Posted on 01/25/2019 5:45:02 PM PST by huckfillary
Its not youth and inexperience. Its not even government-run schools and idiotic celebrities. Not primarily.
Why do so many young people embrace socialism?
For the same reason any middle-aged or older person embraces socialism: Anxiety and envy.
By anxiety I mean neurotic anxiety, which means a false or exaggerated belief that one will be unable to properly survive or take care of oneself, so that unspecified help is needed to ensure survival.
Envy is often a byproduct of anxiety. If one starts out feeling, Im unable to care for myself, then its not a stretch to look at someone else who has more than enough and say, Thats not fair. He can more than provide for himself, and Im unable to do so for myself.
What about the fact that young people have not yet earned much money, and therefore dont appreciate the value and justice of private ownership, i.e., being able to keep what you earn? Not all young people feel this way. Some young people understand the justice of keeping what you earn. Some do, and change their minds later and become socialists in middle-age.
Regardless, unless you have a significant amount of neurotic fear and/or envy, its unlikely socialism would grab your fancy for even five minutes, much less for years (and elections) on end.
Its true that public schools are teaching the ideology of self-sacrifice and blind service to others (the same premises as Nazism and Communism) as self-evident givens in todays government-run schools. But these faulty ideas are not new to the present era. Yet in earlier eras, the majority of young people did not turn as socialist as they appear to be doing today.
The more likely contribution of todays mediocre schools as well as an increasingly irrational culture is that young people dont know how to think. Thinking is your basic tool and precondition of survival. If you feel inadequate to think critically, rationally and objectively, youll develop a neurotic and pervasive sense that, Im not equipped to survive. In a land of plenty, particularly, it seems logically appealing when someone comes along and says, No worries. Well pick up your college tuition. And health care. And tons of other things too. Youre entitled to it, after all. It comes as a relief to the anxiety-ridden souls who embrace socialism.
In older folk, and in some young people born into wealth, theres the factor of guilt and atonement. Thats a form of anxiety, too. Im rich and I dont deserve to be. Its not fair. So it becomes a form of virtue-signaling merged with a psychological tonic to make sure others see you support socialism.
Its not that most young people are depraved and stupid any more than most older people are totally depraved and stupid. And its not just inexperience. Its fear. And the envy that gets ignited by fear.
Its truly sad. And yes, its dangerous for the future of a free society, but dangerous most of all for those young people who now seek to embrace socialism. Its not going to end any better for them than it did for anyone else. And if they get their wish, and socialism gets enacted completely, then their fears will quickly become rational.
Disagree. It’s the schools. We were taught the difference between capitalism and communism (socialism) in grade school ... and if you asked a kid about it he would tell you “communism is bad” ... maybe he didn’t know why, but it was TAUGHT that it was bad. Kids are not going to understand “ideology” ... but we can teach right from wrong ... the schools are not teaching ANYTHING about this now, and if it comes up, it is a liberal/tolerant/feelgood answer that people should embrace all governments.
There are three main reasons why:
1. No one is at home raising the kids.
2. A wussified educational system that slanders American history.
3. College professors who are socialists themselves and hate straight Americans.
Children educated in the US educational system, K through 12th grade, have been brainwashed with Marxist Liberal propaganda since the late 1960’s. If you doubt that, look at the curriculum and read the textbooks. Marxist Liberal professors in the colleges and universities finish the brainwashing by pimping their progressive crapola.
Research LBJ and how he gave billions to the NEA to develop and pimp Marxist Liberal propaganda.
Besides being indoctrinated in schools, they are used to getting anything they want without having to work for it. Parents are to blame too!
The NEA and their fellow marxist travellers.
And now they're old, fogey Democrat politicians in Congress.
I believe it was Édouard Herriot who supposedly said, “if you’re not a socialist at 20, you have no heart. If you’re still a socialist at 40, you have no head.”
THIS is the reason. The author dismisses this as having been around for a long time. American culture gave birth to rugged individualism and the brave cowboy dedicated to objective justice. LIBERTY was once the ultimate American value. The colonies inherited that sense of Independence from the Enlightenment , and came up with a Constitution designed to protect that Liberty .That is how America escaped the self imposed slavery of altruism.
Young people embrace Altruism over Capitalism because it's an easier concept to understand. With capitalism, or free trade, one needs a lot of wisdom before one understands why it's the better way to go.
Souls for sale, as long as someone else pays the price. Besides, the old earned it and the youg, well you are just lucky they are vegans, they only feast on the unborn.
Send them to Venezuela for six months!
They think its free stuff from rich daddy and they don’t have to work for it or pay back loans or medical bills. Life is free and easy.
Hippies of the time seemed to be pretty Libertarian to me.
Yes, but I think more out of rebellion than necessity. We did have a space program back then. Many if not most recent graduates would have difficulty finding Europe on a map today.
So many young people embrace socialism because it is what is taught exclusively in the schools from kindergarten through graduate school. That is why the Republic is in inexorable decline and cannot be saved. The darkness can be delayed for a few years by such as Trump but probably not so much of a hiatus as Reagan gave us, The Left is too much farther advanced and owns the permanent government and probably cannot be dislodged short of DJT taking the power of a dictator successfully but then that would create another set of problems that constitute the end of the Republic, too. I say Trump because the likelihood of Trump being followed by another with his perceptiveness and ability is pretty close to none and even if we got a Trump II that is only another 4-8 years of reprieve. There is no longer sufficient basis for the Republic in the population.
They think the government is going to write off their student loan debt for all those fake journalism and gender studies degrees.
There is something in human nature, where somebody is happier if they are poor, but everyone else around them is just as poor, than if they were better off, but everyone else around them was even more better off than they are.
It was in 1968 that I embraced conservatism. I was probably a conservative long before, but I was in a family of Democrats and had no interest in politics, which I saw as the domain of stuffed shirts and smoke-filled rooms. But I quickly got "woke" thanks to a series of news events including the Pueblo incident, the North Vietnamese Winter-Spring Offensive, President Johnson's decision not to seek another term and the radicalization of the Democrats.
On March 31, 1968, I declared myself a Republican.
Thou Shalt Not Be A leftist, fascist, socialist, nazi, commie, anarchist, demonkkkRAT.
Because they are mostly a bunch of snot nosed, lazy little pukes that believe they are Entitled to Free Chit. They don’t believe in Hard Work to achieve success and they have been trained in cultural marxism their whole lives.
I doubt they could survive the trip, much less the “experience.”
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