I recently said our civ will fall if we do not find finish the industrial revolution, and apply the industry trio of math, big orgs, and capitalism to more areas of life.
Have you tried to publish these ideas in any academic press? I’d like to see them responsive to more scrutiny from those who have worked on cultural evolution
Henrich mostly seemed to nod along as Robin presented his thesis. Disappointing, really.
I assume there will be a raft of people who - like me - would find the "cultural drift" term to be already taken by the cultural analog of genetic drift.
There are the concepts of "mutational meltdown" and "error catastrophe" - which are often applied to genetics. The cultural versions of those concepts seem to me to be close to your ideas. So: we could reasonably have terms like: "cultural catastrophe" and "cultural meltdown" to refer to the cultural analog of these concepts. I appreciate this terminology is a bit more focused on death - rather than decline - but that seems kind-of appropriate to me.
Since you invoke previous civilizational breakdowns as related examples there are terms like "decadence" and "downfall" that are used by historians. These describe the phenomenon you seek to explain - if not the specific mechanism involved.
However, the bigger problem for me is not the terminology, but the science. In particular, I don't really buy the picture that reduced selection pressure on "macroculture" features is a good explanation for the modern fertility decline. Instead I would point to resource competition acting on genetic and cultural variation. The resources spent on preaching and teaching have risen, while those spent on making copies of DNA have declined - since both draw from the same resource pool. Genetic and memetic evolution interact in this case - and there is competition for resources. This competition can also be seen in technology - with motor cars and horses competing for resources - for example.
There's a lot of disagreement in the field of cultural evolution. Different theories lead to different policy proposals - and these include various hot-button issues. The field is littered with dead and discredited theories: social Darwinism, sociobiology, behaviourism - and so on.
Anyway, I don't want to be too discouraging. Cultural evolution is a fascinating and important field. I am generally delighted that it is gradually getting more attention. In particular I am happy to see you taking an interest. Your knowledge and background could position you to make an interesting contribution to the subject. Go Robin!
Don’t algorithms made by for profit companies attempt to influence culture? I’m thinking about TikTok’s attempt to suppress politically controversial topics or twitters collaboration with the US government
We already have for profit organizations that operate very openly in "sacred areas" of "moral activism". You have to look no further than the prosperity gospel movement and some of its noxious personalities like Joel Osteen, Kenneth Copeland, Jim Baker, Jimmy Swaggart, and the hilariously appropriately named Creflo Dollar to see what the combination of so-called moral activism and capitalism produces. It produces exactly the kind of products you would expect including mega-churches, televangelism, conversion therapy, pastor owned personal airliners, sex scandals, and ultimately grape juice fueled suicide pacts, unfortunately. You could say much the same about religion organizations in general as they are for profit and it can be argued they have caused as much suffering in the world as they have assuaged.
>Could we apply industry to more strongly to manage this process? For example, by paying big orgs to create, suppress, and influence such movements to achieve key metrics.
Big orgs (even for-profit ones) already do all of that, of course, to the utmost extent of their abilities. So, what you propose is to change the metrics they strive towards. However, there isn't a broad consensus on what that change should be, and establishing such consensus seems to be the main requirement.
I still think you need to add religion into that mix. Religion is the most time-tested mechanism we have to shape culture in a durable way.
I can imagine a religious faith that incorporates scientific principles to promote well-being, funded by tithing of its members. Scripture will tell us what to seek and why, science and math will elucidate the how.
Re. this: "Finally, the modern world has widely adopted the views (a) that morality is a whole separate realm where the usual adult knowledge and experience are less relevant, (b) that moral opinions should from come authentically from within us, and (c) that youthful opinions on morals tend to be less corrupted by habit and self-interest."
The whole set (a,b,c) was AFAIK first popularized by the Nazis, though much of it builds on pre-Nazi German youth movements, Spengler and other German race-theorists, and of course Nietzsche. For the Nazis, a "moral" person was not someone who followed universal laws, but someone who was "authentic" to their race-historical essence.
