Interesting quote from the musician, Branford Marsalis, about the students that he teaches - I think it applies here and probably in general too:
“What I’ve learned from my students? Is that students today are completely full of shit. Much like the generation before them, the only thing they are really interested in is you telling them how right they are and how good they are”.
Now, if it can be said that this applies here too, and even in general - why?
I’m hesitant to claim it to be a recent phenomenon, if it is in fact applicable to any significant degree at all. I think the tendency for people to claim something as new is often merely because they’ve only recently noticed it. Obviously things do change over time, but it’s easy to assume that subjective experience is reflective of objective experience - at least when you’re just going on a hunch and/or you haven’t already examined things as objectively as you can without confirmation bias. People like to be the first to know something new and share it, which no doubt goes back to new resource finding in earlier periods of human civilisation. But in older situations such as that, your subjective experience of a new resource is of an object whereas the subjective experience of new trends in behaviours and attitudes is of other subjects who are only truly known unto themselves. The straw men you hear these days are just embarrassing, but they’re not surprising due to the fundamental attribution error combined with what I have just described about a tendency for people to assume their subjective experience maps objective experience to the degree that they think it does. You see a feminist doing something stupid and all of a sudden, it’s a new trend amongst feminists…
What I do think is new is the need for instant gratification. I don’t think this is the fault of newer generations, it’s just what they’ve grown up into. We’re rich now, and businesses have figured out how to abuse certain psychological tendencies in people to grab their attention away from the competition and to buy into what they’re offering instead. I say we’re rich, there’s not much you need to be far richer than most - internet and mobile phone is all you really need to be drawn into a spiral of chasing instant gratification. This is actually where we all wanted to get to: this level of richness is what older generations were all trying to achieve - and now we have it we’re realising it’s more complex than we probably assumed and has downsides as well as upsides. I think the upsides are more than the downsides, but the downsides negatively affect - amongst other things - the realm of intellectual thought.
With the rise of “alt-right” and conservative demagogues in reaction to a rise in institutionalised social authoritarianism masquerading as “leftism” (a contradiction in terms if there ever was one, but hey, it’s caught on now so what can you do?), and immediate access to all their content, it’s easy to latch onto their arguments, ideas, or at least their attitude, and think you’ve found something new that you want to show off to others.
I support free speech, but this includes my own free speech to point out flaws in line with the tyranny of logical argument. For example, my “new thing” that I’ve found that I want to show off to others is not really new at all. It revolves around the inversion of leftism that has occurred and is remarkably simple, but I don’t see anybody else pointing it out - so I take it upon myself to do so. For example, how is it “liberal” (deriving from the Latin “of freedom”) to be enforcing e.g. affirmative action? Take its opposite: authoritarianism. How is such enforcement not instead authoritarian? The movement is literally getting authority to prevent freedom… and it’s called “liberal”. Liberalism is associated with new reactionary movements against Conservativism. Conserving the way things are and traditions presupposes a lack of freedom, a lack of Liberalism to do otherwise - often for good reason, but not always and certainly not indefinitely. Freedom to move on from old ways is the whole purpose of Liberalism - but what then when new ways have to be enforced to happen at all? The newness is still the goal, but the freedom from conservativism is now the enforcement of a new way to conserve - as opposed to supporting the freedom to deviate.
Seeing as everyone has forgotten or overlooked things such as this, I don’t get to be told how right I am or how good I am. I’ve even violated the need for instant gratification by not keeping my response short. If I was speaking about my thoughts out loud, assuming I had an engaging delivery of such thoughts, I could potentially get away with extended explanation, but listening can be a lot more passive and less active than reading. It seems to me like the preferred format has turned away from text and towards video. Conversational format is also a lot more natural than an exchange of monologues - people want to respond before you’ve even completed a thought: another factor that works against deep thought that takes time to lay out. This is particularly the case for those suffering from the decline in attention spans. It used to be the case that you had to have a long attention span just to get into intellectual thought, but now with the incorporation of those without attention spans, you can seemingly get a lot more attention by posting little and often rather than making each post count and putting a lot of thought into it. As such I should really have cut my response short a long time ago…