How to Destroy a Generation

I've got news for the author: humans are slightly more clever, slightly less hairy apes, and our feelings have always dominated our logic, what little we have of the latter. You don't have to destroy a generation, because every generation will naturally find various ways to destroy itself.

We evolved to be part of small hunter-gatherer groups. Farming, and thus civilization, is surprisingly recent, a mere 10,000 years old or so. Our monkey brains were never prepared to live together in large anonymous cultures. We are the sorcerer's apprentices, except there's no sorcerer. Our leaders are of the same genetic stock and as apelike as the rest of us.

Whether the author likes it or not, the emotional manipulation genie is out of the bottle. We cannot compete with hundreds of industrial psychologists using attachment theory to bind us to brands, and outrage to sell clicks. We'd have to reorganize our society to reverse the incentive structure of the current arrangement which is ideologically forbidden.

Instead it's easy to predict what will come. Those who are particularly affect will have their consequences individualized - it will be a personal moral failure on their part succumbing to the consequences of that influence, or greedy marketeers, or sadly simply "the way the world works" unable to even be reformed lest we unleash even more negative consequences.

The way out is never back, it's through and it's structural. We used to be able to imagine a different world, a better world.

I think people are thinking of "generation" wrong in this context. It need not mean people born in the 60s or 80s or 2000s, but just the people alive and involved in the social sphere during a time - like right now. I think we have seen a lot of this manipulation across media for the last decade or two but taken to extremes. Whether you are liberal or conservative or something else, many media outlets are spinning a tale that your rights are being violated and the others are bad people who wish to deny you of those rights. Even the same people yelling about their first amendment rights are simultaneously blocking and banning those who have opposing views on any topic. The Us vs Them mentality is being cultivated all around. Taken far enough that people legitimately feel like their existence is under threat, those telling the story can get you to do almost anything, like shoot up a mosque or trash the capital.

It's nothing new. The Nazis, the Cold War, the Satanic panic - we see examples throughout history of how this can lead people to do terrible things.

But I bet a lot of people aren't even aware this is happening to them. Sometimes you need someone to point out the elephant in the room.

Eh, for all the talk about a generation, this feels like it could apply to every generation on social media. Doesn't matter whether they're boomers or generation X, millennials or generation z or generation alpha, they've often withdrawn into echo chambers that reinforce their every belief and lost the ability to think critically about their views (if that was ever a thing before).

But to be honest, something about this article strikes me as either inauthentic or 'off'. Like, it's very light on concrete details or analysis, and written in such a way that it could be applied to whatever group the reader dislikes the most. Admit it, when you read this, who do you think it's talking about? Gen Z with TikTok and Instagram echo chambers? Boomers with Facebook and Fox News? Millennials with Twitter and Reddit and YouTube? Someone else entirely?

The answer is whichever group you're not part of. Or maybe the one you are. It's just so wishy washy with how it's written and so non specific that it feels designed to trigger an emotional response rather than start a debate.

This thesis seems like it could apply to any generation that has achieved a level of sufficient material development to focus on issues higher up on Maslow’s Hierarchy. The postwar boomers. The post-Cold War millennials. Mass media and consumer affluence fuels it, but I don’t think either alone is sufficient.