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Student rebels in search of a cause Why don't they mobilise in their own interests?

A Just Stop Oil protestor at Manchester University (Photo by Christopher Furlong/Getty Images)

A Just Stop Oil protestor at Manchester University (Photo by Christopher Furlong/Getty Images)


July 16, 2024   6 mins

The King will open Parliament on Wednesday. Or at least, that’s what he thinks. First, he’ll have to contend with whatever obstacle is posed by Youth Demand, an upstart direct-action campaigning group and splinter faction of Just Stop Oil, which has announced its cunning plan to “disrupt” the occasion.

Wearing their constitutional knowledge commendably lightly, Youth Demand’s Twitter/X account explained to its followers that the state opening of Parliament is “an outdated, farcical parade” in which the “King will ride in a (literal) golden carriage” and “welcome in” Keir Starmer “as the new head of a blood-stained Parliament”. Only by disrupting the event in a way that will prove “impossible to ignore” does the group think it can achieve its aim: an “end to genocide”, starting with an Israeli arms embargo, and — a little incongruously, but they might as well read the whole shopping list while they’ve got your attention — a prohibition on new licences for oil and gas exploration in the UK.

Parliament is an appropriate target for rebuke because, as the group emphasises, whether “Tories or Labour, it all means genocide”. “Young people are not stupid,” they insist, perhaps pre-empting a charge sometimes levelled at this stage of the sales pitch. Rather, they “see through the bullshit” obscuring the fact that UK’s is a “rigged political system”.

As should be clear, in idiom and action Youth Demand is a fitting addition to the paramilitary wing of the student-led activist movement. As of April this year, it already claimed a 10,000-strong mailing list, with representatives at 17 British universities. Among its recent political achievements, it has spray-painted Labour Party headquarters and the Ministry of Defence, and staged a creepy protest involving children’s shoes outside the Starmer family home in Kentish Town, leading to three of its members being convicted of public order offences. (Apostates being worse than infidels, it is the Labour Party that seems to come in for the worst of Youth Demand’s ire, despite the group’s offhand acknowledgement of the Conservative Party’s responsibility for “14 years” of unspecified “atrocity”.)

It is tempting to think that the rapid turnover of political fashion over the past decade has had a curious effect on protest-oriented youth. More than at any point in recent history, today’s student protestor must be a generalist rather than a specialist. In a style characteristic of a conspiracy theorist, their background theory of the operant forces in society encourages them to see every injustice as standing in close explanatory connection to every other: and a failure to see these sometimes quite obscure links can be a worrying symptom of bad faith, privilege-induced blindness, or something even more culpably malign.

Under such pressures it is easy to acquire the monistic belief that there is really only one political problem — though one that perhaps has different manifestations — as people have started calling it, the “omnicause”. In the mouths of today’s protestors, what often seem like quite different political objects of disapproval — global capitalism, the patriarchy, white supremacy, Gaza, environmental terrorism, settler colonialism — are slurred over in a way that makes them seem fungible. They are all vantage points on the same monolithic oppressor. Something like that deflationary urge might always have been with us. But unlike their ancestors, who would have urged each other perfunctorily to “stick it to the man”, today’s activists feel shamelessly compelled to spell out the weird consequences of their background theory. Hence, the unabashed existence of vividly maladaptive movements such as Queers for Palestine.

The resulting political movements are characterised by an unhealthy mix of political disengagement and global fixation. The ordinary mechanisms of electoral politics are judged too feeble to be of any service to the extravagance, urgency and scale of their cause — which is, at the limit, the whole world and its unjust past and endangered future — and are promptly bypassed.

It is of course easy to find activists led astray by such a totalising theory a comical spectacle (or an obvious anti-social menace, depending on how nearby they happen to be). They are in a straightforward way politically short-sighted: the immediate, local, and graspable problems of political life seeming to them blurry and unimportant, only expansive, universal, and unobtainable objectives snapping into focus.

Such moralism arguably involves a practical mistake. Its proponents misidentify the sorts of problems universities, book festivals, private firms, political parties, or even national parliaments are suited to solving. As a means of effecting political change, such mistakes are a recipe for making oneself irrelevant and one’s cause disliked; though one could litigate the exceptions, indiscriminately-targeted direct action has a comparatively poor track record of securing lasting political progress. This shouldn’t be surprising: its aims are often ill-defined, and its methods deliberately calculated to avoid engaging the socially established channels of political action.

