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.
They want free $h!t. Read my tagline, it has been the same for years, and is still true.
So the authors asking why truly uneducated, naive young people want a free ride with the benefit of an idealistic ego trip? Hmm...
Beat me to it. Yes. They’re stupid. They’re frankly too stupid to be idiots.
A late cousin of mine was like that. In all political discussions you could easily see he was afraid of the future, and was envious of the rich. This, of course, made him a liberal Democrat.
He was also a devout Catholic—and when I pointed out to him that Envy was one of the seven deadly sins, he didn’t have a good answer. Still it was fascinating how fear and envy automatically pushed him left.
Bump
“Actually, they are looking at a life far worse than that of their parents, Boomers or the Greatest Generation.”
You missed a generation.
.
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