Rare News Desk
If you are a conservative like me you know that Millennials aren’t listening to you. Why would they, when their government teachers have had them in thrall for most of their life and TV teaches them that conservatives are Neanderthals.
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The Pew Research Center has released a study on Millennial opinion, and it seems that Millennials are confused.
If you are a Millennial and you are confused, I have an explanation: You are confused because they lied to you. Your nice government teachers, your nice TV shows, many of your friends, and especially those nice politicians that care about people like you, as in “we are the ones we’ve been waiting for” — they lied to you.
Nothing new here. Authority figures have always lied, as in “history is the lie agreed upon” for purposes of social control (the quote may come from Voltaire, or maybe not). It’s a function of humans as social animals. Part of being social is agreeing with others in a shared lifeworld in which “all things and all situations are ‘always already’ familiar.”
That’s why government invented childhood education. The Prussians invented it to build a powerful army. The French invented it in the battle between “The Red and the Black,” between secular and religious reality. Bostonians like Horace Mann invented “the common school” in an effort to cure the Boston Irish of their Catholicism. The Brits did it to close the “gaps.” Today, of course, government schooling is run by liberals for liberals. And they lie.
Here’s lefty Thomas Frank boosting the inequality meme with “The game is rigged.” Yes, the game is rigged — and liberals rigged it. Why do you think we have laws against child labor? If you said: to prevent young people from competing for jobs with adults, go to the head of the class. What about the minimum wage? If you replied: originally, to prevent blacks from competing for jobs with whites, you’ve escaped from the echo chamber.
Let’s not talk about student loans and Obamacare; it’s too painful.
When I first came to the U.S. as an immigrant baby boomer I naturally identified with Democrats. In 1972 I followed PBS as they lovingly boosted Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern and his anti-war, guaranteed income agenda. The shock of Nixon’s 60-40 reelection in the fall set me to thinking: what had I missed? Why did 60 percent of U.S. voters completely reject the obvious choice of educated people?
Four years later I had read Hayek and Mises and I’ve never looked back.
As young people we pride ourselves as magnificent rebels. But really we slavishly identify with the zeitgeist served up to us by our teachers and our peers.
We end up as grumpy old codgers and like to feel that we’ve seen it all before. But that is just an act. Really, we old ‘uns are terrified that the young might get a glimpse of reality, realize how bad we’ve been, and throw us out into the street.
