The French youth are supposedly staging a revolution. Really? Today’s seventeen-year-olds are doing exactly what their liberal teachers and liberal parents taught them to do, if they come from liberal families, or what their preachers at the mosque taught them. If there are any rebels among them, they are mostly young men who openly oppose the looting rabble. Or take the philosophy student Louise Montangon, the heroine and voice of “young people who want to work.” When the dust settles, you will see that it is not the rioters and arsonists who are punished, but their critics.
In a way, this is conservative. Exemplary heirs are doing exactly what they were raised to do. But we are used to decency being passed down from one generation to the next. These children, by contrast, were raised to make a show of hating “the system”—in strict accordance with that system’s own rules and guidelines. They support everything that brings civilizational collapse closer, and consider the “far right” the greatest evil, without knowing what the term means. To them, setting fire to town halls is a lesser evil than protecting the borders. That is what their progressive teachers want of them, and that is what they do.
By chance, an article appeared a few days ago by the American essayist Jacob Savage. He argues that millennials were the pivotal generation in the West—that is, people now aged forty to forty-five. Of course, every generation contains all kinds of people. But in the generation before them, those who shaped the social atmosphere were people who knew how to work hard, while also being free-thinking and knowing how to enjoy life.
The millennial world is anxiously politicized, full of political correctness and people who cannot laugh. The less capable they are of handling everyday situations, the more capable they are of complaining—or of making a show of being traumatized. They were the ones who came to be called snowflakes. Today, young people’s problems are often blamed on social media, and rightly so. But the terrible world of ideological fanaticism took shape before social media existed.
These are the people who raised today’s seventeen-year-olds. Incidentally, a few months ago, when Associate Professor Soukupová left Prague’s Faculty of Humanities—after pro-Palestinian activists forced her out—she said in her statement that ideological fanaticism is not primarily a matter of students, but of young teachers who instill it in them. That is precisely what Savage describes in American society.
In the previous generation, there was a divide between what children were taught by their parents and what proved advantageous in the new world. Today’s French high school students no longer face that divide.
What actually happened back then? Why are millennials so different? Savage asks, but has no strong answer.
It fits our model perfectly, though. Millennials are the first generation to grow up in a world—one of service economies—in which factories do not matter very much.
For now, however, let us treat this as an interesting opinion and hypothesis rather than something we can reliably build on.