I’ve meditated on the proposition that, as generations pass, adults are fulfilling the responsibility to raise children to be adults less and less effectively. Various societies used to have tests, implicit or explicit, to pass into adulthood, and perhaps there are still some; I’m not an anthropologist.
But certainly not here in the States, outside of some sects.
Such tests are designed to impress upon the candidate the attitudes considered proper to a successful society. Whether they are appropriate and successful, again, I cannot say. But Erick Erickson’s observations of both left and right actually strike a bell for me:
The Biden Administration was overrun with white upper-income progressives from the non-profit world who’d never had a real job and could not relate to the real world.
The Trump Administration is overrun with the kids from wealthy white elites who live their lives online and have concluded that Twitter is real life because that’s where they spend their time.
The Biden Administration got radicalized by the white guilt of progressives. The Trump Administration got radicalized by an online horde of white kids who have convinced themselves that if it is buzzing on Twitter it must be real.
The elites and the experts deserve a lot of blame for people distrusting them, disregarding them, and discrediting them. But we’ve traded experts trained in a field of study for experts who learned everything they know from Twitter. We’ve gone from the elite of Harvard Yard to repeat residents of a Holiday Inn Express.
It does seem that way, doesn’t it? And Twitter, et al, have imparted important information to the extremists: They are not alone, and here’s more conspiracy theories that must be true, because they’ve been published.
As observed by many pundits, social media is not a communications medium for which we’ve evolved. Of course, that’s true of many mediums, but the lack of negative feedback, which discourages lying, hyperbole, and malice, even with primordial predecessors such as the old Coast to Coast radio program, and it being available 24 hours a day, may constitute a metaphorical further distance from normality than seen before.
And so we become burdened with arrogant young know-it-alls who only know social media. In my surlier moments I suppose I should add Just Like Me.
It’s something to think about, although I can’t imagine how to correct it. From what I read it seems the Ivy League colleges are on the edge of becoming little more than cesspits of autocratic confirmation bias vortices with way too much money to die sooner rather than later.
But we shall see.
