05-20-2021, 11:55 AM
(05-19-2021, 11:45 PM)X Marks the Spot Wrote: In this article from the Atlantic, Jean Twenge disses Millennials.
https://www.theatlantic.com/national/arc...ic/256638/
Twenge writes: "The first books written about Millennials were not just positive but glowing. The best known of these, Millennials Rising, is subtitled The Next Great Generation. Authors Neil Howe and William Strauss predicted that Millennials would resemble the generation who fought World War II: conformist, socially conservative, and highly involved in the community and interested in government. 'Once this new youth persona begins to focus on convention, community, and civic renewal, America will be on the brink of becoming someplace very new,' they write."
But you Millennials ARE conformist, socially conservative, and highly involved in the community and interested in government!
Social conservatism is compatible with greater equality in economic result. Great disparities of wealth and poverty are not consistent with conformity. Maybe such requires acquiescence of the working poor in their own deprivation, but that implies that people are already defeated in the struggle for human dignity.
People start turning to their immediate community when the overall society fails politically and economically. Consider how large numbers of people who had no jobs started small businesses in the 1930's; many of the corporate behemoths had failed, and when you see attorneys and accountants becoming clerks instead of bureaucrats you may wonder what sorts of opportunities exist. People decide very often to create their own opportunities, once often expressed by people selling apples at street corners. Some such people ended up opening grocery and dry-goods stores. Two of those were Sam Walton and Hendrik Meijer.
So you think small and stay put, and commit everything to a low-yield activity from which you cannot run away. A low yield is better than no yield, even if the yield is basically a low income that comes from your travails. Oddly the 1930's were the best time for starting a business because labor was cheap, employees were able to get their relatives to be a reliable base of customers, real estate was cheap, and inventory and raw materials were available at fire-sale prices without the aroma of smoke. As the overall economy improves the profits become much larger than private-sector pay.
Americans are much more conformist than you might believe at first. Americans have not cast off traditions wildly; if anything we have multiple traditions competing for allegiance and for economic roles.
Quote:She also writes: "Howe and Strauss were right about other trends -- rates of teen pregnancy, early sexual intercourse, alcohol abuse, and youth crime have continued to decline. However, these behaviors aren't related at all to civic orientation, and have a tangential relationship at best to the desire to help others or contribute to society. They are also determined by many factors beyond generational attitudes, such as demographics, drug wars, policing, birth control availability, and even -- as the authors of Freakonomics argued -- the legalization of abortion."
But those trends suggest the conformity of peer pressure. People accused peer pressure of getting 2T-era kids to do drugs and petty crime... except that many youth polarized into their own cliques that disapproved of drugs, crime, and promiscuity. Some people succeed and some fail, and those who reject really-bad habits (drugs, crime, and promiscuity) are more likely to succeed if they get the chance. Those who have those bad habits fail if they get opportunity offered to them on a silver platter.
Quote:No, Millennials have decreased teen pregnancy, alcohol abuse and crime because they're a buncha wholesome Scouts! S&H got it right, foo's!
They saw what happened to X'ers who did those things, and it wasn't pretty.
Quote:Why do so many people fail to see the social conservatism and conformism of Millennials?
Americans are conforming to different traditions. if you are to suggest two ethnic groups that statistically do well, Jews and Chinese-Americans have very different traditions, and they could never adopt the ways of each other. But statistically they do certain things much the same, like putting a high value on formal education.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.
