Seems like some young people failing to see authority in the older generation anchor themselves in the virtual authority of ideology- with a vengeance.
Part of me wonders just how “new” this phenomenon is. I see endless books, podcasts, news appearances, etc, about how the younger generation is losing their mind and the older generation needs to reassert themselves to dampen their destabilizing influence.
While I agree with this, there has always been tension between older and younger generations in different times and different cultures. In some cases, revolutions happen because of this. I think the same dynamic is occurring now, just with different generations and different circumstances.
Although I don’t really believe in rigid “cycles of history”, this is one dynamic that I don’t see going anyway anytime soon. Tensions rise, things change, and what was once considered new and revolutionary becomes common. The older generation suddenly retaking their authority to spread wisdom and knowledge to a pew of attentive younger people would bring them back to reality. But in the long run, such a practice leads to stagnation. When you’re older, your thinking becomes static, your habits congeal, you grow risk averse and conservative, and you are more interested in keeping things the same.
The younger generation is mostly the opposite, and given how consistent this has been across time and culture, I increasingly see this as a biological necessity. It’s precisely because young people don’t know all that much that they are so eager to change things in their own image, as they have no other frame of reference or deep knowledge base to draw from. The presence of such people is terrible for a society that is mostly stable, but stability without change is stagnation. It’s under conditions of upset that change happens, for better AND for worse. We can then look back and see what went right, what went wrong, and what emerged contrary to our expectations. This gives us even more knowledge in the long run.
It would surprise me if this was new phenomenon given that the psychology (and its roots in how the brain functions) at play here is a fundamental part of humans. To argue otherwise you would have to look to some external change (e.g. a new technology) that scrambled how this basic psychology operated. Maybe there is such an explanation, but I am not aware of what it might be.
I thank the excess of the women's movement for this along with the corresponding greed pursuits of the upper rent-seeking, looting and gambling class (aka Wall Street class) that have in just a couple of generations elevated females to a position of social and family dominance.
I remember Jospeh Campbell talking about how he noted successful cultures that progress members from MOTHER'S-CHILD --> FATHER'S CHILD --> ADULT.
My mother, God rest her soul, if given the keys of control to the job of raising her kids, would have pulled much of the required tough-love discipline that my father dished out. It is biological that mothers nurture and shower their kids with unconditional love. It is required for healthy early childhood development, but it is detrimental when continued into the teen years when kids test their independence to learn how to be independent.
The shift described here I think is a massive demographic change in how children are raised. They are missing the FATHER'S CHILD era. Then these kids grow up and have their own kids and lacking the experience of FATHER'S CHILD, they gravitate to a style of parenting that never implements the FATHER'S CHILD tough love that teaches behavior and consequences.
Just about everything critically wrong with society today I can connect to this never-before-in-history rise of female dominance. It is evolutionarily incorrect.
Sometimes adolescence seems like a mental disease with a roller coaster of emotions catapulting one from the heights of euphoria to the depths of despair. Excruciating self-consciousness or unwarranted over-confidence often drive behavior that one immediately regrets with embarrassment, humiliation and shame - or smug indifference. All of this is driven by unaccustomed surges of hormones that are only smoothed out and regulated with age. While there is a huge difference between the sexes in over-confidence, girls, while in their teens, have the highest level of testosterone they will ever experience and have the highest levels of risky, callous, violent behavior they'll (collectively) ever exhibit. So is adolescence a medical problem? Boys have to deal with often sudden, barely controllable sexual urges, yet receive little help in preparing them to deal with these biological facts that may derail their chances in life.
Can seem to remember Aristotle writing about the indignant, lack of respect, wasting time and energy of the young, have things really changed, or are they just better documented?
As in the past, much depended on whose child it was, which often made the pushback varied. Though for those caught actually breaking the law, especially if their parent was an elected officer, the penalties tended to be stronger, to enforce the idea that no one was above the law.
There is a lot of wisdom in this article. However, I tend to think the older generation was raised with more values. In general, mothers stayed at home, and many people attended church. Not that these conditions were ideal or are required for a well-raised young person. Things were just different back then. Today, it seems the majority of mothers work, and church attendance is on a downward trend. As the article pointed out, young people don't seem to have a strong sense of ethics anymore, and many appear to be very angry. At the same time, not every older person offers true wisdom--some were not open to learning anything while progressing through life. Parents need to provide more quality guidance when children are young. The questions are complicated. At 73 years of age, I'm not sure I have all the answers.
