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Dispatches from Facebook: Or, Very Bad News
I’m 24. I didn’t create a Facebook account until my last year of college. When I did finally give in, I curated my feed carefully to avoid politics, and I stayed away from the most politically active people. All this (mostly) worked… until about four days ago.
Over the last few days, I’ve unfriended almost every person I knew in high school since all of them were posting either explicit justifications for the current riots or intersectional propaganda. (You know the kind.) The once staunchly Republican daughter of a family friend has now taken to calling out “privilege.” Just now, I logged into Facebook and found myself staring at the “pyramid of oppression” charts being non-ironically shared by Hillsdale students. Yes, you read that correctly: Critical race theory has arrived at Hillsdale. Some fraction of the school’s literary elite has gone woke.
What the bleepity-bleep is happening? I’ve witnessed a gradual radicalization of my peers since high school, but this… this is just bizarre. And when classically educated Catholics start sounding like Ta-Nehisi Coates, we’ve really fallen through the looking glass.
I submit that we’re doomed. Doomed, doomed, doomed, doomed.
Published in General
Wow, I felt bad when I snoozed people for 30 days.
Good for you though, even though I’m sorry, because it hurts to turn-away from people.
I’m simply confident that I don’t need no schoolin’ in all this woke.
I saw a post in a teacher page called woke kindergarten. Posters and memes, translating woke concepts for little kids.
Here’s what I know for sure, I was raised to believe we judge people by the content of their character. I’m not liking what I see.
I’m getting to a breaking point.
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Fyi, I’m not in college. I was an infant when JFK and MLK and RFK were assassinated.
You are pretty depressing. And correct.
The takeover of the educational system is coming home to roost.
@kephalithos, find the Young Heretics podcast on ricochet superfeed or iTunes. It’s like a balm in Gilead.
@spencerklavan
It’s worse than that. Some of these people are homeschooled Christians from conservative families. Some of them went to classical high schools.
Does’nt it make you think of the community hysteria that formed around the Salem Witch trials?
There is a kind of insanity in all of this.
I don’t know. But I do have a newfound sympathy for the late-pagan Romans.
So what’s it about? Word of mouth? Peer pressure?
I honestly have my doubts that intelligent people properly raised and schooled would do a 180, but I’m open to explanation.
I wish I knew. It might have something to do with the fact that our political culture is currently quite malleable. Just what is a conservative supposed to believe nowadays? It’s hard to say.
Things were much clearer during the Cold War era and its afterglow.
I have pretty much no contact with under 25’s, so I’m really going speculative here. But one common theme that transcends (bypasses) education is popular media. And to say it slants left is to undersell “slants.” There is no conservative voice to speak of and no questioning of conventional left-wing wisdom that regularly permeates the programming. It has to have an effect, particularly among those who are still formative.
Yes, Zoomers are in a bubble and don’t get and don’t seek alternate opinions. They are so deep in the virtue cycle that they dare not stray from the collective opinion. Lately they have taking from 11 to 12.
Talked on Saturday with my friend’s grandson, and part of the problem I think is the lack of understanding at their age for private property or the long-term damage of some of what’s being done. The 60s riots and the waste they laid to cities like Detroit or Newark are as distant to them as the union riots of the World War I era were to the Boomers of the 60s, so they’re OK with property being destroyed because it shows those people put George Floyd’s life over mere personal property, and whatever was looted on burned around the country will be back up and running soon by somebody.
The idea of people losing their homes or businesses to the looters and arsonists isn’t factored into their thinking, with the only caveat there being if their own homes are threatened (and the fact that Floyd’s family has called out the rioters may disarm some of the virtue signaling, since you now have to downplay the family of the victim you’re supposedly supporting in order to justify the damage being done).
Meanwhile in Chicago this weekend 26 killed and 65 wounded. Almost exclusively blacks killed and maimed by other blacks.
But no outrage, no protests.
One bad cop killed one black man. Thats a “man bites dog” story. It’s rare and the exception not the rule.
Apparently all those other black lives don’t matter.
Properly raised and schooled has only so much impact, even if the child/student was an active participant opposed to a compliant prisoner. The benefit, I hope, is in being able to reason them back to sanity.
You submit that because you are 24 and haven’t lived through times of great difficulty. If you great grampa was still around, he’d tell you how foolish you are for being so negative, and that things have been far worse before, and that they will get better.
Someone is going to come along and tell me “But Spin, don’t you see? It’s different this time!” Yeah, I know. It’s always different this time.
Some people are saying this in a re-run of 1968, but I think it’s still more akin to 1972, even if the Democrats went with Biden instead of McGovern stand-in Bernie.
The Ferguson and Baltimore riots in 2014-15 helped make the 2016 election into 1968 redux, where the violence continued into Nixon’s first term, and t he ’72 race ended up being a referendum on whether or not people were going to vote for a party defending order, or one that offered up the most tepid condemnation of the most violent protestors, while asking everyone to understand what led them to this point. The only difference is Antifa’s protests have been more of the hit-and-run variety when they see the opportunity, and not the more long-term planning of the Bill Ayers Weather Underground crowd, with their targeted bombings of the U.S. Capitol and ROTC centers (and their untargeted bombing of that townhouse near Washington Square).
The aftermath of 9/11 and the inability to defend premeditated domestic terrorism is likely the only reason that hasn’t happened yet.
