Is there any credible theory about what's happening with millenials...

Is there any credible theory about what's happening with millenials, or rather the causes of the kind of collective insanity we're experiencing as society?

I didn't post this at /pol/ because I actually want to talk about this seriously.

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youtube.com/watch?v=P0tmqJcnJ04
theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/09/the-coddling-of-the-american-mind/399356/
youtube.com/watch?v=aWM4bJNpch0
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>Collective insanity

I'm sure this has some stupid political slant, but what does "collective insanity" mean here? Something about gays or something?

CUZ MUH SEX JUNK

wait wrong thread...or is it?

I mean in the sense that large clusters of people become more and more detached from reality, maybe even deny even it's exsistence in the first place, and develop more and more pathological traits or just suffer from bein neurotic. Stuff like paranoid delusions, narcissistic personality disorders, and the general decay of normalcy.

One of the arguments I've heard resolved around the idea that high levels of wealth and social security allow people to focus on stuff on non-issues, because of a lack of any real problems.

Yes and no. This isn't a Bill Nye bait thread but his shitty is definitely turning more and more nutty.

It's a shit economy.

The breakdown of a social nexus which centers people to their communities.

Every society needs its communal church, town hall, weekend dances, potlatches, symposiums, or whatever to engage citizens in a shared ritual.

All relationships are by definition esoteric, and without a center there can be no nation in the state.

Reality is a social construct, and without a shared reality the different world spirits will develop in parallel to each other until they become diametrically opposed and collide.

Specifically in the anglo-sphere, there is no common language to separate "us" from "them". No hidden mysteries by which a citizen is immersed in the community. No rights of passage. No shared moments of experience. No rituals to bond us together. All this is leading to increased sectarian conflict, an increase in religious beliefs, political fragmentation, racial division, and increased belief in conspiracy theories.

No, you?

To be fair it's not like there ever were any jobs for people who studied shit like literature, art history, or africa studies. I don't know what some people are expecting. Interpreting poems for some electrician?

I wouldn't say reality is a social construct but our interpretation of reality is. And I suppose the quest for objective truth might be a good nexus in theory.

To have this discussion you have to clearly define what you mean by collective insanity or else we're all just old men yelling at clouds.

Not really fair when people who intentionally go into fields that have been historically good occupations (Engineering, stem, all that good shit) are still struggling to find jobs
Where I live in particular you're lucky if you can get hired at Miccy dee's. And I wish that was hyperbole.

There's been a panic every generation over the next, fucking Plato thought the one that would follow after him would fuck everything up and here we are. What's happening right now is no different than what happened in the sixties or what happened in the eighties, people just remembered and idolized their past through nostalgia and a general disconnect from the youth.

Plato did pretty well for himself.

Well, until they killed him.

Jokes aside, an enlightened society, if it has truly ran out of necessary work, should then turn it's excess workforce to artistic and philosophical pursuits, or it should reduce the workload on an individual worker and spread tasks out through the population, leaving any given citizen with more free time and the same quality of life. If these new workers, now blessed with spending power, create more demand, then increase the workload to account for it.

The idea that men in a society should starve or go idle because it is too easy for that society to maintain itself is fucking absurd.

Were a bit closer to the edge than we were before, dont you think?
If not now, then when should we be afraid? If we wait for the water to start boiling it will be too late.

Yeah but a baker or a cook or any other of the more bread and butter kind of jobs are always getting by somehow. I think the problem is that everybody wants to go for higher education and gain strong qualifications for jobs that never existed in high enough numbers to supply a large amount of people.

Well, with collective insanity I mean the evaporation of objective reality which results in broken feedback mechanisms and the growing inability to solve real life problems, while wasting ressources on artificial problems like gender pronouns and so on. Also the normalizationi of any idiosyncrasies no matter of how retarded those they are, because everything is just an expression of one's uniqueness and any form criticism is considered rude and there's no reason to change ever. Which again creates broken feedback mechanisms.

