12:28:24
“In the 60s, the counter culture was liberal. Today’s counter culture is not liberal. Today’s counter culture is a reawakening, it’s a renaissance. Today’s counter culture is seeking rules…If you're not facing the consequences of your own actions, why should I face the consequences of your actions? That seems wildly hypocritical…Everything the Left has been doing has been about abdicating personal responsibility.”
-Dimitry Toukhcher, What Clothes Tell us about Culture, Politics, and War
*This is such an interesting point, which came on the heels of Konstantin Kisin asking Toukcher about why we have become so obsessed with worshipping youth rather than age, experience, and wisdom, which was not historically the case. This is a subject I have thought and written a lot about over the years, so Toukhcher’s answer feels spot on. Our fanatical quest for cosmetic and youth mirrors our abdication of emotional and psychological maturity. Adults are no longer adults, the are overgrown helpless children of the State, so why should we bother looking or dressing like actual adults?
Young people are irresponsible (and allowed to be indefinitely these days), and adults have become increasingly infantile and enabled over the years, with everyone living in a narcissistic bubble of permanent immaturity, victimhood, and arrested development. There is no true adulthood anymore. And don’t get me started on today’s men, who are basically malfunctioning women. Thus this cultural emphasis on youth and young people is the visual equivalent of this cultural and emotional abdication of personal responsibility. Acting young is looking young and looking young earns you the right to continue acting irresponsible, self-indulgent, and juvenile. It all tracks. In the 1970s and 1980s, when movies started focusing on the emotional lives of children and teenagers, those children and teenagers were weighty and had gravitas. They dressed like grown ups and the stakes were high. That’s why adults liked watching those movies too. The young people onscreen were basically old people being played by teenagers and kids. Their lives were not easy and they were far more profound and mature than any of the adults we see on screen today, much less “real life,” which is more or less a video game, Reality TV show, dating app, or Instagram story. You can’t even call these people people by historical standards. That’s why today’s adults even sound young and immature, trapped in the idiocracy and inarticulateness—Kardashian spell—of vocal fry. Men sound like 12 year old girls. No one can complete a sentence without filling it with twenty “like like likes.” No one sounds serious, smart, thoughtful, or capable, even if they are CEOs running businesses or whatever the fuck these people do to have some much disposable income in their 20s and 30s. They may be financially savvy, or “highly employable,” but they are intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually retarded.
And to Toukhcher’s point about the Left’s culture war on abdicating personal responsibility, Kisin rightly added:
“That's such a good point because I think that really opens up the entire debate we've been having for the last eight or nine years, which is what you're talking about: where populism comes as the revolt of people who feel that the people who govern them do not have skin in the game, and in fact, can pursue policies that harm everybody else because they feel virtuous, or they feel compassion or empathy but do not pay the price when their policies actually cause terrible consequences for everybody else, I.E shipping jobs overseas, I.E mass immigration that affects people who are not protected by gated communities; who are not protected by the comfort that they can afford. That's where really this whole massive populist movement comes from: a feeling that the people who rule us do not have skin in the game.”