The worldview behind authenticity comes from Rousseau, and also some from Christianity. It was originally about individual authenticity. The Nazi philosopher Heidegger popularized the particular term "Eigentlichkeit" ("authenticity"), originally in an individualistic way, as being resolute in the face of one's own death. But he soon turned it into the racial authenticity that Hitler was already preaching with different words.
Hannah Arendt, Heidegger's student and lover, eventually saw his development of "authenticity", which she called "emotion-laden insensitivity to reality", as a grave threat to the world. You can't say she didn't warn us.
Sartre made authenticity individualistic again, but the Social Justice movement got their understanding of authenticity more via other students of Heidegger, such as Herbert Marcuse (the Marxist revolutionary who told Angela Davis to radicalize blacks to incite revolution in the US, and created the Social Justice movement's arguments that free speech is oppressive), and post-colonials like Franz Fanon and Paulo Freire, who invented the "anti-colonial" educational system which was imported to the US in the 1960s & 1970s and is widespread today.
(All five of these people--Sartre, Marcuse, Davis, Fanon, and Freire--ardently defended past and future massacres of race and/or class enemies in the service of "liberation".)
Heidegger hated science and objectivity (which, along with capitalism and Western civilization, he called "Jewish"), and set out to replace them with an epistemology of "authenticity" based in your race's "lived experience". That is, it is right for you to believe whatever your race believes. He took Spengler's proto-Nazi theory of racial relativity (especially "German science", and in the recently-published Black Notebooks, "Jewish science") and cloaked it in academic jargon to make it respectable. Heidegger equated Western civilization with Jewishness, and argued that it was the most degenerate and decadent civilization in the world today, and needed to be destroyed.
(That's why some people have started saying "people of culture" instead of "people of color": it's a Heideggerian dog-whistle. "People of culture" was Heidegger's phrase for "authentic" German Volk, as opposed to the Western Jewish capitalists and scientists, whom Heidegger said could have no culture and no authenticity.)
Marcuse replaced Heidegger's racial "authenticity" with authenticity as "The Great Refusal"—the absolute rejection of the current system, whatever it was.
Combining these two teachings gave third-world Marxist anti-colonialists exactly what they wanted. It was obvious to them that racial hatred of a minority, plus a blanket hatred for all social conventions, would do even better than class hatred at inspiring revolution. Fanon's book (1961) was translated into English in 1963 and immediately taught in many American universities; Freire's /Pedagogy of the Oppressed/ was first published in English (1970) and also brought immediately into American colleges.
So the doctrine of "authenticity" based on "lived experience" now taught to American children in K-12 and in college, as well as the doctrine that America is the worst of all nations, and truth is found not in s/Jewish/white/ science, but in the folk wisdom of s/Kulturvölker/People of Culture/, was developed by the foremost Nazi philosopher to support a totalitarian racist dictatorship, and brought to America by Marxist revolutionaries intent on bloody revolution.
I’m fine with “finish the industrial revolution, and apply the industry trio of math, big orgs, and capitalism to more areas of life”. But this won’t satisfy the human yearning for meaning. For long-term success you need a parallel engine for meaning that is at least mostly compatible with your Industrial Revolution. Meaning necessarily includes the fuzzy stuff like purpose and morality. In the past this has been Christian religion. There are points of conflict, but for the most part its creation of meaning also supported the IR’s creation of prosperity. With religion failing on the Left, we got a bunch of mostly random and mostly futile activism to replace that need for meaning and purpose. This activism was largely antagonistic to the IR. Your IR will never be complete without a compatible meaning engine in place to satisfy that need. Just reactively suppressing the most antagonistic activists won’t be enough. You need something to proactively replace that source of meaning.
Per Mike Lane’s comment above, actually American-style mega-churches (and religions like Scientology) kinda do this, as has the Catholic Church and no doubt various other religions for centuries. That is, extract money (donations, tithes etc) from people in return for giving them a sense of meaning
Yes hard. Better to have industry manage $$ and something external to mange meaning. There needs to be a tension in the relationship or else the $$ will ultimately subjugate and swallow the meaning.