From your research, you found that younger adults "deemed actions like tax evasion or theft as more permissible...and rated physical violence...as more permissible." What was the time period of the datasets used? I think it would be interesting to do meta-analysis of studies that span at least 5 decades to understand how the views of younger adults change compared to older adults. When you add the year the data was collected as a variable, is it a significant predictor of the attitudes of young adults? Was there a smaller gap between the attitudes of young and old adults in the 1980s, for example?
From my personal observations, of some young people, I think that something else like a degree of paranoia should be added in the mix. Some are adopting a fake personality in order to establish themselves in the society. That kind of thinking may start in the teen years when the there is a lot of peer pressure in the high school.
No age group is a monolith of unified behavior per se to me, though some of this rings true certainly.
As I reflect about various undercurrents about boomers and seniors (outside of owning their place perhaps in sharing wisdom), I think about seniors who don’t need the wealth transfers of social safety nets and yet get them. I also think about the number of seniors living in poverty and growing population of the unhoused. As a whole, how do the economic prospects of today’s Gen Z contrast to boomers back in time.
Last take a listen to this podcast with older millennial and MacArthur Fellow Jason Reynolds. He is really phenomenal with words and emotions in his storytelling He keys up a way in which we can actually ask questions to truly engage the young and show we are interested in their lives. The podcast episode is titled being young in America. https://onbeing.org/programs/jason-reynolds-and-kessley-janvier-on-being-young-in-america/
I think a lot of moral authority is being wrested away from older generations as GenX approaches retirement age. It was cool for 18-20YO baby boomers to have a beer; not so for GenX. It was groundbreaking for boomers to helicopter parent; not so for GenX. Now in the workplace it's all Millennials and GenZ, while GenXers are being shown the door.
GenX was promised so much as we got older (usually by being denied it while younger), and now that we are older, the script has been flipped.
I think it's less of a surrender than never being handed the baton, or having it denied to us, or being put in a corner by a younger generation with broad societal support.
Seems like some young people failing to see authority in the older generation anchor themselves in the virtual authority of ideology- with a vengeance.
This.
Part of me wonders just how “new” this phenomenon is. I see endless books, podcasts, news appearances, etc, about how the younger generation is losing their mind and the older generation needs to reassert themselves to dampen their destabilizing influence.
While I agree with this, there has always been tension between older and younger generations in different times and different cultures. In some cases, revolutions happen because of this. I think the same dynamic is occurring now, just with different generations and different circumstances.
Although I don’t really believe in rigid “cycles of history”, this is one dynamic that I don’t see going anyway anytime soon. Tensions rise, things change, and what was once considered new and revolutionary becomes common. The older generation suddenly retaking their authority to spread wisdom and knowledge to a pew of attentive younger people would bring them back to reality. But in the long run, such a practice leads to stagnation. When you’re older, your thinking becomes static, your habits congeal, you grow risk averse and conservative, and you are more interested in keeping things the same.
The younger generation is mostly the opposite, and given how consistent this has been across time and culture, I increasingly see this as a biological necessity. It’s precisely because young people don’t know all that much that they are so eager to change things in their own image, as they have no other frame of reference or deep knowledge base to draw from. The presence of such people is terrible for a society that is mostly stable, but stability without change is stagnation. It’s under conditions of upset that change happens, for better AND for worse. We can then look back and see what went right, what went wrong, and what emerged contrary to our expectations. This gives us even more knowledge in the long run.
It would surprise me if this was new phenomenon given that the psychology (and its roots in how the brain functions) at play here is a fundamental part of humans. To argue otherwise you would have to look to some external change (e.g. a new technology) that scrambled how this basic psychology operated. Maybe there is such an explanation, but I am not aware of what it might be.
I thank the excess of the women's movement for this along with the corresponding greed pursuits of the upper rent-seeking, looting and gambling class (aka Wall Street class) that have in just a couple of generations elevated females to a position of social and family dominance.
I remember Jospeh Campbell talking about how he noted successful cultures that progress members from MOTHER'S-CHILD --> FATHER'S CHILD --> ADULT.
