The Eloi…eventually the Morlocks will come for them.
Jon Bergeron
Jon is an individual. An anti-egalitarian. A man. An aspiring writer/critic. A part-time curmudgeon; full-time American. Jon appreciates any comments, criticism, or encouragement.
Jon can be reached at individualjon@gmail.com
December 10, 2014302 Comments Culture
It is great that most millennials are such pussies. It offers many opportunities to the rest of us, including the well-paying jobs and getting with the most attractive women with little to no effort. It’s like shooting fish in a barrel, except the fish are already dead.
Some competition from time to time keeps us on our toes. However, competition is just non-existence in our post-modern ironic western society because it has been eliminated in favor of apathetic equality. It is a race to the bottom. Deconstruction, irony, and post-modernism is to thank for this. The evolution of winners over losers is pure nonsense to millennials. The “enlightened” mass has figured everything out by marginalizing all that was once great, as if thousands and thousands of years of evolution are reversed with their college degrees in sociology and their mind-blowing master’s thesis on why Star Trek is overtly homophobic.
Do these dumb kids realize the debt of this country is $18 trillion dollars and growing? Does anyone care?
This post-modern deconstruction mentality leads us to our current age of “all equal and all useless,” with no one rising above the herd and reaching the status of “Ubermensch.” Struggle and competition is viewed as arrogant and downright wrong. The truth is that competition and struggle builds character, individuality, and personality. The millennials’ final solution is to deconstruct everything to the point of pointless ridicule in an orgy of failure and lazy self-pity.
Competition hurts feelings, so it must be destroyed. It is frivolous mass thinking. Kant observed this mass thinking years ago in “What is enlightenment?” and made excellent remarks on individualism. Most still don’t get the idea. Emotions are shared by all as one homogenized docile culture without individuality, edge, aggression, or risk; all things that made the U.S great. We live in a castrated culture, and nothing good can come of this.
As David Foster Wallace observed years ago:
Irony’s useful for debunking illusions, but most of the illusion-debunking in the U.S. has now been done and redone…Postmodern irony and cynicism’s become an end in itself, a measure of hip sophistication and literary savvy. Few artists dare to try to talk about ways of working toward redeeming what’s wrong, because they’ll look sentimental and naive to all the weary ironists. Irony’s gone from liberating to enslaving. There’s some great essay somewhere that has a line about irony being the song of the prisoner who’s come to love his cage.The problem is that, however misprised it’s been, what’s been passed down from the postmodern heyday is sarcasm, cynicism, a manic ennui, suspicion of all authority, suspicion of all constraints on conduct, and a terrible penchant for ironic diagnosis of unpleasantness instead of an ambition not just to diagnose and ridicule but to redeem. You’ve got to understand that this stuff has permeated the culture. It’s become our language; we’re so in it we don’t even see that it’s one perspective, one among many possible ways of seeing. Postmodern irony’s become our environment.All U.S. irony is based on an implicit “I don’t really mean what I say.” So what does irony as a cultural norm mean to say? That it’s impossible to mean what you say? That maybe it’s too bad it’s impossible, but wake up and smell the coffee already? Most likely, I think, today’s irony ends up saying: “How very banal to ask what I mean.” Anyone with the heretical gall to ask an ironist what he actually stands for ends up looking like a hysteric or a prig. And herein lies the oppressiveness of institutionalized irony, the too-successful rebel: the ability to interdict the question without attending to its content is tyranny. It is the new junta, using the very tool that exposed its enemy to insulate itself.Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk disapproval. The old postmodern insurgents risked the gasp and squeal: shock, disgust, outrage, censorship, accusations of socialism, anarchism, nihilism. Today’s risks are different.
What we have left with this ironic deconstruction is emasculated juvenile 30-something millennials busy fingerpainting and drawing pictures as if they were five years old and pursuing their careers in “music” and video games. As Wallace observed several years ago, this all has been “done and redone” ad nauseam. These are childish behaviors that should have been abandoned years ago.
Millennials inherit this from the painfully tolerant hippie generation (their arrested development parents) while dodging any real adult responsibility. Millennials and the conformist hippies of yesteryear both believe in impulsive hedonistic nihilism and “living for the moment” with little understanding of struggle, morals, and self-responsibility.
The millennials have little ability to compete and strive to do their best. They don’t want to experience the downs, they only want to experience the ups; the highs. Working towards goals can take years and years of self-discipline and sacrifice, going through a vicious cycle of sadness, happiness, failure, and finally victory. To put it simply, it can be tough work, and they don’t want it.
Millennials want immediate gratification, and they seek impulsive behavior. They even feel entitled to such things. If they do not get what they seek, they see no point in trying. Most represent a lost tribe of self-righteous, ill-mannered pricks. They respect nothing but their own delusional belief of “progress.” Anything seen as constructive, polite, traditional, or sincere in their eyes is immediately ridiculed and attacked.
The Rude Awakening
With the failure of their messiah, Obama, and his faux utopia along with the rude awakening from crushing student debt, perhaps this generation will reverse their thinking. Perhaps the recent election of conservatives sweeping the political realm is symbolic start of this? I remain skeptical, but who knows. I guess it’s possible that this generation could start to view their outdated post-modern beliefs and change the course of this generation.
Ironically, this generation is in the perfect position to do so. They have been through the necessary (yet outdated) deconstruction, ironic post-modernism, and have seen everything both positive and negative. With a knowledge of history’s mistakes, they could make the “greatest generation” look like child’s play.
However, I am highly skeptical much will change with this docile generation. One just has to look at the bright side of this—for the rest of us mature male adults, everything is for the taking. Opportunity is endless to those willing to step up to the plate and take what is rightfully theirs. The competition has never been so dead-minded.
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