Some time in the changing modern world, people in society stopped taking responsibility for each other and that means that most individuals only think of things that will keep things the way we like them. And it’s well documented how capitalism thrives on feeding that desire to have the things we want. Add to that the sorcery of marketing and advertising and soon what we want becomes what we need and like little hamsters we get into our wheels and just start running. Because we don’t take responsibility for each other, we have stopped questioning the systems and processes of our lives that have become accepted as the norm. As long as the systems and processes of our lives are working to good effect and in our interests then what’s to think about? But that’s just the point. What is happening is that as we get older, we forget what life was like as children. We forget what we learned about ourselves about our lives and those around us. And most importantly we forget the original ideas we had.
The only versions of life we supposed were true were our own. But slowly and surely we begin to lose these hopes and fears and flights of imagination because no-one older than us is able to understand that the world changes so rapidly around us that the only way to stay the same is to cling very hard to our own personal version. We say things like ‘if it was good enough for us, it’s good enough for you’. Just like our parents and their parents did. We excuse our own lack of interesting ways of thinking by justifying it against something that someone else did to us. No-one teaches us that we don’t know how to understand thing properly until we have thought about it from other people’s standpoint. Or at least the only time we do that is with speechless infants, when we don’t deny what we instinctively know are their needs and wants because it’s the only way that they can communicate is to make us feel bad – either because they are screaming or because we would feel cruel if we ignored them.
The clear truth is that we are slowly but surely failing our children because we have stopped thinking or being clever about life and how and why we make decisions about almost everything. So as a result they can only be worse than we are about making decision or what they think about life. Just like our parents despaired of us we despair of the coming generations. And why? Because the challenges they face are completely different from the ones we face and since those are often completely unfamiliar to us or we have simply refused ever to deal with them, we are intimidated or frightened or dismissive.
As a result, we can’t support young people and they will no longer be able to wrestle with the challenges they face.
Not that I am suggesting that this hasn’t always been the same but it’s true that because so many changes have happened so quickly in our society even just in our lifetimes, the experiences that young people have are often so completely distanced from either the people in power or the older generations. The rift is growing, institutions are becoming irrelevant and the systems and processes that have long been established as the right way to develop the people in our society to become useful, thoughtful, balanced, creative and thinking individuals are just broken.