My mother, God rest her soul, if given the keys of control to the job of raising her kids, would have pulled much of the required tough-love discipline that my father dished out. It is biological that mothers nurture and shower their kids with unconditional love. It is required for healthy early childhood development, but it is detrimental when continued into the teen years when kids test their independence to learn how to be independent.
The shift described here I think is a massive demographic change in how children are raised. They are missing the FATHER'S CHILD era. Then these kids grow up and have their own kids and lacking the experience of FATHER'S CHILD, they gravitate to a style of parenting that never implements the FATHER'S CHILD tough love that teaches behavior and consequences.
Just about everything critically wrong with society today I can connect to this never-before-in-history rise of female dominance. It is evolutionarily incorrect.
Sometimes adolescence seems like a mental disease with a roller coaster of emotions catapulting one from the heights of euphoria to the depths of despair. Excruciating self-consciousness or unwarranted over-confidence often drive behavior that one immediately regrets with embarrassment, humiliation and shame - or smug indifference. All of this is driven by unaccustomed surges of hormones that are only smoothed out and regulated with age. While there is a huge difference between the sexes in over-confidence, girls, while in their teens, have the highest level of testosterone they will ever experience and have the highest levels of risky, callous, violent behavior they'll (collectively) ever exhibit. So is adolescence a medical problem? Boys have to deal with often sudden, barely controllable sexual urges, yet receive little help in preparing them to deal with these biological facts that may derail their chances in life.
Can seem to remember Aristotle writing about the indignant, lack of respect, wasting time and energy of the young, have things really changed, or are they just better documented?
At least in the past there was more pushback if the observations of this article is correct.
As in the past, much depended on whose child it was, which often made the pushback varied. Though for those caught actually breaking the law, especially if their parent was an elected officer, the penalties tended to be stronger, to enforce the idea that no one was above the law.
There is a lot of wisdom in this article. However, I tend to think the older generation was raised with more values. In general, mothers stayed at home, and many people attended church. Not that these conditions were ideal or are required for a well-raised young person. Things were just different back then. Today, it seems the majority of mothers work, and church attendance is on a downward trend. As the article pointed out, young people don't seem to have a strong sense of ethics anymore, and many appear to be very angry. At the same time, not every older person offers true wisdom--some were not open to learning anything while progressing through life. Parents need to provide more quality guidance when children are young. The questions are complicated. At 73 years of age, I'm not sure I have all the answers.
From your research, you found that younger adults "deemed actions like tax evasion or theft as more permissible...and rated physical violence...as more permissible." What was the time period of the datasets used? I think it would be interesting to do meta-analysis of studies that span at least 5 decades to understand how the views of younger adults change compared to older adults. When you add the year the data was collected as a variable, is it a significant predictor of the attitudes of young adults? Was there a smaller gap between the attitudes of young and old adults in the 1980s, for example?
Age does not necessarily beget wisdom.
There’s nothing worse than an old fool.
From my personal observations, of some young people, I think that something else like a degree of paranoia should be added in the mix. Some are adopting a fake personality in order to establish themselves in the society. That kind of thinking may start in the teen years when the there is a lot of peer pressure in the high school.
Great article. School is a consumer product.
No age group is a monolith of unified behavior per se to me, though some of this rings true certainly.
As I reflect about various undercurrents about boomers and seniors (outside of owning their place perhaps in sharing wisdom), I think about seniors who don’t need the wealth transfers of social safety nets and yet get them. I also think about the number of seniors living in poverty and growing population of the unhoused. As a whole, how do the economic prospects of today’s Gen Z contrast to boomers back in time.
Last take a listen to this podcast with older millennial and MacArthur Fellow Jason Reynolds. He is really phenomenal with words and emotions in his storytelling He keys up a way in which we can actually ask questions to truly engage the young and show we are interested in their lives. The podcast episode is titled being young in America. https://onbeing.org/programs/jason-reynolds-and-kessley-janvier-on-being-young-in-america/
I think a lot of moral authority is being wrested away from older generations as GenX approaches retirement age. It was cool for 18-20YO baby boomers to have a beer; not so for GenX. It was groundbreaking for boomers to helicopter parent; not so for GenX. Now in the workplace it's all Millennials and GenZ, while GenXers are being shown the door.
GenX was promised so much as we got older (usually by being denied it while younger), and now that we are older, the script has been flipped.
I think it's less of a surrender than never being handed the baton, or having it denied to us, or being put in a corner by a younger generation with broad societal support.