Michel Valentin: Joe or Donald? Really?

[ad_1]

This article is a gift

Share this article without a paywall.

Where are you Generations X, Y, and Z? Where did the youth go?

Absorbed by identity politics? Paralyzed by political correctness? Engaged in expanding 72+ LGBTQA sexual options? Cherry-picking from the exciting assortment of products, ideas, or beliefs on the physical and digital shelves of consumer society? Or simply swallowed up by ubiquitous systems of high-tech digital communication screens?

Where are the Czar-defying Russian Decembrist equivalents? Where is the new Greatest Generation? The youth contemporary of May 1968 that overthrew conservative fossilization in France? The Young Turks of 2023? The 21st century New Wave of angry and talented creators?

Co-opted by Silicon Valley? By Big Money? Ready to move into the Meta-Verse? Or just too comfortable?

It is true that radical challenges, never before encountered in our recorded history, confront humanity and life in general. Once the answer, today’s revolutions seem impossible: there is no center to conquer; no single tyrant can be eliminated; there is no easy solution because part of the problem is our lifestyle and being (especially if we are rich). Everything is now scattered and complexly caught in labyrinthine nexuses and rhizomes of knotted entanglements. Materialist determinism and scientific positivism are our new gods. The ideology and economics of the neo-liberal system is the new normal. The system also cut people off from mainstream social life separating them into individual consumers/producers/enjoyers.

People are also reading…

Among the naysayers, everyone knows that the system, while providing unprecedented benefits to humanity, paradoxically produces physical and mental symptoms that abound, prompting violent behavior on a massive scale. , while ignoring the returning nature. The massive human mess is disheartening, especially for the young, who have enjoyed unprecedented prosperity albeit relative and unevenly accessible.

Mitigating looming global ecological and socio-economic catastrophes requires a new, radical politics. Contrary to promises, our instantaneous-communication-global-network has become a gridiron-like grid. Contrary to expectations, it has not produced the kind of innovative politics, deep thinking, and decision-making that the seriousness of our postmodern troubles requires. There is no substitute for Humanism: the study of millennia of art, culture, texts, books, interpreting changes, tragedies, and hopes. Young people lack a text-based education with tough, analytical, critical intelligence. The culprit is the seductive logic of cynical politicians, using free-market logic to reduce American children’s access to books. As such, how should young people read thought-provoking texts, the very textuality that provided their predecessors with much-needed inspiration and motivation?

Young people, please, don’t let super-rich, demagogic septuagenarians dictate your future through an obsolete two-party-system, underwritten by Big Money and 538 Electors! Why mortgage your future to debased, ideological money? Trust the people who set you up against imaginary goats, while laughing behind your back, or giggling all the way to shore? Listen to hypocrites who destroy your dreams of innocence and purity by persuading you that utopia is a dirty word, that nothing else can replace the status quo? They bend the Rules of the Games so that the privileged 1% stay at the top, gated in their cool Elysium (see the 2013 film), while the middle and lower classes live in a filthy , expensive, air-conditioned, or hot nightmares.

The youth of the world arise! Count you in! Reject the cynicism, apathy, hopelessness, or depression that results from isolation and hopelessness! Reconnect your defiant optimism with your eternal energy that is utopian and essential! Consign the Old Guard to the dustbin of History. Reinvent the world before Systems logic forces AI and gene-therapy upon us to ameliorate humanity’s shortcomings. Read Montaigne on friendship, Emerson on transcendence, Marx on exploitation, Baudrillard on hyper-virtuality, de Beauvoir on feminism, the Frankfurt School philosophers, or Lacan on sexuation, etc.

Michel Valentin is a retired UM professors/EPIS researcher/writer.

You must be logged in to react. Click on any reaction to login. Stay tuned for the latest in Opinion

Get opinion pieces, letters and editorials sent straight to your inbox every week!

[ad_2]