Extreme atomisation. The internet and increased consumer choice has led to bubbles in which individuals can place themselves without ever having to engage with dissenting or opposing viewpoints. It leads to a feedback mechanism where the group think is always correct and any opposing views are evil or wrong and any dissent need to be shunned. It leads to extremist thinking as the individuals within the group try to outdo each other in the purity of their beliefs.

>Were a bit closer to the edge than we were before, dont you think?

Ha! No. Society has improved in nearly every way since Plato's time. For all the good the Greeks did, the still made a dude drink hemlock and walk around until he died just because he proved himself smarter than a bunch of chucklefucks.

I would argue that *objective* reality doesn't fucking exist in any way that we can detect in the first place.

Im talking in modern terms

I can look at a color and say it blue and then someone else sees the same thing. If hundreds of people agree, yeah it's blue than it's probably blue. Maybe it's really green but that's more of an linguistic problem than anything else. I'm aware that colors are made up in our heads to a certain extend, but there's also the spectrum of visible light which you can prove through science.

Even if reality is all just construct we can gain knowledge and anticipate outcoms no matter of what you as an individual think about it. All the colors don't suddenly turn yellow or whatever just because someone decides he would like it that way.

You say we're closer to the edge, but think about what people were thinking in the sixties, with major upheaval, racial tensions, the hippie movement, and Nuclear war on the horizon. Besides, I don't know what your definition of insanity you're applying to the millennials, are you afraid of some moral breakdown? War? In either case it's nothing new, no matter what some neophyte traditionalist or similar doom-sayer says.

I've heard the statistic quoted that every modern generation has been measurably more intelligent than the last. That's most likely bullshit, but it's bullshit I'd believe. Being retarded is what 15-year-olds do categorically, it's not a good measurement to compare them to our current selves.

They could just be being retarded in different ways. We're also assuming they're retarded in the first place, when it's really a very subjective thing; it's more a matter of different values than anything. Those who come after us will push their values, which we see as ruining everything, just as the values we pushed conflicted with those who came before us. This shit's impossible to measure in the first place; the only thing you can say is that you don't like it, or you can point to some number and say "this number is lower, that's an objective loss of progress", but in that case it could simply be that those ho came after you don't value that number in the same way you do.

Is Blue-Green Blue or is it Green? Which shade of Blue is "true blue"?

Even the visible light spectrum is fucking nebulous and the same visual results can be achieved through different physical means. In addition, colorblind people or people with other conditions may disagree with that assessment outright. Color is not the fight to pick here.

>This random clickbait thought catalog piece heralds the end of society!
Come on, people were thinking and writing kooky shit millenia before you were born. Look at the first red scares during the beginning of the 20th century.

If you think reality is just a construct why are we even talking. Dude just put your fingers on your temple wrinkle your forehead and imagine me agreeing with you.

You're playing semantic games. If there wasn't some form of common ground we couldn't have a discussion.

I agree, its been like this, theres been people proclaiming the end sense the beginning, that doesnt mean it wont happen
Maybe not this generation, maybe 2 or 3 ahead, but we are the last that can do anything before the damage becomes irreversable

no, this time there are serious societal ramifications brought on by economic and geopolitical conditions developing by the end of the post-war boom, rapid advancement in communications tech, high inflation, the opening of the communist economies (China in particular), and the "global war on terror".

we are getting to a point where a second American civil war is a realistic possibility in the first half of this century, and looking at an almost definite large scale war in the near east and central Asia.

and those are just some of the potential bigger picture problems. we can always look into the immediate and real problems of the first world brought on by lack of unity towards a societal norm, loss of good work in the blue collar sector, the increasing uselessness of advanced technical degrees in education, extreme healthcare issues, states in infrastructural and social welfare crises, the rising cost of living, decreasing wages compared to increases in productivity and profits at the top levels of the economy, almost zero enforcement of our own immigration laws to the point of host populations being displaced country-wide, a pointless war on drugs that destroys countless individuals, families, and communities through the forcing of a black market so vast and hundreds of billions of dollars in value that the criminal syndicates are as ruthless and powerful as the government palms they grease and extort, and also endless terrorist attacks brought on by reckless use of the global drone warfare program and the thousands of capture-kill night raids being perpetrated by JSOC.

we are in a new territory as the youth of today are coming of age in a world with the highest generational wealth and technological gap possibly in human history

Migrant and economic crisis made them dumber and more conservative. Expect more dictatorships in near future because younger generations are disappointed with liberal democracy. Anti-intellectualism is getting more and more popular thanks to conservative and nationalist propaganda.

