Spoiled Rotten (2012)(newyorker.com) |
Spoiled Rotten (2012)(newyorker.com) |
I spent a few days with a young bedouin, who in the absence of his parents, maintained the extended family, had mounted a successful business, spoke several languages fluently, hunted, played the jordanian mandolin, was humble yet strong. He was one of the most stable, centered, culutured, balanced and smart people I've ever met.
All of this at the ripe age of 19.
It made me consider his peers of my EU hometown Paris, and the only thing that came to mind was: Where has it gone so wrong. Western culture is raising generations of weak-minded, watery examples of sloth.
Travel really opens your eyes to the fact that determination, culture and independance are muscles that can be trained, apparently like their physical analogues: through reps.
Sure there is a trend towards helicoptoring that punches above its weight in our media, but there are plenty of solid, well-adjusted American kids in college too.
"Kids these days aint shit" it never ends and we can always find enough examples to prove it to our satisfaction if we want to.
This is a dangerous, deadly cycle as it produces a society where more and more people are incapable of acting independent and looking out for themselves.
And what is our answer to this? Utopian phantasies like unconditional basic income for everyone, because why can't we all just sit at home and play video games instead of doing something productive for ourselves and our society?
I'm not against social security per se, but it should only be available to those who objectively can't survive without outside help.
We've perverted this into a system where healthy, capable people can choose to not work and this doesn't hurt just them but the whole of society including businesses because they have to pay for this.
For example in Austria where I am 75% of all taxes are paid by the top 10% of incomes (with a >50% income tax), yet the other 90% still complain that we at the top are all thieves and we should give them more free stuff.
Modern healthcare, farming, family planning, improved access to education, and the liberation of women cause an extended adolescence.
In exchange, you get to live like a king, enjoy unprecedented personal security, have a constant supply of goods from the world over, and very decreased likliehood of dying.
Of course primitive cultures produce more rugged individuals. It's not that their methods of living are superior.
It's that everyone else is already dead.
Being self independent in a modern society means being able to find a job, tie one's shoes, take out the trash, do homework and so on all without active management by the parental units.
It doesn't mean surviving out in the wilderness.
The metric of 'having a constant supply of goods' equating to living like a king seems like a personal opinion.
As the article alludes: material possession appears to have little positive effect towards creating strong independant youth.
So not only they skew the male/female ratio in their age cohorts heavily towards male (Europe should work hard to increase single female immigration to balance, but no one is talking about it), but they posses toughness that few of their contemporaries in the West have - a trait that is generally liked.
The dating game for the people around 16-22 in the areas where the migrant influx is greatest will be quite interesting to observe.
The parallels drawn here unmistakably read like something from Dune
I've observed the exact opposite of the folksyism of this article. Young people with increased play time were able to find more meaningful and more lucrative long term positions due to the luxury of explorations. Those forced to "grow up" early ended up in dead end positions due to suboptimization for short term needs.
But the New Yorker is hung up on the trope of individual success, as is the cultural center they arise from.
1) In the US at least so many people are living away from family and often even friends. My wife and I were essentially on our own. We did not have the wisdom of people who had done it and learned (hence this post and I expect the article ..). We had the general idea of helping, but I certainly think we helped too much (our kids are OK, not living at home for one thing).
2) At least some of American parenting ratcheting-up is a contest among mothers. "I'm a better mother because my daughter takes both piano and horse-riding." It is not a pretty truth, but it is nonetheless a truth.
"With the exception of the imperial offspring of the Ming dynasty and the dauphins of pre-Revolutionary France, contemporary American kids may represent the most indulged young people in the history of the world."
Affluent kids in China are also very much indulged, mostly by grandparents.
The main factor at work here is not a mystery: the demographic transition that began in the West around 1850. When families have 20 children, the children are under pressure to prove their worth to the family, relative to all the other children. They compete with each other to show their worth. But when a family only has one child, the parents and grandparents compete to win the favor of the child.
There are nuances, that vary from country to country, but the primary force at work here is the demographic transition.
This sounds like a really dysfunctional family to me.
https://books.google.com/books?id=LSCf0j5lNeYC&pg=PA142&lpg=...
Also, fitness and kinship:
https://books.google.com/books?id=2XH0CwAAQBAJ&pg=PA113&lpg=...
Define what makes a social dynamic "dysfunctional".
> humans are under pressure to prove their worth to society.
This sounds like a really dysfunctional society to me.[sic]
Lisa makes a lot of sense - even then, it's still only a piece of a massive social jigsaw mindfuck.
The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.
(I know the quote is not really by Socrates)
They are so much more enthusiastic consumers, it would be a real shame if those know-it-all parents could hold them back.
Can you name three such examples?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infanticide
"In many past societies, certain forms of infanticide were considered permissible. In some countries, female infanticide is more common than the killing of male offspring, due to sex-selective infanticide.[3] In China for example, the gender gap between males and females aged 0–19 year old was estimated to be 25 million in 2010 by the United Nations Population Fund."
Also:
"The historical Greeks considered the practice of adult and child sacrifice barbarous,[30] however, the exposure of newborns was widely practiced in ancient Greece, it was even advocated by Aristotle in the case of congenital deformity "
In her Nobel winning novel, The Good Earth, Pearl Buck recounts how the family, during a famine, allows the daughter to starve to death, but then at the last moment the father changes his mind and gives her some food. The child grows up brain damaged, having been deprived of food for several days, when she was only 1 or 2 years old. This part of the novel (like everything else in the novel) has been praised for its realism.
Around the year 610, early in his preaching, one of Muhammad's first revelations from Allah is that parents should no longer leave their newborn daughters to die in the desert. He would not have felt the need to make this pronouncement unless it was a common practice. And remember that his own sister had been set out in the desert and allowed to die as soon as she was born.
And that is the root of the problem.
Finding a job that pays the bills and affords the worker a certain lifestyle is the difficult part.
N.B The parent was edited. The original text was substantially different, and referred to the Bedouin people.
"Why are you saying that Bedouin culture is primitive? By what standard?"
I edited it to better get my point across.
And, by the way, s_b_q, you don't need to be a "relativist" to recognize that using the term "primitive culture" in this context is not only imprecise, but also borders on being racist--regardless of whether we are talking about Jordanian or Bedouin culture--and detracts from the conversation.
Bedouin culture is primitive, in the sense that it resembles the state of earlier societies in history.
It has norms that significantly conflict with basic human rights. Attempting to conflate comparative cultural criticism with racism is nonsense. We should not hesitate to criticize societies that condone the systemic abuse of women, lack basic respect for human dignity, and encourage outright brutality. To that say that culture is primitive is to put it mildly.
Bedouin culture is also significantly different than urban Jordanian culture. Thus editing the question significantly altered the debate.