*
The right sometimes says the left is childish, but it’s actually adolescent—let’s review what adolescents are like.
Adolescents like to form small gangs (male) or cliques (female): these groups are separated from the adult world by neologisms (slang) that change quickly and adults never get—teenagers also like to be ironic a lot, since irony is a means, like slang, to create exclusivity. If you’re not “in on the joke”, if you don’t “get it”, you don’t belong.
Teenagers also like to be sarcastic, which is a lower form of irony—sarcasm conveys unexpressed aggression (“Do you like the dress I bought you.” “Yeah, l like the dress.”). This is because you are a small adult at 12, but, especially in the modern world, you are treated as a child until you are, in some cases, 21 (or older); hence teenagers are often very angry and have a lot of unexpressed aggression because they’re treated like large children, not small adults.
Teenagers are also narcissistic and are very concerned with appearance over actuality. This manifests in fashion choices and is connected to slang and so on—a teenager would rather wear a fashionable pair of shorts in the snowy mid-winter than put on warm but sensible “dad trousers”. Attempts to be sensible where to be sensible would violate appearance are met with ridicule and exasperation, but there is no actual argument behind them other than “it would look silly if I wore ‘dad trousers’ and then my life would be ruined forever.”
Teenagers are also subject to bouts of fanaticism, partly because they have a lot of energy (which is chaotic)—and also because they haven’t found a sexual outlet yet and so sublimate their sexual energy into fanatical beliefs (hysteria). Teenagers notoriously become unbearable and over-enthusiastic evangelical Christians, Marxists, or environmentalists—although the enthusiasm often burns out by 21. This sometimes goes along with being in a tight clique or gang where everyone agrees with each other and reinforces the belief.
Teenagers are often filled with abstract knowledge from their schooling—often, in modernity, superior to what their elders know (due to rapid technological advance—the adolescent impatiently standing over their elder using a computer) and this abstract knowledge is imbibed in a sheltered environment, the school.
The result is that teenagers don’t realise that they lack experience nor do they realise that their environment is relatively more protected and more regulated and ordered than the actual world. Their view as to what is useful and high-status is constrained to a grade system that is very rigid (A-F) and abstract, and bears little relation, as with exams, to reality. However, this is the main way by which teenagers appraise themselves and come to think about how reality works—reality seems quite rational and ordered to them, it’s also based on credentials (narcissism).
This leads them to over-estimate their abilities and this tendency, combined with narcissism, so leads them to think solutions to problems are easier than they are in actuality. They also tend to undervalue experience as low-status and “irrational” because it’s not derived from the school exam system—in modernity, their relative facility with technology gives them the illusion that they know more than their parents and that older people are incompetent (in an agricultural society, it would all be the reverse—the adolescent would always be more ignorant than the adult).
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The reason for all this behaviour is, in part, because the best age to reproduce is 12-21 and yet, in modernity, it is strictly expected that no one should reproduce in that age range—and it is, in fact, regarded as a catastrophe if that happens (which it is, from a certain perspective).
Boys form themselves into gangs (in the widest sense, even a chess club could be a “gang” in this sense) because they want to be hunters with a status hierarchy that makes them worthy to be a mate.
Girls form cliques so as to create an emergent intelligence, based on anti-fragile bickering and bitching, that selects mates—males differentiate themselves within a male “gang hierarchy” and then a female collective intelligence selects male mates for individuals within the collectivity (hence it is well known that women push forward certain friends to mate with certain males, in deniable and non-overt ways, because the collective intelligence chose them).
Before modernity, the female collective intelligence was augmented by the presence of older post-reproductive females who increased the wisdom within the collective entity. On the other side, older males within a wider male hierarchy provided more individual discrimination in mate selection and gave the final say (as well as, perhaps, the selection of which female “collectivity” to engage with in the first place). However, in modernity, teenagers are effectively left to form sub-cultures to sort it out for themselves.
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There is nothing wrong with the teenager in principle—except that, as you can see, the teenager is how the left works: a small narcissistic clique that is obsessed with popularity and neologistic jargon (“pronouns”, “dialectical materialism”); it enforces its exclusivity through irony and sarcasm (just take a look at adults who support Ukraine and you’ll find very sarcastic and ironic people).
It’s all about appearance, a fanatical belief based on abstract knowledge, and if you make a mundane observation about reality based on experience you’re met with stuttering incomprehension, bitter sarcasm, and, finally, the assertion that you’re some “evil” out-group.
We live in a democracy and, as Plato observed, in a democracy the youth dictates to the elders—hence we are dictated to by, and expected to behave like, adolescents. And if you disagree with the “clique”, you will be shunned—which is the worst thing that a narcissistic teenager can experience (because it destroys their ability to mate at the most crucial time to mate and when they most want to).
Notably, leftists on X often accuse rightists of never having sex—which is a typical adolescent retort, which refers to the actual fact that, in the adolescent world, if you are shunned by all groups and cliques your chances to reproduce will be low (and since that’s the most important thing to you as a base biological fact, this is crushing).
Children, by which I mean humans under 12, might be unbearable in other ways but it is from pre-pubescent children that you get “the wisdom of the child”, sometimes alluded to by men like Jesus. Small children say things like “Why’s that man in a wheelchair, mummy?” or “You have an ugly face” to an ugly person. These “pearls of wisdom” are often collected in cute video compilations for our entertainment. Ahhh…bless them.
Teenagers are never like that—because they are acutely aware as to what is high-status behaviour, often called, mistakenly, “being a good person”. They are ready to pounce on anyone who makes a solecism or even a contrary suggestion and tear them to pieces (“like, that’s not cool, man”).
You only get “the truth from babes” because, like the idiot savant or the genius, the young child isn’t fully conscious of social status and so just says what it thinks—which can be stupid, but sometimes is acute. As with the idiot savant, all is forgiven the young child because “they don’t know better”.
The left piggybacks on the idea of “the wisdom of the child” with figures like Greta Thunberg—but Greta became famous as a sulky adolescent, not a child; but the idea is that you’ll not notice, just go with the high-status “from the mouthes of babes” vibe—but Greta Thunberg isn’t a babe, in any dimension.
To channel Schopenhauer, wise people aren’t motivated by sex: the old post-reproductive crone, the elder man, the young child, the idiot savant, the autist, the genius, the ascetic mystic—the connection between these people is that they are removed from the turmoil of sexual consideration, either by a voluntary act or because biology has forced them so to be, or because, as with the autist and the young child, they are so constituted that such considerations are meaningless to them.
Teenagers, on the other hand, are all about sex—hence their decision-making process is poor, because sex and status go together and competition for status can obscure reality.
So the left is teenage, just like the prototypical teenage Marxist or environmentalist: it’s narcissistic, it’s filled with abstract knowledge, it has little practical experience, it’s desperate to be in a group and be liked by the group, it wants to be a “good person” or “cool” (which just means social conformism), it likes to use jargon and irony to signal its exclusive nature—and, if challenged, it either explodes in incoherent rage (because its actions aren’t based on actual deliberation) or is sarcastic to you (slams its door and has a sulk).
We live in a society that is fundamentally adolescent (feminised), based on narcissistic gangs and cliques, so much so it will not put on a sensible pair of trousers to go out in the middle of a snow drift because it would not look cool—“Like, I’m not stupid, duh! I know what I’m doing. I got an ‘A’ on that last test. I’m a young adult now, why won’t you treat me with respect?…it’s my own decision!”