Define anti-intellectualism.

This is not semantic games, you claimed there was an "objective reality". I am arguing no such thing exists, and so all you're complaining about is a derivation from your personal reality, unless you care to put some other value on it besides objectivity.

>That's most likely bullshit
Progressively more available education explains this easily. There's a reason why IQ requirements are going up every generation. Not likely bullshit, especially when stats back it up.

Distrust of scientists as experts.

It only exhibits it, the cause is self evident

None of that's really the doing of the generation in question though, and can't be put on their lap; it can't be claimed they "fucked everything up".

I'm pretty sure all your shit is less serious than the bronze age collapse when even literacy was lost in fucking Greece of all places. Get your head out of your ass.

Its seriously the jews. If you don't believe me look at this video youtube.com/watch?v=P0tmqJcnJ04 don't just dismiss this because you think that it sounds stupid. When people first heard 911 wasn't done by some wacky sand people they didn't believe it

I suppose it doesn't matter if you believe in objective reality because objective reality believes in you. Do you think when someone smacks you in the face that's just a fucking mirage? No. There's something that exists independendly from the subjective experience, and even if it was all just in your head and go poof once you're consciousness stops, it wouldn't matter anyway. If it's an illusion it still obeys to laws, can be predicted and anticipated, and doesn't just change because of someone's feelings.

being right wing

Define being right wing.

I don't think you get my point. Humanity, and more specifically the U.S. has been through a lot worse, we don't have anarchists running around and assassinating Presidents and robbing banks like we had a century ago, we don't have the entire country split in two like we did a hundred and fifty years ago, we dont have riots and violence that makes that Oregon standoff and Ferguson look anemic. I understand that you're shitting your pants in fear of more Brown people in the country, and I'm sorry you're such a slave to the false God of race that you honestly don't realize how the concept of "white" has changed in this country (most of the founding fathers wouldn't consider the majority of Americans to be white, not me and most likely not you). Honestly, go look up the know-nothing party and look at their fear of a Vatican-controlled future, or look up how the Irish, Slavs, Italians, and Germans were treated, America has had racial panics in the past, none of them have bared fruit.

People have gotten too comfortable

Those quotes about Plato or Socrates bitching about the youth aren't real.

This is anti-intellectualism. YouTube propaganda videos are more popular and more trusted than books and articles written by historians.

They didn't kill Plato you fucking idiot. They killed Socrates.

Holy shit everyone on this board is retarded.

Im not saying now, maybe 30 - 50 years or so

Reality doesn't' believe in anything m8, that's a category error.

You're slippery sloping the fuck out of this. The people in question who you are accusing obviously believe they were hit in the face when they get hit in the face, that's not what you yourself are discussing.

I'm asking you to clarify your position and give your view of reality value besides "objectivity", which blatantly does not exist, or to show that the aspects of reality you are claiming they are violating are really objective. As your definition currently is given, it means nothing significant.

Do you understand?

>Hurdurr society needs its communal church, town hall, weekend dances, potlatches, symposiums, or whatever to engage citizens in a shared ritual.
>Posts the most socially inept Asians in the region.

That said if postmodernism is correct and reality was just whatever, within the realm of the physical possible I assume, why the fuck should I care? I might as well pretend reality is objective because it leads to better more functional results and doubting reality only leads into the loony bin.

You're right, I'm fucking retarded. I mix the two up all the time because everything we know about Socrates is through Plato and other's mouths and I'm used to just substituting Plato for Socrates when I'm quoting since they're Plato's writings.

its no fucking surprise that people don't trust what you consider to be "Trusted" by mainstream historians. Get your head out of your ass and start looking at the REAL reality, and stop living in a fucking fairy tale. Look at the world around you, look at Europe and tell me, is there a reason that denying the holocaust in europe results in a 5 year prison sentence ??

