If I had to generalize, the main reasons why the Millennial generation is dysfunctional is because of insulation from competition, organizational chaos around them, and a resultant lack of healthy friendship. This is what people tend to mean when they use terms like ‘atomization.’ It’s not just that people are isolated, it’s that they’re isolated in a chaotic social environment.

People in the business press will often try to explain why millennials need to be treated differently to manage their unusual psychologies.

In the US, we’ve gone from what was once a highly competitive culture into a cut-down-the-tall-poppy culture that’s more common in Asian countries, Europe, and South America. Part of the reason for this is that this is the first generation to grow up with enormous numbers of new people from Asia and South America. The positive spin that’s often put on this is that it’s a less materialistic culture. Well, that may be, but primitive tribes without plumbing are also less materialistic. A certain amount of materialism is what keeps humans out of the trees.

This generation is also the first to really bear the full brunt of feminism and women in the work force.

All of this leads to caginess, social fracture, romantic nihilism, and corporate dysfunction.

This is a generation that, as children, tended to be used as chemistry sets for new psychiatric theories that tend to be developed and discarded in five year cycles. The results of using children’s brains as chemistry sets seem to be, at least from self-reports, widespread psychosis.

People whose formative experiences were having quack doctors tell them all the ways in which they were disabled and deficient (while simultaneously telling them that they were talented and special) lead to people with a strange sense of identity.

We’re what happens when you have classes for middle schoolers that explain why promiscuity is healthy and masturbation is a great idea. This was a bold social experiment, and now we know what the results look like. It’s not just the chemicals, but the pioneering psychological theories pushed onto people without much thought about the potential damage that might be done. Libraries have been filled with books of untested notions, and then those ideas have been promoted at scale at schools, universities, clinics, and hospitals.

The baby boomers get a lot of credit for being the vanguard of the ‘sexual revolution,’ but even those that have divorced tend to have an idea of what romance and monogamy means. It’s difficult for people in the older set to understand how, among young people, even in the upper classes, monogamy has become strange, and even a perverse behavior, before increasingly fewer feel the pressure to go into a sham marriage to satisfy someone’s baby rabies.

While millennials are highly educated, they’re educated in a system that has watered down standards to the point of uselessness. Meanwhile, many of those people with watered-down credentials believe that they are entitled to high positions in the workforce. This leads to frenetically chaotic competition in which employers with limited legal means to discriminate among employees based upon ability have to sort through huge numbers of people who are all desperate for work, without being permitted to efficiently test the capacities of the people looking for that work.

Additionally, many of those people are saddled with debts that push them to compete much harder for work than they probably should be. Demand for labor to repay debts (created ex nihilo, with a ‘native advertising’ campaign called K-12 paid for by the government) displaces demand for labor based on capability and interest to do the job.

That all happens in the larger context of economic chaos caused by Federal Reserve policy, egregious acts like Obamacare, and foreign competition taking advantage of the civil conflict within the US.

Faced with this pile of problems that single people can’t solve, the typical response is to pray for the apocalypse. That’s understandable. It’s also the morally wrong response.

A lot of the common life problems that millennials experience are due to people no longer really looking after one another. Families, which are supposed to fulfill this purpose, have been greatly damaged or obliterated in enormous numbers. It’s sort of like what happens when formerly owned dogs become strays. Their hair gets patchy, they don’t eat good food, they develop weird habits, they have trouble socializing, and they become incapable of doing ordinary dog-like things.

People aren’t much different. Without close friends, family, and spouses, people tend to become unhealthy, erratic, and unproductive. They begin worshiping strange idols, obsessing over useless paths of knowledge, making bad art, and abusing drugs. The people that are supposed to help other people to resolve their problems will tend to instead just do what they can to triage the dysfunction, tell the person who has made themselves worthless that they still possess essential worth, and go on to the next dysfunctional person.

The reason why we hold each other to standards of behavior, health, and appearance is because a breakdown of this process causes the breakdown of civilization: city by city, town by town, village by village, family by family, person by person.

Apocalyptic violence only makes those problems far worse and usually has multi-generational negative consequences. Chaotic civil war doesn’t select for civilized traits. The people who thrive during chaotic civil wars are killers, pimps, smugglers, and whores in that order. The higher arts disintegrate almost immediately, because delicate spirits must either coarsen or escape to survive the conflict. Keeping the electricity running and the plumbing working is a big enough challenge: producing literature and advancing technology becomes impossible.

World War T, a term coined by Steve Sailer, actually has little to do with real transsexuals, who are a minuscule minority by any count. The amount of attention paid to this new frontier in equality is wildly disproportionate to the actual incidence of transsexualism in the general population.

What the interest is more likely to be is about transsexualism as a metaphor for mass androgyny, which is part of the egalitarian, democratic experiment. The androgyny relative to historic standards is what is aberrant and significant.

The people who are most androgynous overall, namely white, urban, educated liberals, also put forth the greatest effort to show moral concern over transsexual acceptance, and are more likely to support state subsidies for genital mutilation and hormone treatment to allow a person to effect a more masculine or feminine appearance than biology would allow.

Brainier liberals will use terms like ‘gender dysphoria’ to describe an emotional experience that presents as people claiming to feel as if they have spirits with an alternative gender to the one that nature assigned to them.