At a theoretical level, however, comical though it undoubtedly still is, such moralistic overreach is at least an intelligible form of error. The fact is that moral and political progress in the past often has been achieved by gradually expanding the sphere of ethical concern both outward in space and forward in time. The extension of moral concern provides one easily-grasped paradigm of moral progress. Most psychologically normal people, however, find it clear that uncontrolled reliance on this heuristic quickly yields silly results. In fact, part of the comedy of Just Stop Oil, Youth Demand, and their fellow travellers, is that despite their grandiose dogmatism the meagreness of their actions reveals that they, too, find it difficult to take their theory at anything close to face value. (If the fate of the earth really were at stake, action more drastic than the spray-painting of Taylor Swift’s Jet or boycotting book festivals would be morally required.)

More curious than the way young activists misunderstand the collective interest is the way they routinely fail to understand even their own self-interest. Though charitable interpreters will be inclined to think that youthful idealism, even in overreaching, serves as a socially useful corrective to a jaded and politically unimaginative status quo, from another point of view it represents a gross diversion of political resources.

Despite the widespread trope that they are excessively self-centred, one of the most striking facts about people in their teens and twenties is their near total neglect of their distinctive interests as a political class. Young people form an increasingly natural constituency for political solidarity, yet time and again age is overridden by dividing lines of more doubtful importance. In fact, to learn of the agenda of a misleadingly-named group like Youth Demand would lead you to think that the young had no political causes of their own worth pursuing and so had generously moved on to solving the world’s problems.

The complete absence of a sense of intra-generational solidarity among the young is, in a way, baffling. The dysfunctional political decision-making of the recent past has been utterly prejudicial to their interests. Electorally outnumbered by a politically active gerontocracy, the young now leave university with mountains of debt. They can look forward to a future cramped by an effective graduate tax on even small earnings, national infrastructure degraded by long-term under-investment, a chronically under-supplied housing market, and little hope for the life-enhancing arrival of economic growth. All of this is the political legacy of older generations who, unlike the young, vote in high numbers and ruthlessly in their own interest. According to the CPS, someone born in 1956 will extract £1.2 million in state benefits, and someone born in 1996 only half that. These are the basic ingredients of intergenerational injustice.

“The complete absence of a sense of intra-generational solidarity among the young is, in a way, baffling.”

The totemic political betrayal of the young in recent years — the casual use of lockdown as a tool of public health policy — involved a catastrophic transfer of wealth and opportunities away from children and young adults, towards the elderly. The ongoing and expensive Covid inquiry will presumably reach no holistic judgment as to whether this was a justified action. Recent university cohorts had their A-levels cancelled, were placed under effective house arrest in their university accommodation at their own expense, and then had the delivery of their final university grades delayed by university strikes. That all of this was accepted in a spirit of compliant resignation makes it hard not to want to blame the young for their want of vitality.

Such political quietism is the natural accompaniment of a style of activism which is pathologically moralistic and holds the actual practice of politics in contempt, as today’s frontline student activists do. Is it too much to expect that, at least as a default, student activism should be about students’ interests?

All this is enough to make one nostalgic for the anti-tuition-fee riots of 2010: perhaps the last time an impressive number of students mobilised in their own interest. Then, as even The Daily Telegraph recorded, “perhaps because their cause was justified… [the protesting students] had none of the swaggering, self-righteous manner of the student protestors of legend”. City traffic ground to a standstill; students occupied the Millbank tower; Conservative Party headquarters were graffitied over with a crude drawing of an ejaculating penis accompanied, ironically or perhaps not, with the message “don’t kill the arts”. Nick Clegg took to the airwaves to explain cravenly that he should have been “more careful” in making his ill-fated manifesto pledges; days later, as Clegg was delivering the Guardian’s Hugo Young lecture at Kings Place in London, students outside the building brought out a Clegg-like effigy which they sentenced to death and promptly executed while chanting “Nick Clegg, shame on you, shame on you for turning blue.” All very invigorating stuff.

It is hard not to warm to these protestors in a way not possible with the student activists of today: grounded self-interest is so much more sympathetic than unworldly moralism. They had a just grievance — they had been misled, perhaps even lied to, at the ballot box. They owned their own cause. They had a realistic grasp of the party political structures they were attempting to influence. Best of all they had a lively sense of their own material interest. That is a precondition for getting a political hearing though by no means a guarantee of one.

Today’s student activists could do with being a little less self-involved and little more self-interested.