Your last sentence sums it up. Blacks lives matter only when snuffed out by whites. Other than that, it’s open season . . .
And, if you bring this up you’re a racist for emphasizing black-on-black crime.
Train young women up to think this way, and young men will double down on it to earn demonstrations of their approval. This is true whether the young women are part of the young mens’ social life, or, as is often the case these days, their teachers and managers.
This lack of understanding is assiduously cultivated in most K-12 and higher education.
Like you, I’ve tried to segment my social media interactions. Ricochet is for serious debates (and silliness). Facebook is for family photos and friendly connections. Twitter is for my interest in games and game design.
Lately, the last has been most annoying because groups and companies normally dedicated to providing humor and light escapism have decided to advertise their politics. Sony, EA, and other companies which exist to entertain have delayed product reveals to mourn an entirely imagined epidemic of racism. I don’t see a critical thought among them.
Hillsdale students aren’t monolithic in their politics. One of the few students to stand up and ask questions of the speakers at the Understanding China seminar was a Bernie Bro.
I wouldn’t rule out Hillsdale students eventually coming around to sensible thinking, having been exposed to such great classical thought — unlike most other college graduates.
Hat tip: Instapundit
I was talked into Facebook back when my family was planning the funeral service for my mother. I got out of it soon after.
My wife joined and enjoyed it for years, since there was a Deerhound group (we had three ) and it was a good way to keep up with people we knew from the dog show and breeding world. It eventually became so political (deerhounds! ) that she just quit it.
I think Facebook is another example of “O’Sullivan’s Law”:
Yeah, and maybe some expressly right wing organizations, too.
I was raised in a middle-class family in the midwest. After finishing my suburban high school I applied to college several places including UCal/Berkeley. I am far from a brilliant guy–my high school GPA was probably around a B+ and my SAT’s were (who can remember exactly?) around 1500 or so. Somehow I was accepted to attend school there. All I knew was that it was California and the girls were supposed to be really HOT. The time was 1965 and the Free Speech Movement had just cooled down but LOVE and Hippiedom were just revving up. After 11/2 years I had enough and quit to become a full-time hippie. My Dad owned a relatively small plumbing supply company. I had worked there every Christmas break (inventory) and every summer since I was about 13 years old, but now I had become a socialist and thought my Dad was an evil man because he made a profit in his business. He was a capitalist. BAD!
A few years later I was still in my wandering times and I found myself spending a summer living with a group of wild young people from 15 to 30 years old temporarily renting a home in Marin County, Ca. The group of kids was an artistic lot and spent a lot of time roaming around the valley and “being creative”, but the time came for us to disband and go our different directions. There was one last event that took place right before we left. I came home to find all the kids inside painting all the walls with what were their expressions of art. One of my few possessions was an oil painting done by a friend from back home. It was hanging on a wall in this house. It was a portrait of a policeman. I was suddenly aware of my upbringing as I saw this vandalism occurring and I objected. “Why are you doing this? We are all leaving tomorrow and the owner is just going to have to spend money re-painting all the walls.” A pause and then silence spread over the group. “We do not believe in private property,” said the leader as he reached into his pocket and pulled out his knife. At that point, the leader of this pack of increasingly wild youth shoved his knife into the heart of the policeman in my painting. Everyone looked at me for my reaction. I told him that his knife was now a part of the painting. “Leave the knife there.” He thought a moment and then reached up and took his knife back and put it in his pocket, leaving my painting with an irreparable gash in it. That’s when I understood. “You don’t believe in private property unless it is your private property,” I commented. That’s when I knew I wasn’t a socialist any longer. I was about 25 years old.
We all change and grow.
A great deal of what is occurring is what Daniel Kahneman called “What you see is all there is.”
Kahneman (Nobel Prize winner in economics) noted that we have two ways of thinking: 1) the hyperactive, effortless “system 1”, which wants to create cohesive narratives even when it doesn’t have enough information and 2) the analytical, energy expensive system 2, which sorts through complex variables to find nuance in complicated situations. Normally, we run on system 1 around 85% of the time because analyzing everyday activities would take forever. System 2 takes over when system 1 has reached the end of its cognitive threshold, but you have to be willing to engage system 2–it is not automatic.
Problems arise when you should be using system 2 to sort out complicated situations, but you’re unwilling to leave the comfortable, grand-narrative world of system 1. Right now, we are stuck in a system 1 cognitive feedback loop. Our minds are taking the limited (often contradictory) information we are being given and using it to construct pleasant narratives with solutions that can be winnowed down to bumper sticker slogans. To actually sit down and parce the sea of information we are being fed would take time, patience, and effort, three things that are in short supply right now.
You’re right Spin, our youngin’s are too young to know there is nothing new under the sun. That is why as a rule, young should respect the old, because there is something to be learned.
That is part of the reason we study history: so we can see the patterns that keep repeating. This world is like a class of people where all the attentive kids are waiting for the oblivious to wake up and see. It is all there for the knowing.
interesting, we also see it in our youth with the self-destructive behaviors like cutting, drug use, games that tempt death, general recklessness.
All I can say is there is a remnant of the sane and healthy that will survive.
what an enlightening story. I pray more of our young people have such an awakening. thanks for sharing.
This is the best transformation from a socialist to a capitalist story I have heard. It needs to be in a movie.