In reality, we impose gender dysphoria through instruments like the school system which feminizes boys and masculinizes girls. Civil rights laws addressing gender differences attempt to ‘correct’ for the natural sexual dimorphism in the human species.

Democracy’s ideal has become to mold men with the spirits of women, and women with the spirits of men. According to the values inculcated by the education system, a good biological girl has the enterprising, adventuring spirit of a man. A good biological boy has the meek, gentle nature typical to girls. We encourage both genders to play against what biology pushes them towards, using operant conditioning and social disapproval to rectify any deviations from our attempts to realize the blank slate, to train billions of little Émiles.

World War T resonates because the power structure expects us to all be trannies now, at least on the inside. For the ideal of equality to be realized, men must be encouraged to be effeminate, and women must be encouraged to be masculine. In popular culture, the parody of this is the flamboyant homosexual and the butch lesbian in the lumberjack-plaid shirt. But part of the broader goal of the thrust towards equality is to encourage indifference regarding the social construct of sexual orientation. Rather than calling certain acts sinful, we instead manufacture alternative ‘identities’ around sinning with pride, around favorite sins, while simultaneously condemning most of the classical virtues.

Popular art reinforces the real dysphoria, the common kind that no surgery can correct for, by casting women as competent hard-boiled killers and men as sensitive, bumbling cowards. The ideals that even radical liberals rarely are able to fulfill in the real world show up in their fiction, repetitively.

The obsession about the rights of the transgendered has more to do with soothing people uncomfortable with what they have done to themselves, feeling miserable and unhealthy, having abandoned their natural roles in human society. The ‘brave’ transgender who undergoes surgery is a stand-in for the internal world of an ordinary person who has abandoned their traditional gender role. They dramatize with their flesh the internal struggle of the educated liberal, of the tension that they feel in ignoring what their own body tells them is right.

Whereas the physical transsexual receives praise for responding to emotion with surgery and drugs, the spiritual transsexual receives praise for suppressing their feelings and following the trumpet-calls to corporate ambition, achievement, and certification in place of children, home, and church. While the spiritual transsexual might present as outwardly ‘cisgendered,’ on the inside, and in terms of their behavior, they are firmly trans — no surgery needed.

Rigid gender roles remain both a social construct and a good idea. If the principle advocated by trans-rights-activists that the inner feelings of a person regarding their gender ought to be respected, than that goes even more for people trained by mass education to form a character that runs contrary to their inner feeling of what is right, based on the gender that nature assigned to them, which is unchangeable.

It is cruel to attempt to push girls to forsake femininity and womanhood and to push boys to forsake masculinity and manhood. That’s what’s going on at the scale of billions worldwide, and that’s one of the things that causes so much unhappiness and misunderstanding.

In democracy, people are supposed to be roughly equal in ability and talent. People are not supposed to notice inborn differences between people that make for wildly different sets of capabilities and interests across the population. The thought is that, generally, emotional engagement or hard work at something can trump all other factors.

Despite this, even in the most democratic of settings, the compulsory school, we all know of students who never seemed to need to spend time studying to win excellent marks on tests. Part of this is due to the general lowering in educational standards, but it’s also partly because some people are intrinsically more intelligent than others. Some people need to put in hours of work to try to solve a problem and fail, whereas a more intelligent person might be able to solve it in seconds of thought.

Although the democrat praises hard work, the results of hard work over time tend to make them feel uncomfortable. Learning, high levels of skill, and wisdom are all concepts that make a democratic people uncomfortable. There is a general idea that, gaining too much knowledge about any area that might be outside their narrow job description is a suspicious activity.

Even among ‘knowledge workers,’ at least if they’re not technical, it’s common to find people who may only read a single book a year, if that, and otherwise spend the spare time watching television, listening to the radio, and scanning social media feeds. To depart from the culture of mainstream media consumers is to become socially awkward, and to be socially awkward is to be at a professional disadvantage in such an environment, which prefers conformity to virtuosity.

 

Rather than defining a person by their family name or where they come from, at contemporary parties, democratic people identify themselves by what they ‘do.’ In some cases, they may have ostentatious titles that rival those of the old nobility in length and incomprehensibility.

Democratic people tend to focus on building credentials which advance their ‘careers,’ accumulated in a text document, along with recommendations from their former bosses. They may or may not have real skills, but what matters is the long record of conformity that they have behind them. They appear reliable, even if it’s difficult to tell whether or not they are actually effective as individuals. Because of this, the most competitive careerists look to get some brand name companies on their record, which acts as a sort of magic dust that makes them stand out, at least as long as that name remains relevant.

What the democrat rarely seeks is excellence. Excellence is sometimes spoken of in hushed tones, because excellent men are not supposed to exist. The ancient Greeks sought areté, excellence, whereas the careerists seeks to merge their identity with a trust-worthy collective, which, although it may be excellent in its own way, will rarely phrase itself in terms of the excellence of a single man. There are, of course, sacred exceptions, that responsible people treat with an inverted awe, freely praising a particular that they would condemn in general.

Pre-democratic Europe preferred the artisan, whose excellence spanned generations — and still does in certain pockets. People joke about the ‘artisanal’ buzzword as if it’s a joke, but when artisanal products displace industrial ones, it has implications for public morality and philosophy as well. The industrial producer creates democratic products for a democratic people. As democracy fades into the past, slowly, so do its artifacts, and its characteristics of ordinary life.