John Maier is an UnHerd columnist and PhD student at the University of Oxford

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Matt Sylvestre
Matt Sylvestre
4 months ago

All I know is the pathetic (attempted) destruction of art and free speech makes me reflexively hostile to anything the youthful Left may promote… Sure, their immature tantrums do not change the realities of climate change etc. that must be dealt with but their imbecile tirades help nothing…

Martin M
Martin M
4 months ago
Reply to  Matt Sylvestre

I take your point, but I am reflexively hostile to anything the less-than-youthful Left may promote too.

Lancashire Lad
Lancashire Lad
4 months ago
Reply to  Martin M

Eternal juveniles.

Christopher Barclay
Christopher Barclay
4 months ago
Reply to  Martin M

There is the world of difference between promoting and enforcing.

charlie martell
charlie martell
4 months ago
Reply to  Matt Sylvestre

You can’t ” deal with” the climate. It’s a million times bigger than us. It was before we were here, and it will be when we are gone.

ERIC PERBET
ERIC PERBET
4 months ago

I couldn’t agree more! But this is precisely what these “herdy rebels” are incapable of fathoming: in their ignorance-fuelled minds, nothing is bigger than us/them and everything that existed before we/they were here must be destroyed, branded as being tainted by patriarchy/colonialism/systemic racism/transphobia, etc.

Jim Veenbaas
Jim Veenbaas
4 months ago

Interesting essay for sure. – one that might merit further investigation. It’s baffling why these students are so passionate about issues they cannot possibly influence and why they choose protests that do nothing but breed ill will from others.

John Dellingby
John Dellingby
4 months ago
Reply to  Jim Veenbaas

It’s a shame really as there are plenty of issues affecting young people in their early-mid 20’s (and older for that matter) that do need dealing with and where the grievances are genuine. Housing, (renting and buying), living costs, wage depreciation, student loan interest rates, how the state and markets make it more or less impossible to raise a family, attacks on their freedom by the state etc that could get a solid and broadly popular movement going. In the age of social media, it’s shocking that a campaign hasn’t even begun on this. Instead, everyone just makes memes.

Lancashire Lad
Lancashire Lad
4 months ago
Reply to  John Dellingby

Good points, but the idea that it’s “more or less impossible to raise a family” surely isn’t intended seriously?

Yes, the birth rate is declining; yes, it’s arguably harder than it was a couple of decades ago – but it’s far from “impossible” when millions of young families in all levels of society continue to grow around us and their children populate our classrooms. The “impossible” hype isn’t helpful.

John Dellingby
John Dellingby
4 months ago
Reply to  Lancashire Lad

I wouldn’t be so sure. The local authority I’m working at has been talking of possibly closing schools due to there not being enough children. Doubt we’re the only one. Even now though, most people often only have one child and sometimes two nowadays. Growing up in the 90’s and 00’s, it was typically two children with some having three.

charlie martell
charlie martell
4 months ago
Reply to  John Dellingby

Yes. But they are taught certain opinions. And it is these opinions they shout out loud. They don’t appear to have any of their own. They all say the same things, at least the self flagellating minority do.

Lindsay S
Lindsay S
4 months ago

During the #MeToo movement, it was said that it was a smokescreen, a distraction from people coming forward to out Hollywood Paedophiles. If true, it was incredibly effective.
Perhaps the same is at play here, distracting them from the true problems they are to face at a time when they have the freedom to mobilise.

Bret Larson
Bret Larson
4 months ago
Reply to  John Dellingby

The affordability crisis is an existential threat. Unfortunately their solution to everything, more government, just makes it worse.
So they have to concentrate on bigger issues to get through angst.
For me, watching them show up is like the circus coming to town.
They just dont realize they are the clowns. And not the friendly type either.

Daniel Lee
Daniel Lee
4 months ago
Reply to  Jim Veenbaas

Yes, but it’s not at all baffling. It’s right on brand for an age cohort vastly more concerned with looking good to peers (especially the comely female ones) than with making any kind of sense. They’ve been putting the culture through convulsion after convulsion since the 60s.

Adam Huntley
Adam Huntley
4 months ago
Reply to  Daniel Lee

It’s very easy to understand actually. If you have a simple ideology of oppressed on one side and oppressor on the other, you have something to believe in, a sense of community with like minded and a social life. Add in a sense of moral righteousness and being protected from any serious scrutiny because your potential interlocuter deserves cancellation due to their privilege and it’s more difficult to understand why there aren’t more. What I find is more difficult to understand is why they think they’re rebelling against anything when the Establishment is itself busy with social “justice” activism. Far from rebelling, they are giving support to the current hegemony. Their lecturers are more likely than the average person to be joining them in their performance politics.

Alex Lekas
Alex Lekas
4 months ago
Reply to  Jim Veenbaas

Perhaps one reason is precisely because they cannot influence those issues. Their “protests” are more performative than anything else. No actual work is required, just empty posturing.

Kirk Susong
Kirk Susong
4 months ago
Reply to  Jim Veenbaas

It is less baffling when one realizes that careful articulation of rational political interests is about 1/10 of what (consciously or otherwise) motivates people’s political activity. A very small percentage of the electorate votes based on policy; we vote based on character, likeability, what our friends are doing, etc.
No, what motivates people is the Queen of the Sciences – theology, broadly understood. People want to have some sense that what they do matters, that their lives are significant, that they are doing ‘right’ in life. People are looking for meaning… and particularly when you are young, without a career or a family, daily enjoying the simple delights of youth, this need for meaning will express itself in socially-acceptable ways. No longer does that mean prayer and church-going and so forth. Now it means – finding “something bigger than yourself to live for” and then “doing something” about it. Perhaps it’s marching and/or rioting at your moral indignation that two hundred years ago slavery existed. Perhaps it’s obstructing traffic and/or gluing yourself to art because fossil fuels have an impact on the natural world. Perhaps it’s trolling social media upset that women don’t want mentally ill men in their private spaces. Whatever it is, you are simply looking for some way to prove to yourself that you matter.
It’s a very old saying… “If you’re a conservative at twenty you’ve got no heart. If you’re a progressive at thirty you’ve got no brain.”

Mark Cornish
Mark Cornish
4 months ago
Reply to  Jim Veenbaas

It’s not just that they can’t influence these issues; the vast majority of the protestors don’t have the faintest idea about their complexity.

Max Price
Max Price
4 months ago

They’re having fun! And they are soooo cool. It’s not dumb. Lots of people are dumb. It’s pathetic, it’s conformist.

Martin M
Martin M
4 months ago

They spray-painted Taylor Swift’s jet? The monsters!

jane baker
jane baker
4 months ago
Reply to  Martin M

Must have been a fix. Or how’d they get close enough. It’s all illusion.

Christopher Barclay
Christopher Barclay
4 months ago

Anything to not get a job. Plenty of vacancies in care homes, construction, teaching maths and science, engineering including renewable energy sources.

jane baker
jane baker
4 months ago

You expect posh kids like Indigo or Tristan to wipe old peoples bums.
This is what Mercy Killing is for.

Ben Scott
Ben Scott
4 months ago

Luxury beliefs. These privileged whingers have nothing else to worry about because Mummy and Daddy are doing very nicely thank you. They have to scratch around to find things to complain about as their lives are pretty much spot on……apart from their “mental health”

jane baker
jane baker
4 months ago

That there is a lot wrong with our political administrations,full stop,is obvious,but these youthful persons do nothing to ameliorate the situation and a lot to make it worse. Are they actually being organiser by the forces of tyranny and oppression to create a justifiable pretext for yet more scrutiny,regulation and control. These young people are not from council estates,they are from affluent,upper middle class homes,they go to private schools,a trust fund will pay their university debt off. They can afford to bum about in their 20s enjoying picturesque poverty,it’s so exotic,in dosses and inner city squats. They will make friends with beggars and dealers but leave them in the gutter when on hitting 30 they want to join the real world and that’s easy because Mummy and Daddy have lots of friends in the media and business etc. These young people have Grandma as their role model. They admire but also envy her. She was AT the Grosvenor Square riots. She smoked weed. She had sex with Mick Jagger. Oh! Those glory days. Just like Grandma in her Prada outfit and Hermes scarf they get past Security and get up close to valued cultural objects because they DONT look like BAD PEOPLE. They are tastefully well dressed,they are well spoken and polite,they pass all the acceptability tests. Some of them must realise they are being used so presumably there must be something in it for them.

James Hooper
James Hooper
4 months ago

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs: I would wager that the first two ( ie Physiological ( air, food, drink, shelter, clothing, warmth, sleep, and health ) and Security ( personal security, financial security, and health and well-being) are being provided by their social status and the bank of Mum and Dad. This then leaves them free to pursue the next two ( (Belonging and Self Esteem) through faddish protests and ineffectual stunts.
In reality though, the very nature of the ‘omnicause’ will never lead to the final level of Self Actualization. ( which includes acceptance)
The vast majority of the ‘real world’ ( including myself ) are still struggling with levels 1 & 2…..