There's a middle ground. You can recognize that reality is not objective and still operate to the best of your ability on the information you have.

Either way I'm not asking you about how you live your life I'm asking you about your own statement.

>That said if postmodernism is correct and reality was just whatever, within the realm of the physical possible I assume, why the fuck should I care? I might as well pretend reality is objective because it leads to better more functional results and doubting reality only leads into the loony bin.

This is literally post-postmodernism in some interpretations, or metamodernism. The idea that narratives are probably subjective and always problematic, but too useful to discard.

For some dude who doesn't believe in objective reality you're pretty hung up on words. It's a figure of speech.

Jesus fuck, again. Why would I care about your definition of reality in sense that we can all just make it whatever we want it to be? It pulls the rug from any argument or appeal to urgency you might have. If nothing matters and we can jump around pretending to be unicorns I might as well could pretend there's a thing like objective reality. Again because it makes sense, it's logical, and allows us to make predictions and change reality.

youtube.com/watch?v=P0tmqJcnJ04 explains exactly whats going on in Europe.

Jonathan Haidt covers this topic interestingly.

theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/09/the-coddling-of-the-american-mind/399356/

There are many probable contributors to the phenomenon of an increasingly silly PC movement. On colleges, administrations treat students as customers and the customer is always right. This leads to them pandering and placating students desires for the college to be a home and a safe space, for a price.

The conspiratorial part of me also thinks the economic elites find these trivial social issues a useful distraction for the masses. Let lower class left/right people waste their energy on retarded shit like transgender bathrooms instead of the worsening problems of income inequality, offshoring, automation, etc.

There is an objective reality. You just have imperfect means to observe it.

Yeah there's a ridiculously large gap in wealth and tech, but none of the concerns you expressed are particularly new (except the drone bit but interventionism by other means has been known to the U.S. shortly after it's inception.) As others have mentioned before stuff like the bronze-age collapse shadows our current situation like no else. A second civil war barring some very dire and drastic changes, is unimaginable. Tell me when faction backed warfare like what happened in Bleeding Kansas happens again, or senators beating each other in the Senate like Charles Summer and Preston Brooks. There is discord, yes, and there are major issues no doubt, but this same stuff has been gnawing at America for ages, The drug wars had their predecessor in Prohibition, the crack boom in the 80s itself dwarfing anything like we have today, welfare has been a mess since Reagan or arguably even LBJ, the roads have been garbage since Eisenhower. I do think you are exaggerating on the Immigration and degree fronts, immigration itself has been ecreasing since 2010. You think America wasn't in new territory after the Civil War? Or at the turn of the century and the following decades, with the KKK reigning in the south, and syndicalists and Communists in the north, and Anarchists all around with Racial and Class tension at an all time high?

youtube.com/watch?v=aWM4bJNpch0

>implying Koreans don't go insane with their fucking Confucian Christfaggotry and build ethnically homogeneous churches that become local nexuses of social organization

The big question here is why do you think these things are more common now than in the past? More common diagnoses =/= more common occurrences

Again, it's not like there will be some major crisis because "white" Americans won't be a simple majority in the future, unless you've got some other reason to be worried aside from those images you posted.

Jesus fuck if you're not even going to read my post I'm done here, have fun yelling at kids to get off your lawn. Should have kept your shit on /pol/.

Who gives a shit was Zimbardo has to say, his famous experiment was all anecdotal and had no controls.

>Only two hours a week

Plebs

Fair enough. But our perception is so far removed from what that is that it doesn't even resemble it.

You're the one claiming there no such thing as objective reality, that which is ouside of the subjective experience, and that it can be proven. Give me falsifiable experiment to prove objective reality doesn't exist and we can talk. Until then this is just a bullshit argument about metaphysics or whatever that has absolutely no relevancy to real life or logic.

How do you know?

>the causes of the kind of collective insanity we're experiencing as society?
You are getting old

>political "scientists"
if they were professional at being scientists they would've known more about human nature