When I became unemployable, as a fiftyish white non-managerial male in a DEI-ridden, youth-worshipping industry, and was forced to retire to the country to live cheaply off what I'd saved, I saw my new neighbors spend all their free time on activities that seemed, to me, utterly banal. Tending their lawn and flowers. Church services. Sitting for hours at the bar. Watching TV or talking about it. Watching sports or talking about it. Playing sports. Pursuing pointless hobbies: ham radio, quilting, raising chickens at a loss.
I thought they were pathetic lives of quiet desperation.
It took me a few years to notice that, excepting some in severe financial, physical, or mental trouble, they weren't desperate. Except for religious or political fanatics, most weren't pursuing "meaning", whatever that is. They worked, they relaxed, they played, they married and raised families. They were doing something I came more and more to feel that I wasn't: living in the present, and being mostly content.
Many have part-time purposes. But there was a distinct lack of the constant nagging guilt that they weren't helping to change the world at every moment, which I'd become used to in academic, scientific, literary, and rationalist circles.
Families and identities are a key part of this. Having something you do well, even if it's useless. Being a member of the community. Being a father, a mother, a woman, a man. I saw a city-dweller get angry when someone said country people care more about their families than city people do, but it's true. Country people give up a lot of money to stay in one place and keep their families together. There's a lot to be said in favor of following your biological imperatives.
I'm still not like them. I have ambitions and purposes I don't intend to give up. But I always have. I've never been plagued with the need to find "meaning"; I always have more purposes to choose from than I can use. So do my academic, literary, etc., friends. I don't understand how someone can have the imagination to desire purpose, but not the imagination to come up with even one.
Just a few days ago, I accidentally watched the first few minutes of Melania Trump's movie, trying to figure out what it was and why it had been made. Her walking around in high black heels, black sunglasses, wide-brimmed black hat, the center of attention, walking oh-so-demurely and indifferently past rows of servants and bodyguards, from mansion, to limousine, to airplane, to limousine, to some other mansion. Now /that/ seemed pathetic. But I got the strong impression that she thinks she's found her purpose: to be first in a status competition. A perfect match for her husband.
It made me wonder whether my "purposes" are really any different. I think a lot of people who think they want to save the world, would feel cheated if they did, and didn't get credit for it.
So I think feeling a "yearning for meaning" either isn't a natural thing, or is really a yearning for status. If it really is an existential crisis for someone, I think the problem isn't any lack of "meaning", but the yearning itself. The fact that a lot of people claim to be yearning for "meaning" or "purpose" doesn't mean that the best thing for them would be to find it, any more than an obsessive-compulsive's yearning to wash his hands endlessly means we need to help him find a way to do that.
I think you are right that “yearning for” meaning and purpose is not natural. We only yearn for it when it’s missing. A purely capitalist materialist atomized culture is generally unsatisfying. People start to yearn for collective meaning but don’t know what meaning is so they grope for purpose in various unnatural ways that won’t satisfy in the end because they are mismatched with human nature. (Rationalists want to change the world in ways that make sense only to autists, environmentalists want to save the earth from something or other, leftists have to invent novel minority classes to feel good about protecting.) the small things you talked about are usually what engenders natural meaning and purpose - family connections, religious community, parenting. These are what has been destroyed in the culture you describe, leaving us to yearn.
One of the most transformative cultural shifts was the Russian Revolution and Marxism/Communism. Was that driven more by youth movements or more by adults? If the latter, does this suggest that the trend of cultural drift by youth movements is a part of something bigger?
Re: Communism adults/youth - wasn't it both? Trotsky, Lenin and Stalin started when they were quite young, and kept going as adults.
Soviet communism was a youth movement until it wasn't. It remains a youth movement in capitalist countries where (significant) cemented communist power doesn't exist.
