One of the scariest trends right now is the steep decline in sexual activity that began around the time of the 2008 financial crisis. Along with the declining quality and increasing toxicity of food, this trend highlights society's diffuse repression of basic biological functioning. In Wilhelm Reich's The Mass Psychology of fascism, such repression was viewed as an essential part of manufacturing conformity to a control regime's agenda. In our population today, we're seeing a striking uptick in conformity, particularly among young people.
An article in the New Statesman titled "Young people have fallen in love with authority" explores this phenomenon, focusing on the disappearance of rebellious youth subcultures. This is something I've noticed, but never gave much thought to. I almost never see groups of young punks or hippies raging against the machine anymore. Part of that may be economic. Here's a quote from the article:
"That the young would always be against authority once seemed a truism, but things have changed. In Western democracies, the political economy has become unrecognizable. For three decades after 1945, unemployment in advanced European economies remained low. Odd jobs for the young were plentiful, and the knowledge economy barely existed. If you worked for a few hours in a shop or warehouse, who cared what you did at night or what your opinions were? Today, by contrast, a worker in the knowledge economy – a consultant or a media executive – is hired and rewarded for certain habits and dispositions that are effectively indistinguishable from political opinions. ... The new political economy reaches deep inside your soul. The darkest side of the knowledge economy is that it has gradually destroyed the separation between intellectual and material life."
Bad food. No sex. The disappearance of rebellious subcultures and the politicization of the modern workplace. All of this adds up to unmet biological needs and the elimination of places where people can think, learn, and express themselves freely. No one can fight these conditions. All they can do is obey.
Governments and big companies love this. The pandemic has provided them with an excuse to exercise more and more control over our lives, testing the limits of the new conformity, and everybody just seems to be playing along. I very much doubt that my friends and I would have gone along with this when we were young. But the youth of today, instead of offering resistance, have become agents of the authorities we once rebelled so sincerely against.
In the US, one of the greatest bits of propaganda that's been disseminated in recent years has been the association of rebelliousness with unpopular reds in the popular mind. Because of this association, the blues, who control urban centers and college campuses, now dismiss anything that challenges the status quo as a nefarious red plot.
Rebellious subcultures, in the recent past, were places for young people to experiment and vent pent up energy. The disappearance of these places implies that less experimentation is taking place and that pent up energies no longer have a place to go. The control regime is almost certainly channeling some of these energies into the service of its pathological agenda, perhaps by processes similar to those described in Reich's 1934 book.
At the coffee shop, it's become more and more common to overhear young people policing each other's language or manner on behalf of the control regime. They seem unaware that this is what they're doing, which only makes it worse. These same young people talk about 'safe space' continuously, never realizing that the space of conformity they're creating is actively hostile to individuality and freedom. Personally, I'm glad I grew up before this nonsense was the norm.
(Feature image from Pixabay.)
Read my novels:
Check out the comic I wrote:
Read my autobiographical monograph:
