Hell in A Handbasket

[Rhyfelwyr]

My generation is filled with a bunch narcissistic, self involved, add-addled flunkies. I have never seen a group people congratulate themselves on a breadth on knowledge so shallow you would fail to drown an infant in it.

Neither have I. Are you referring to the sense of entitlement that some of today's youth have on account of their education? If so, I think you are confusing a false sense of entitlement with disillusionment at broken promises.

It seems a Wikipedia page worth of research and some SAT words that still clang around in your head from time to time are enough to pass off as intelligence these days. There is no depth to anything people say anymore, it's a metaphorical race to spit the most words out and see what sticks.

Any yet maybe these trends have always been true in the educated classes, and the common folk just didn't know enough to be aware of it. We are infinitely more scrupulous nowadays when it comes to scientific research, political science, historical research etc than at any time in the past. And a lot more self-aware to. What was once a brilliant and revolutionary ideology is now just part of a historical narrative, neither original nor inspired. Seeing the past as a golden era of learning because it had a handful of great theorists is like looking back on how fantastic the 80's were because they produced a few great songs.

These kids and there excuses. Women who get nothing but positive reinforcement simply because they are a solid 6/10.

You sound like you've been on the misc. So you think women today all think they are goddesses because society tells them so. Really?

Men whose idea of manhood is some sort of cardboard cutout from a Stallone movie.

And yet I take just as much issue with your idea of manhood - or at least, the sort of attributes that you feel makes a man command respect. Your idea of the 30 year old lawyer that nobly takes on young recruits, as if it was an act of charity. Look how he contributes to society through his hard work! How dare you interrupt him! No doubt it was some unemployed youngster on that phone!

There are a lot of good people in the world, some of them will be keen businessmen. But what I don't like is when people conflate a person's work situation with morality, or their value as a person. The relationship between labour, material progress, and society are not such that any such link between work and morality should be made. I think that this conflation is in part a hangover from a time when such links existed. When laziness could destroy families, even starve communities. But I think it is more than that. It seems to me to be a way in which the 'better sort' of people attempt to retain the moral highground over the unemployed. Not the working-class - the underclass.

People with high-paying jobs rarely contribute more to society than anybody else. In fact, I see (most of) them as parasites of a magnitude way above that the benefit-scroungers will ever reach. First off, we have reached such a level of material progress that most 'respectable' jobs are concerned not with the production of wealth, but either with it's redistribution, or with non-productive/non-capital-creating services. As such, they do not even aid the material progress of society. Secondly, any wealth that they generate and 'invest' is not even rightfully their own, since they simply manage others' labour, and give a portion of it back to them. And thirdly, they don't create jobs, they monopolise them. That gap in the market was there before they took it over. And this last point is in a way the most relevant today, since it explains how our working conditions decline and our work hours increase at a time when the means of material production have been largely mechanised and human labour made redundant. This is an excellent article, btw.

The thing is, many people, like the OP, are misguided. They think that they glorify work, when what they do is in fact glorify a person's role in a productive system where individual labour is not the means of it's organisation, but a tool to be controlled. But it's not only that, these people abuse labour, so that rather than being a healthy part of a person's life and being, it becomes their defining characteristic - the sole means of determining their role and place in society. Hence when we meet a stranger in any sort of semi-formal setting, name-asking aside, our first question is generally "what do you do?".

It is a very unhealthy situation, and a product of the individualistic and materialistic society that the OP so loves and yet hates the fruits of.