In my hypothesis developed over many years, what is the greatest challenge for a young adult now, is the lack of any example from previous history to help provide perspective upon what is before us today. I find the Fermi paradox makes sense because of the physics showing in deep space, and also the distances, whereas a definite speed limit called light-speed holds down the pace of aspiring to just build a spaceship and go to other solar systems tomorrow. We don't seem to like the apparent situation of the need to take better care of our own planet. We don't seem to aspire to the use of AI augmented research to cure cancer, stop most of the causes of death by old age, and essentially outsmart our genes learning to better manage nutrition and environmental factors to protect our metabolism living longer, healthier, and having more time to figure out more about the challenges in developing space travel within our own solar system. This just isn't football. But if we do grow up and face the real challenge before us, the discovery in cyberspace may be much more amazing than is currently considered in most of the big science fiction movies. My goal is to focus upon what is present, being mindful of what is actually before us, and appreciating the complexity of the task that is really there. We have no more excuses for not understanding it. The burgeoning AI resource provides plenty of unanticipated amazing opportunities to learn in molecular science, genetic engineering, and medical biology, while the philosophy development in all of it is just a massive task waiting to be seen fully. While the romance of Star Trek "warp field" invention seems really cool, nothing in space telemetry and astronomy indicates that it happens at all. But the key mistake is thinking the "quiet" means emptiness out there. We had better learn more about cyberspace now. Because what seems to be more likely out there has much more to do with that than Captain Kirk's leadership in a uniform full of human courage. The warmest recorded annual average temperature ever seen in known history for Antarctica was 2025, and this is what should be a big part of new missions, building a better future for the truest hope of our young adults today. We need to make progress in understanding molecules and physical chemistry, taking care of our own planet and bodies now. That is the real job. It is a task for our minds, and a frontier in information theory works. Can we respect what we already are standing here on our planet enough to put it in the kind of perspective that empowers us not to go extinct in a cosmic inferiority complex?
Youth movements are often handicapped by the young people not having very much money or influence. In turn, I'm sure the youth don't like the way the world often seems to be run by a bunch of geriatric and senile wrinklies.
Assuming slowing down perpetual youth revolutions is the goal: hardline cementing of top-down institutions committed to tradition seems a very viable option.
Lobbying or bribing private orgs to support conservatism (as they have apparently done what with the tradwive trends etc.) and cementing political power, institutions and legislature so as they're less viable to change. Pushing hard for conservative propaganda in legal news outlets and through social media and AI algorithms (assumedly by lobbying social media and AI orgs).
(Neo-)conservative activism should trump youth activism if it in fact manages to align with money and power.
Obvious issues with this approach arise, yes, but that is one way to do it. The biggest instrumental issues I find are that 1) even regional, much less global coordination of political and business forces is difficult to achieve in a global environment of free flow of information, and 2) backlash seems imminent with hard pushes. Perhaps severe cracking down on free Internet might help here, but it might result in even harder backlashes. Moreover such measures might result in sterile cultures with little innovation, which means losing the baby with the bathwater.
I do not advocate any of this, so as to repeat: assuming the goal is slowing down perpetual youth revolutions.
One trend that runs counter to this narrative is the recent rise in youth attendance at Catholic and Orthodox churches (maybe other conservative Christian denominations too?). Time will tell whether this leads to serious cultural shifts, but my sense is that young people are intuiting that they live in a maladaptive culture and are willing to make serious sacrifices to find a better one. Reminds me of the mass conversions to Orthodoxy among late Soviet liberals (my parents among them).
sure, but the Catholic / Orthodox conversions seem to run counter to the trends you mentioned since they deemphasize authenticity and fashion, and encourage submission to older adults and even older cultural traditions.
Have you tried to publish these ideas in any academic press? I’d like to see them responsive to more scrutiny from those who have worked on cultural evolution
Not a write-up - but I did notice that Robin presented his ideas to Joe Henrich here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s4qMJwmL9cU
Henrich mostly seemed to nod along as Robin presented his thesis. Disappointing, really.
I assume there will be a raft of people who - like me - would find the "cultural drift" term to be already taken by the cultural analog of genetic drift.
What better term do you suggest for what I'm trying to point to?
There are the concepts of "mutational meltdown" and "error catastrophe" - which are often applied to genetics. The cultural versions of those concepts seem to me to be close to your ideas. So: we could reasonably have terms like: "cultural catastrophe" and "cultural meltdown" to refer to the cultural analog of these concepts. I appreciate this terminology is a bit more focused on death - rather than decline - but that seems kind-of appropriate to me.
Since you invoke previous civilizational breakdowns as related examples there are terms like "decadence" and "downfall" that are used by historians. These describe the phenomenon you seek to explain - if not the specific mechanism involved.
However, the bigger problem for me is not the terminology, but the science. In particular, I don't really buy the picture that reduced selection pressure on "macroculture" features is a good explanation for the modern fertility decline. Instead I would point to resource competition acting on genetic and cultural variation. The resources spent on preaching and teaching have risen, while those spent on making copies of DNA have declined - since both draw from the same resource pool. Genetic and memetic evolution interact in this case - and there is competition for resources. This competition can also be seen in technology - with motor cars and horses competing for resources - for example.
There's a lot of disagreement in the field of cultural evolution. Different theories lead to different policy proposals - and these include various hot-button issues. The field is littered with dead and discredited theories: social Darwinism, sociobiology, behaviourism - and so on.
Anyway, I don't want to be too discouraging. Cultural evolution is a fascinating and important field. I am generally delighted that it is gradually getting more attention. In particular I am happy to see you taking an interest. Your knowledge and background could position you to make an interesting contribution to the subject. Go Robin!
Don’t algorithms made by for profit companies attempt to influence culture? I’m thinking about TikTok’s attempt to suppress politically controversial topics or twitters collaboration with the US government
I had intended to mention that; just edited to do so.
We already have for profit organizations that operate very openly in "sacred areas" of "moral activism". You have to look no further than the prosperity gospel movement and some of its noxious personalities like Joel Osteen, Kenneth Copeland, Jim Baker, Jimmy Swaggart, and the hilariously appropriately named Creflo Dollar to see what the combination of so-called moral activism and capitalism produces. It produces exactly the kind of products you would expect including mega-churches, televangelism, conversion therapy, pastor owned personal airliners, sex scandals, and ultimately grape juice fueled suicide pacts, unfortunately. You could say much the same about religion organizations in general as they are for profit and it can be argued they have caused as much suffering in the world as they have assuaged.
>Could we apply industry to more strongly to manage this process? For example, by paying big orgs to create, suppress, and influence such movements to achieve key metrics.
Big orgs (even for-profit ones) already do all of that, of course, to the utmost extent of their abilities. So, what you propose is to change the metrics they strive towards. However, there isn't a broad consensus on what that change should be, and establishing such consensus seems to be the main requirement.
I still think you need to add religion into that mix. Religion is the most time-tested mechanism we have to shape culture in a durable way.
I can imagine a religious faith that incorporates scientific principles to promote well-being, funded by tithing of its members. Scripture will tell us what to seek and why, science and math will elucidate the how.
Marxism, as practiced by Lenin, preaches constant revolution. One important reason to hold onto the written word, most everything else is ephemera.
Re. this: "Finally, the modern world has widely adopted the views (a) that morality is a whole separate realm where the usual adult knowledge and experience are less relevant, (b) that moral opinions should from come authentically from within us, and (c) that youthful opinions on morals tend to be less corrupted by habit and self-interest."
The whole set (a,b,c) was AFAIK first popularized by the Nazis, though much of it builds on pre-Nazi German youth movements, Spengler and other German race-theorists, and of course Nietzsche. For the Nazis, a "moral" person was not someone who followed universal laws, but someone who was "authentic" to their race-historical essence.
