Is it possible that we Americans only pretend not to notice the conditions
that produce an epidemic of school shootings, or is the public just too
dumbed-down to connect the dots?
Look at the schools themselves. We called them “facilities” because they
hardly qualify as buildings: sprawling, one-story, tilt-up, flat-roofed boxes
isolated among the parking lagoons out on the six-lane highway strip,
disconnected from anything civic, isolated archipelagoes where inchoate teenage
emotion festers and rules while the few adults on the scene are regarded as
impotent clowns representing a bewildering clown culture wrapped in a Potemkin
economy that has nothing to offer young people except a lifetime of debt and
“bullshit jobs” — to borrow a phrase from David Graeber.
The world of teens has been exquisitely engineered to steal every
opportunity for colonizing the chemical reward centers of their brains to
provoke endorphin hits, especially the cell-phone realm of social media, which
is almost entirely about status competition, much of which revolves around the
wild hormonal promptings of teen sexual development — at the same time they are
bombarded with commercial messages designed to prey on their fantasies,
longings, and perceived inadequacies. All of this produces immersive and
incessant melodrama along with untold grievance, envy, frustration, confusion,
and rage. And, of course, where the cell-phone universe leaves off, the world
of video games begins, so that boys (especially) get to act-out in “play” the
extermination of their competitors and foes.
I will venture to say — against the tide of current sexual politics — that
adolescence is much tougher for boys these days than it is for girls. Every boy
in one way or another faces his archetypal hero’s journey, the
hard-wired seeking to become powerful in one way or another, to accomplish
something, to prevail over adversaries, to win the goodies of life. This
country used to be a place where young men had many useful and practical paths
to follow in enacting that eternal script.Too Much Magic: Wishfu...James
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That has changed utterly in a couple of generations. Young men are being
out-competed by young women who enjoy the advantage of being hard-wired to
cooperate with others in the hive-like corporate workplaces that require
tractable drones who will just follow instructions. The smart ones can easily
avoid pregnancy, too, and still enjoy sex and all the exciting social games it
entails.
For young men, beyond the repellent corporate world of work are only
fantasies about triumphing in pro sports, show business, or the drug trade,
with pornography and masturbation in place of the tension-filled process of
mate-seeking. There is also plenty of opportunity these days for archetypal
acting-out in warfare, but our wars lately are devoid of valorous story-lines,
and instead of dying nobly for a cause, our soldiers are more likely to come
home with shattered brains and bodies from campaigns of no discernable meaning.
And so high school is the launching pad for all that, though in this era of
protracted adolescence, mass murders also take place on college campuses. The
part of the forebrain that regulates judgment generally doesn’t complete its
development in young men until sometime in their early twenties. And college is
swiftly becoming as meaningless as high school, given the economic landscape,
and the debt racketeering now deeply associated with higher education.
It’s all part-and-parcel with an American way-of-life that is not what it
advertises itself to be. It’s become a cruel hologram of a distant memory of a
land that sold its soul for a few decades of comfort and convenience, and ended
up in a wilderness of addiction to cheap hits of pleasure. Pleasure is not
happiness and the constant seeking to satisfy pleasures is not a journey to
meaning. The catch is that this toxic way of life has poor prospects for
continuing as a practical matter. History is catching up with our foolishness
and history will prove to be even more wrathful than a lonely, confused,
seventeen-year-old boy with a pistol and shotgun.
Reprinted with permission from Kunstler.com.
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