Nell Clover
Nell Clover
4 months ago

“Youth Demand would lead you to think that the young had no political causes of their own worth pursuing and so had generously moved on to solving the world’s problems.”

Your typical Youth Demand member isn’t representative of the young. Wealthy parents, child free, still in education, and not working, these are often the progeny of the extremely privileged (mum and dad have solved all their problems thus far – with at least a handful avoiding legal punishment because mum or dad has a friend in chambers!) with nothing useful to keep themselves busy.

And on that point of childlessness, a whole host of demographic issues arise that are the root of the 1996 cohort’s financial problems. Firstly, the author misleads when he writes a person born in 1956 will get twice as many state benefits as someone born in 1996. The CPS study compares net benefits after tax. Someone born in 1996 will have to cough up hundreds thousand more in tax because the dependency ratio – the ratio between workers and those retired (or not working) – has fallen and will now collapse.

Spending an average of 4 more years in education and a far higher rate of sitting on incapacity benefit are two causes of a lower dependency ratio. The largest cause though will be the children of 1996 refusing to have their own children, unwilling to make the enormous financial and lifestyle sacrifice having children has always entailed. From this perspective, suggesting those born in 1956 were better off glibbly ignores the financial cost they paid for having children that kept their dependency ratio that much higher, their taxes that much lower, and their cumulative net benefits from society that much greater.

RA Znayder
RA Znayder
4 months ago
Reply to  Nell Clover

Having children in a postwar economy with its welfare states, affordable homes and stable work is different than having children in today’s climate where having a home is increasingly not possible at all. Of course one can endlessly debate on who’s life is harder, but boomers were at least living in a world of hope where things got progressively better instead of the other way around.
Does that have to do with children? I’m a bit skeptical about the entire narrative that a growing working population always brings wealth and an aging population is a huge problem. That might have been the case in early industrial society but do you really think that another army of consultants and lawyers is truly going to pay for pensions? Yes, of course, according to abstract economic models it does. But when we empirically investigate these things we often find that, fundamentally, the entire neoclassical economic narrative might simply be completely wrong. Constant economic crises also point at this.
Back in the physical world we were able to keep society running with only a tiny group of ‘essential workers’ during the lockdowns. In fact, that was already the case in the time of Bertrand Russell, who noticed a war economy functions just as as well or even better with only a fraction of the workers. Why? Probably because we technologically achieved the capacity to massively overproduce a 100 years ago. Machines are orders of magnitude more productive than workers and we can automate a lot more than we actually do already.
The problem, then, is never to sustain supply, it is to sustain demand. It seems to me that all of this has much more to do with power structures and not so much with an actual physical problem of taking care of retired people. The only physical problem we do have is a limited amount of resources and energy, which will run out. That only gets worse with more people in the absence of innovation.

Point of Information
Point of Information
4 months ago
Reply to  RA Znayder

Excellent comment, especially:

“do you really think that another army of consultants and lawyers is truly going to pay for pensions?”

Nell Clover
Nell Clover
4 months ago
Reply to  RA Znayder

There was a serious housing shortage until the mid 1970s. By serious, I mean people living in severely overcrowded accommodation, quite literally slums. A problem orders of magnitude worse than anything experienced today because first the Germans destroyed millions of homes, then there was a population boom, and then the planners pulled down a lot of Victorian housing in our big cities. Homes were not affordable: as many people in the 1960s were in private rental as today. Do you honestly think conditions are worse today than at any point in the past when birth rates were far higher???

Andrew McDonald
Andrew McDonald
4 months ago

I’d like to see a breakdown of that ‘intergenerationally inequitable’ £1.2m benefit that somebody born in 1956 is likely to enjoy. Is that net of taxes and NIC paid in? Does ‘benefit’ include the state pension that those born in ‘56 will have paid into for 40 years?
And so on – there’s a lot of this casually inaccurate lambasting of the vile boomer generation leaking into the discussion these days – yes We Are All Guilty, but get the argument right. I’m still having nightmares over 21% inflation and 15% mortgages, and that was over 40 years ago.

charlie martell
charlie martell
4 months ago

Useless, entitled and I’ll educated, these young people are not so much being prepared for the world at their “Universities”, as being rendered permanently unemployable.

They are not in a position to demand anything.

Get a job, ( make it part time perhaps, after your six hours of contact study a week). Pay some tax. Support yourself. Stand for election or work for someone who does.

In short, grow up. Behaving like an earnest fourteen year old all your life will mean people will always treat you as a fourteen year old, and not a smart fourteen year old either

Susan Grabston
Susan Grabston
4 months ago

Not the most informed generation I have taught.(sample size 250 UGs annually). Many of them appear to have entirely outsourced their world view to a single data source of choice.
Not their fault – they have not been taught critical thinking, and have little exerience of handling seconday data. Overlay that with a lack of curiosity or willingness to engage with the “unknown” and you can be faced with neither skill nor motivation.
Of course this doesn’t apply to all. Some are brilliant. Eastern Europeans in particular have clearly been well schooled in how to think rather than what to think…

RA Znayder
RA Znayder
4 months ago

I congratulate the author with observing these patterns. I always wonder when this generation is going to wake up and see that they themselves are being exploited like no other generation since the war.
That 1.2 million in state benefits is probably an underestimate if one considers the trillions of central bank money, simply given to asset owners since 2008, while the real economy stagnated. That is a big reason why younger people are literally driven into homelessness in many Western countries.
The activism seems to be a bit of a LARP version of the 60s counter culture. Back then the cultural revolution might have seemed silly as well but the status quo definitely took notice when they actually did tune in and drop out – at least for a bit. Not to forget that in France they actually got de Gaulle fleeing the country when they allied themselves with the working class. Such solidarity is hard to imagine today. Of course there were many of them and only a few zoomers. But perhaps the lack of potent activism also shows that the mechanisms to manufacture consent, co-opt and distract simply work pretty well.

Barry Stokes
Barry Stokes
4 months ago

Bang them up until the ceremony is over and then release them with a caution.

John Tyler
John Tyler
4 months ago

Why is a lack of intra-generational solidarity baffling? Selfishness is a trait of almost all young people. The young follow one another ardently, yet willingly change their ideas as quickly as they change friends and idols, and can hardly be expected to walk in step with their elders.

Point of Information
Point of Information
4 months ago
Reply to  John Tyler

Intra-generational not inter-generational.

Karen Arnold
Karen Arnold
4 months ago

It seems to me there are very different groups of young people: those who need to work feed, house and entertain themselves, and those who shout loudly about saving the world. The first whether academic or practical, or both, just get on with muddling through as we have done for generations, the others don’t need to work to live, and spend their time making life more difficult for the rest, they are just the modern version of the offspring of the aristocracy.

Daniel Lee
Daniel Lee
4 months ago

All these callow kids need is a Mao figure and they’ll destroy the country with a simple-minded new Cultural Revolution.

Alex Lekas
Alex Lekas
4 months ago

Children who have grown up wanting for nothing and feeling entitled to everything. The oil people’s lives depend on petroleum-based products and they are either too ignorant to know that or too self-righteous to admit it. And so we get mindless stunts that persuade no one. On the contrary, they harm the cause and make it even more incoherent than it already is.
Young people today, like everyone else in the West, are among the top one percent of all people who have ever lived. They have the luxury of marinating in first-world problems but not the self-awareness to realize what they’re doing.

John Riordan
John Riordan
4 months ago

Exceptionally well-written analysis. I haven’t anything to add.

Søren Ferling
Søren Ferling
4 months ago

As far as I can see, the omnicause in question is Antonio Gramsci and George Lukacs’ aim to spread despair, doom and cultural self-hatred in the West. His thoughts were operationalized with Critical Theory, which looks at the disadvantages of Western civilization and its people and ignores its advantages, failing to compare with existing alternatives.
As a result of The long walk through the institutions starting at Uni in ’68, Critical Theory’s view of society and people is today omnipresent.

Martin Johnson
Martin Johnson
4 months ago

Well, from an American perspective, it is interesting that an entire generation of elite British youth have had their brains destroyed, just like in America.

H W
H W
4 months ago

What’s really radical – and practical, traditional, green, and definitely ‘sticks it to the man’ – is family interdependence. Reject the generational-divide-and-conquer doom rhetoric in this essay: no future, no jobs, no kids, no homes, no money, no food, etc. The fact is that parents/elders share and pass on their wealth, knowledge, homes, and stuff to their kids and grandkids. Many will share their time by caring for grandkids. The kids will help care for their elders eventually. It is this massive intergenerational wealth transfer and the whole non-GDP family sector that ‘the man’ wants to colonize. It’s a policy called defamilialization. Demanding gov’t subsidies for institutions like schools and daycares and elder care rather than for families feeds ‘the man’ and disempowers families.