The worldview behind authenticity comes from Rousseau, and also some from Christianity. It was originally about individual authenticity. The Nazi philosopher Heidegger popularized the particular term "Eigentlichkeit" ("authenticity"), originally in an individualistic way, as being resolute in the face of one's own death. But he soon turned it into the racial authenticity that Hitler was already preaching with different words.
Hannah Arendt, Heidegger's student and lover, eventually saw his development of "authenticity", which she called "emotion-laden insensitivity to reality", as a grave threat to the world. You can't say she didn't warn us.
Sartre made authenticity individualistic again, but the Social Justice movement got their understanding of authenticity more via other students of Heidegger, such as Herbert Marcuse (the Marxist revolutionary who told Angela Davis to radicalize blacks to incite revolution in the US, and created the Social Justice movement's arguments that free speech is oppressive), and post-colonials like Franz Fanon and Paulo Freire, who invented the "anti-colonial" educational system which was imported to the US in the 1960s & 1970s and is widespread today.
(All five of these people--Sartre, Marcuse, Davis, Fanon, and Freire--ardently defended past and future massacres of race and/or class enemies in the service of "liberation".)
Heidegger hated science and objectivity (which, along with capitalism and Western civilization, he called "Jewish"), and set out to replace them with an epistemology of "authenticity" based in your race's "lived experience". That is, it is right for you to believe whatever your race believes. He took Spengler's proto-Nazi theory of racial relativity (especially "German science", and in the recently-published Black Notebooks, "Jewish science") and cloaked it in academic jargon to make it respectable. Heidegger equated Western civilization with Jewishness, and argued that it was the most degenerate and decadent civilization in the world today, and needed to be destroyed.
(That's why some people have started saying "people of culture" instead of "people of color": it's a Heideggerian dog-whistle. "People of culture" was Heidegger's phrase for "authentic" German Volk, as opposed to the Western Jewish capitalists and scientists, whom Heidegger said could have no culture and no authenticity.)
Marcuse replaced Heidegger's racial "authenticity" with authenticity as "The Great Refusal"—the absolute rejection of the current system, whatever it was.
Combining these two teachings gave third-world Marxist anti-colonialists exactly what they wanted. It was obvious to them that racial hatred of a minority, plus a blanket hatred for all social conventions, would do even better than class hatred at inspiring revolution. Fanon's book (1961) was translated into English in 1963 and immediately taught in many American universities; Freire's /Pedagogy of the Oppressed/ was first published in English (1970) and also brought immediately into American colleges.
So the doctrine of "authenticity" based on "lived experience" now taught to American children in K-12 and in college, as well as the doctrine that America is the worst of all nations, and truth is found not in s/Jewish/white/ science, but in the folk wisdom of s/Kulturvölker/People of Culture/, was developed by the foremost Nazi philosopher to support a totalitarian racist dictatorship, and brought to America by Marxist revolutionaries intent on bloody revolution.
I’m fine with “finish the industrial revolution, and apply the industry trio of math, big orgs, and capitalism to more areas of life”. But this won’t satisfy the human yearning for meaning. For long-term success you need a parallel engine for meaning that is at least mostly compatible with your Industrial Revolution. Meaning necessarily includes the fuzzy stuff like purpose and morality. In the past this has been Christian religion. There are points of conflict, but for the most part its creation of meaning also supported the IR’s creation of prosperity. With religion failing on the Left, we got a bunch of mostly random and mostly futile activism to replace that need for meaning and purpose. This activism was largely antagonistic to the IR. Your IR will never be complete without a compatible meaning engine in place to satisfy that need. Just reactively suppressing the most antagonistic activists won’t be enough. You need something to proactively replace that source of meaning.
Yes I want industry to manage meaning. Yes that looks hard.
Per Mike Lane’s comment above, actually American-style mega-churches (and religions like Scientology) kinda do this, as has the Catholic Church and no doubt various other religions for centuries. That is, extract money (donations, tithes etc) from people in return for giving them a sense of meaning
Yes hard. Better to have industry manage $$ and something external to mange meaning. There needs to be a tension in the relationship or else the $$ will ultimately subjugate and swallow the meaning.
