Most people are merely a product of their culture. Like bats in twilight, most people find their way by detecting the reflections and refractions of the philosophies and popular opinions which grip their age. Our education system and pop culture has taught the nihilistic Critical Theory with its universal cynicism and cult of repudiation which has no historical consciousness and cannot treasure our heritage or affirm objective truths.
It fallaciously fills its students with the conceit of being 'woke', when in reality it channels them into a nightmare of ingratitude and despair in which not only do they wear blinders that focuses them on many real but often imagined injustices but makes them unable to see the shimmering reality all around them which glaringly reveals that they live in a time of unprecedented peace, prosperity, and opportunity. Worse, they also wear nearly opaque lenses which blinds them to both to the long climb of history which has reached this 'height of the times', as well as the pillars of liberty and civil society which have enabled that climb.
Following on a social experiment of inflating each child with a phoney self-esteem instead of teaching them to ballast themselves with a healthy self-respect and timeless wisdom, what has caught on like a contagion to capture the imaginations of many Gen Xers is a pervasive feeling of existential emptiness which rob them of their dignity, initiative and confidence and fills them with hopelessness, meaningless and ennui. Caught rudderless in the drift of the times, they find their sustaining therapeutic by eagerly disparaging the world around them and resentfully transferring the blame for their failures to other classes or groups of people, the systems of society, and even the march of history itself. Tragically, without the benefit of an education that has transmitted the lessons of history and the winnowed wisdom of our ancestors, they place all their hopes for the future on the most poisonous remedy; the government.
Civilisations rise and fall as eternal truths fall in and out of favour. History will crash again and again on the permanent things like an angry sea upon a rocky coast. Our emerging generation does not seem to want to steer clear of traps of history or chart their own course to a better world, nor do they seem to be able to recognise the deadly rocks ahead or have the spirit to resist the sirens' call to cultural suicide.