To spoil the child

NOTE: Please insert all your own “not alls.” I will not be peppering my generalizations with “not all”. You must supply your own, recognizing that I understand there are always exceptions.

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We have been raising spoiled, stunted children in the West for at least two generations. Millennials had maturity problems previously unseen in young adults. Gen Z is worse.

When I criticize the deficiencies of the younger generations, as I will here, it is not out of pride. I do not want to “gotcha” younger people. My ego does not grow two sizes larger by “cutting down” younger people.

Though Gen Z is hostile to older people like me, and though they don’t believe this, some of us older people genuinely care about them. I am one. I want to help younger people raise themselves to a higher level, as caring adults did for me when I was young and lost.

Young people today have, through no fault of their own, a distorted and false view of themselves. They believe they have knowledge they do not have. They believe they have wisdom, when what they have is simply a generational prejudice. Their parents and teachers have praised them for substandard work and behavior their whole lives; why wouldn’t they think they know better than some stupid 50-year-old?

The modern (and never before seen in living memory) inversion of values permeates every level of culture. Here are some of those inversions. They are not only inversions of values, they are inversions of objective reality:

1. Young people know more than older people

2. Young people have a more finely tuned moral compass and know what society should do better than real adults

3. Young people are much more compassionate than older adults

4. Young people have the social and moral right to scoff at, abuse, and “correct” older people who do not flatter the young population’s view of itself


These are problems, not progress. And they are not minor problems; they are potentially civilization-ending problems. It is not a coincidence that we saw the cultural elevation of the young over the old in Hitler Youth, and in Mao’s cultural revolution. This inversion alerts us that we are in a Bolshevik mode.