"Meaning" is such a first-world problem.
When I became unemployable, as a fiftyish white non-managerial male in a DEI-ridden, youth-worshipping industry, and was forced to retire to the country to live cheaply off what I'd saved, I saw my new neighbors spend all their free time on activities that seemed, to me, utterly banal. Tending their lawn and flowers. Church services. Sitting for hours at the bar. Watching TV or talking about it. Watching sports or talking about it. Playing sports. Pursuing pointless hobbies: ham radio, quilting, raising chickens at a loss.
I thought they were pathetic lives of quiet desperation.
It took me a few years to notice that, excepting some in severe financial, physical, or mental trouble, they weren't desperate. Except for religious or political fanatics, most weren't pursuing "meaning", whatever that is. They worked, they relaxed, they played, they married and raised families. They were doing something I came more and more to feel that I wasn't: living in the present, and being mostly content.
Many have part-time purposes. But there was a distinct lack of the constant nagging guilt that they weren't helping to change the world at every moment, which I'd become used to in academic, scientific, literary, and rationalist circles.
Families and identities are a key part of this. Having something you do well, even if it's useless. Being a member of the community. Being a father, a mother, a woman, a man. I saw a city-dweller get angry when someone said country people care more about their families than city people do, but it's true. Country people give up a lot of money to stay in one place and keep their families together. There's a lot to be said in favor of following your biological imperatives.
I'm still not like them. I have ambitions and purposes I don't intend to give up. But I always have. I've never been plagued with the need to find "meaning"; I always have more purposes to choose from than I can use. So do my academic, literary, etc., friends. I don't understand how someone can have the imagination to desire purpose, but not the imagination to come up with even one.
Just a few days ago, I accidentally watched the first few minutes of Melania Trump's movie, trying to figure out what it was and why it had been made. Her walking around in high black heels, black sunglasses, wide-brimmed black hat, the center of attention, walking oh-so-demurely and indifferently past rows of servants and bodyguards, from mansion, to limousine, to airplane, to limousine, to some other mansion. Now /that/ seemed pathetic. But I got the strong impression that she thinks she's found her purpose: to be first in a status competition. A perfect match for her husband.
It made me wonder whether my "purposes" are really any different. I think a lot of people who think they want to save the world, would feel cheated if they did, and didn't get credit for it.
So I think feeling a "yearning for meaning" either isn't a natural thing, or is really a yearning for status. If it really is an existential crisis for someone, I think the problem isn't any lack of "meaning", but the yearning itself. The fact that a lot of people claim to be yearning for "meaning" or "purpose" doesn't mean that the best thing for them would be to find it, any more than an obsessive-compulsive's yearning to wash his hands endlessly means we need to help him find a way to do that.
I think you are right that “yearning for” meaning and purpose is not natural. We only yearn for it when it’s missing. A purely capitalist materialist atomized culture is generally unsatisfying. People start to yearn for collective meaning but don’t know what meaning is so they grope for purpose in various unnatural ways that won’t satisfy in the end because they are mismatched with human nature. (Rationalists want to change the world in ways that make sense only to autists, environmentalists want to save the earth from something or other, leftists have to invent novel minority classes to feel good about protecting.) the small things you talked about are usually what engenders natural meaning and purpose - family connections, religious community, parenting. These are what has been destroyed in the culture you describe, leaving us to yearn.
One of the most transformative cultural shifts was the Russian Revolution and Marxism/Communism. Was that driven more by youth movements or more by adults? If the latter, does this suggest that the trend of cultural drift by youth movements is a part of something bigger?
Re: Communism adults/youth - wasn't it both? Trotsky, Lenin and Stalin started when they were quite young, and kept going as adults.
Soviet communism was a youth movement until it wasn't. It remains a youth movement in capitalist countries where (significant) cemented communist power doesn't exist.
