The Logic of the Meat GrinderThe generation that did everything it was told to do is keen on burning down the very culture which sold them a lie.
By Christopher Gage
May 17, 2022
Perhaps you too are devastated by this week’s crushing news—Meghan Markle’s Netflix show has been canceled.
The show, of course, a one-word title by the name of “Pearl,” is about an oppressed young woman who deigned to overcome obstacles such as someone not validating her every whim, not affirming nor flattering her every thought. I wrote this before bothering to Google the name and premise of the now regrettably canceled show—unremarkably, my assumptions were faultless.
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Our epidemic of narcissism burrowed itself within my generation—the Millennials. We grew up sitting in circles, telling everyone in the circle how special and great we all were. Naturally, we ended up delusional.
Now we bend reality to reflect that of ourselves. If it does not bend, we go mental and protest, fume and fulminate, demand those in power change the mirror to one of our liking.
The problem is that millions of people have their own mirror. To demand the mirror satisfy all is to demand winter follow spring.
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Sending half of young people to university will prove to be the biggest social catastrophe since TikTok and “Love Island.”
A historian agrees. Peter Turchin’s theory of “elite overproduction” contends that societies which produce more potential elites than they can absorb invite social instability and strife.
We’ve created—and continue to create—vast numbers of graduates waving expensive certificates with too few high-status jobs for them to walk into. Understandably, those kids aren’t impressed with this state of affairs. We’ve promised too much to the poets and professors who’d make better plumbers and police officers.
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Yes, it’s easy to say, “They shouldn’t have gone to college.” But if everyone you meet tells you, “It’s raining,” do you first conduct a thorough meteorological investigation, or do you tend to take their word for it?
Arthur Miller wrote that an era can be said to end when its basic illusions are exhausted.
After decades of affirmations, self-help, self-care, empowerment, equality, quotas, and special days in which both men and women celebrate their genitalia, our basic illusions are too exhausted.
After seven decades of meritocracy, a poor kid has as much chance of making the Ivy League as he did in the 1950s. At Princeton and Yale, more students hail from the top one percent than from the bottom 60 percent. Two-thirds of all Ivy League students come from families in the top 20 percent. By the time they start school, lower class kids are already two years behind their more fortunate peers.
For those who work real jobs, wages haven’t climbed since the 1970s; buying a home is nigh on impossible, and attaining what was once ordinary is now extraordinary.
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Many of those Millennials form part of a political tribe called “Progressive Activists.” They’re young, urban, educated, woke, and angry.
Despite their lamentations of whiteness, their tribe is the whitest, richest, most credentialled, and most censorious of tribes. On issues such as white privilege and structural racism, virtually every member of the tribe shares the same conviction. Curiously, those convictions align perfectly with the founding beliefs of the ruling class.
For all their publicized concern for minorities and the downtrodden, elites and their aspirants play social colonialism, extracting emotional and social profit from those they lavish with their compassion.
Such compassion falls far short of any measure which may help too much. Rather than raise wages or recover good jobs from overseas, rather than build more affordable housing, or improve schools for poor kids, the ruling class offers hashtags.
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Source:
https://amgreatness.com/2022/05/17/the-logic-of-the-meat-grinder/
