those who pray in front of abortion clinics, who deny evidence of nature, deny the intangibility of life, spread euthanasia-state murder-against the poor, sick, depressed, now even drug addicts. Squeezed like lemons and thrown like garbage. If Nazism is absolute evil, does it not occur to them that they are on the same path?

In America it is carnage of young people dying from drugs but no one is stopping the rise of fentanyl. Children and young boys are being pushed into sex change through powerful and terrible drugs, but inhumane would be the victims, not the bad teachers.  Kids would become inhumane because they “increasingly choose the nihilistic existence promoted by the masters of addictive platforms like Instagram and TikTok. The left, Zuckerberg, and China transmit more information to young people in the U.S. every day than TV news broadcasts do in a month. Generation Z Americans spend up to five hours a day on TikTok, controlled by an atheist communist opponent. Are we to believe that this does not affect their worldview? “All the fault of the Evil Dragon, although Instagram, Facebook, X, are owned by Americans. No wonder the woke inculture wins, if the opponents are of this level.

“Many college students today are more lonely, more depressed, have no strong friendships, are addicted to pornography and use drugs. Democrats have created an inhumane generation, and any effort to change these hardened hearts will take courage and time”.  Truths soiled by ridicule. After the teachers, the Marxists, the Chinese, here are other culprits of all evil, the “Democrats”, in the party sense. It is hardly worth remembering that since 1968 the U.S. Democrats have been in government for a shorter time than their opponents. Let's face it: left and right share the same mental horizon, they have overlapping ideas on 'economics, social organization, finance; they serve the same power centers, whose internal currents they constitute. More nuanced is the question of differences on the ethical foundations of society, but the right is often a lagging left: conservatives simply deprecate, shake their heads and accept everything, as long as the sacred Market is not touched.

Generations become inhuman because such is the whole system of power. Roused by addictions of various kinds (consumption, drugs, alcohol, sex, pornography, high, gambling, drugs) they cannot but become individualistic. Addiction centers one on oneself, makes one accept everything in the name of induced need fulfillment, makes one selfish, cynical, even inhuman. No one, however, counters addictions on an anthropological level, in the name of the Market, which is not Marxist. Again, for the Market's measure of all things, no one breathes a word for the addiction to continuous connection in which young people live, the chatter of insults and statements the more lapidary the greater the ignorance.

We should ask their forgiveness for how we have reduced them, not accuse them because they have fewer filters (and less hypocrisy) than the mature generations. The disvalues they practice are the ones they find in society. Madam, the catalog is this. They are afraid of missing out on something-experiences, consumption-and experts have theorized a new syndrome, the Fomo, fear of missing out, the fear of exclusion that makes conformists. They do not engage as everything is just a click away, in fact they drop intelligence. Application and perseverance are discredited: by us, the adults. Ignorant and conformist, chained to the commodity form, persuaded that the existing is the “only one” (there is no alternative, power repeats) obvious that they shy away from debate and, fragile as we have shaped them, demand protection, security, expulsion of any alternative thought that forces confrontation. Thus, formatted and reset, they are functional to power, which does not have those who challenge it, the role of each new generation. As equality is transformed into equivalence, that is, indifference, it becomes an alibi for disengagement and for demanding the chastisement of those who disturb the sleep of reason.

Inhuman is forgetting the Other, the lonely crowd, the smart (cunning...) life of those who work from home, remotely supervised by artificial apparatuses of which they become offshoots, in an incredible reversal of roles. Inhumane is to have no more teachers, amid distance education, disinterest in knowledge and superstitious admiration of a narrow specialism. The further stage is the erasure of questions of meaning with respect to existential issues, the dependence on fashions, uncritically assumed and just as quickly abandoned to the master's whistle. Other “inhuman” addictions are the fear of not being “like others”, that is, as power prescribes, and stress over anything that requires effort or decision.

Yes, many young people are inhuman: they have learned from us without developing a thought of their own. We have depoliticized them, denatured them, anesthetized them. The shocking news is a generation that does not want to grow up and does not ask questions.  Dehumanized, not dehumanized. They are our children, so our generation has lost. A momentous defeat in which the faults of the fathers fall on the sons. Where were you, where were we, conservatives of my boots?

Translation by Costantino Ceoldo