In my hypothesis developed over many years, what is the greatest challenge for a young adult now, is the lack of any example from previous history to help provide perspective upon what is before us today. I find the Fermi paradox makes sense because of the physics showing in deep space, and also the distances, whereas a definite speed limit called light-speed holds down the pace of aspiring to just build a spaceship and go to other solar systems tomorrow. We don't seem to like the apparent situation of the need to take better care of our own planet. We don't seem to aspire to the use of AI augmented research to cure cancer, stop most of the causes of death by old age, and essentially outsmart our genes learning to better manage nutrition and environmental factors to protect our metabolism living longer, healthier, and having more time to figure out more about the challenges in developing space travel within our own solar system. This just isn't football. But if we do grow up and face the real challenge before us, the discovery in cyberspace may be much more amazing than is currently considered in most of the big science fiction movies. My goal is to focus upon what is present, being mindful of what is actually before us, and appreciating the complexity of the task that is really there. We have no more excuses for not understanding it. The burgeoning AI resource provides plenty of unanticipated amazing opportunities to learn in molecular science, genetic engineering, and medical biology, while the philosophy development in all of it is just a massive task waiting to be seen fully. While the romance of Star Trek "warp field" invention seems really cool, nothing in space telemetry and astronomy indicates that it happens at all. But the key mistake is thinking the "quiet" means emptiness out there. We had better learn more about cyberspace now. Because what seems to be more likely out there has much more to do with that than Captain Kirk's leadership in a uniform full of human courage. The warmest recorded annual average temperature ever seen in known history for Antarctica was 2025, and this is what should be a big part of new missions, building a better future for the truest hope of our young adults today. We need to make progress in understanding molecules and physical chemistry, taking care of our own planet and bodies now. That is the real job. It is a task for our minds, and a frontier in information theory works. Can we respect what we already are standing here on our planet enough to put it in the kind of perspective that empowers us not to go extinct in a cosmic inferiority complex?
Youth movements are often handicapped by the young people not having very much money or influence. In turn, I'm sure the youth don't like the way the world often seems to be run by a bunch of geriatric and senile wrinklies.
And yet they are consistently changing our morals. Giving them more money would just let them speed that up. How can we slow them down?
Assuming slowing down perpetual youth revolutions is the goal: hardline cementing of top-down institutions committed to tradition seems a very viable option.
Lobbying or bribing private orgs to support conservatism (as they have apparently done what with the tradwive trends etc.) and cementing political power, institutions and legislature so as they're less viable to change. Pushing hard for conservative propaganda in legal news outlets and through social media and AI algorithms (assumedly by lobbying social media and AI orgs).
(Neo-)conservative activism should trump youth activism if it in fact manages to align with money and power.
Obvious issues with this approach arise, yes, but that is one way to do it. The biggest instrumental issues I find are that 1) even regional, much less global coordination of political and business forces is difficult to achieve in a global environment of free flow of information, and 2) backlash seems imminent with hard pushes. Perhaps severe cracking down on free Internet might help here, but it might result in even harder backlashes. Moreover such measures might result in sterile cultures with little innovation, which means losing the baby with the bathwater.
I do not advocate any of this, so as to repeat: assuming the goal is slowing down perpetual youth revolutions.
One trend that runs counter to this narrative is the recent rise in youth attendance at Catholic and Orthodox churches (maybe other conservative Christian denominations too?). Time will tell whether this leads to serious cultural shifts, but my sense is that young people are intuiting that they live in a maladaptive culture and are willing to make serious sacrifices to find a better one. Reminds me of the mass conversions to Orthodoxy among late Soviet liberals (my parents among them).
Most youth movements see themselves as improving on previous ones.
sure, but the Catholic / Orthodox conversions seem to run counter to the trends you mentioned since they deemphasize authenticity and fashion, and encourage submission to older adults and even older cultural traditions.
I don't believe there is such a "trend".