The subject de jour in the national media lately is
“the psychic catastrophe engulfing so many kids in
America.” I’m compelled to ask: Is the obtuseness of
corporate columnists on the left and right with regard to
the saturating, spreading darkness and deadness of American
culture deliberate?
For pundits on the left, the
mental health crisis among American adolescents is often
couched in “studies showing that left-leaning adolescents
were experiencing a greater increase in depression than
their more conservative peers.”
Pundits on the right
resort to the knee-jerk critiques of “the individualistic
liberalism that emerged in the 1960s, leading to rapid
secularization (especially the decline of Christian
identification from the 1990s onward) and increasing social
and sexual permissiveness.”
However various
publications report that a “steep decline in young
people’s mental health beginning around 2012 isn’t just
an American problem, but also shows up in Britain, Canada,
Australia and New Zealand.”
Moreover, the mental
health crisis extends further than the English-speaking
world. Apart from heroic Ukrainians, who people in the West
fantasize and canonize for being so ‘resilient,’ a deep
erosion of feeling and character, good and bad, is spreading
in people and peoples around the world.
“Numbing
out” began in America, and quickly engulfed Canada (we’re
the same culture hearth after all). It then extended to
Western Europe, starting with America’s poodle, Great
Britain. Now the virus of inward, spiritual enervation has
apparently infected Latin America.
Both the lame left
and reactionary right agree in their facile analyses: “The
key instigator of increasingly miserable American teenagers,
who are more likely to entertain suicidal thoughts and act
on them, more likely to experience depression, and more
likely to feel beset by persistent feelings of sadness or
hopelessness, is the rise of social
media.”
The simplistic conclusion? “Social
media has precipitated a revolution in consciousness, in
which young people are constantly packaging themselves for
public consumption.”
It’s dark as hell to call
what is happening to young people, who are the proverbial
canaries in the decrepit coalmines of human consciousness, a
“revolution in consciousness.” A revolution in
consciousness is what’s urgently necessary; what we have
is an increasing mental and emotional overload of the
consciousness humans have always known.
Doubling down
on conventional thinking, cultural ‘influencers’ across
the puddle-deep spectrum in America conclude, “It’s not
shocking that the new mode of online existence would be
particularly fraught for those in a stage of life where both
fashioning the self and finding a place to belong are
paramount.”
What does the “fashioning of the
self” even mean? How does it differ from young people
“packaging themselves?” And who feels they’ve found a
place to belong in this godforsaken culture?
Media and
academic elites have their comfortable niches of course.
Just before another mass murder in the USA, at Michigan
State University in my native state, I tried to initiate a
deeper inquiry into America’s
global-war-on-terror-come-home with a philosophy professor
at MSU.
The putative philosopher emailed me, “I/we
aren’t in the market for what you describe. Each of our
faculty members uses their own approach to inspiring ethical
deliberation. It’s working for us.”
You can’t
walk into a grocery store, Walmart, or restaurant in the
United States anymore without checking the exits. Any loud
bang sends people to the floors. For a philosophy teacher to
say, “It’s working for us” is
disgraceful.
Though it may not seem relevant, it’s
fair to ask: Is the escalating, low-grade world war in
Ukraine a proxy not just between ostensible democracy and
blatant autocracy, but between America’s soullessness and
the nations that orbit it in kind, and an inchoate fear of
being engulfed by Western moral debilitation, brutally
epitomized by Putin in his unholy alliance with the
retrograde Russian Orthodox Church?
Be that as it may,
the influence of this culture, if you can call it a culture,
is global, even in Russia and China, no matter how much
their ruling elites propagandize and control their
populations. America is just the spiritual bottom that has
not yet reached bottom in the global society.
Pundits
have to be purblind to be perplexed about the pandemic of
mental and emotional suffering among young people in this
culture. Teenagers are unable to do what they’ve always
done –rebel and adapt to the culture. Powerless to either
rebel or adapt, they give up, without realizing on what, and
why.
We have to face up to the crisis embodied in
young people around the world. It doesn’t help to see it
in nationalistic terms, or in terms of girls “socializing
less in person and spending more time
online.”
Socialization in a globalized dead culture
is a strong contributor to the crisis in both girls and
boys. Social media has become the primary means of their
socialization, but it’s merely catalyzing the
meaninglessness and anomie of dividualism, materialism and
consumerism.
A toxic worldwide ocean – the
borderless sea of human consciousness that we all swim in —
is the source of the demoralization, despair and depression
among teenagers around the world. It’s American only in
that its leading edge is here.
We’re all living in
“a late stage capitalist hellscape.” We can’t blame
capitalism either however, since capitalism is simply the
complex concentration and institutionalization of
self-interest and greed in human nature.
As AI
chatbots become all the rage, with a real-time dumbing down
of the human mind, the core question in a global society
riven by division, fragmentation and conflict is: What is
happening to human consciousness?
Human nature is
synonymous with consciousness as we humans have known it for
tens of thousands of years. Until we grapple honestly, alone
and together, with the inescapable questions that
globalization and technology are compelling, the future will
be like the present, just darker.
Is humanity is at
the end of cumulative-consciousness and the beginning of
insight-consciousness? Or is this, the sum of all dark ages,
the future? If humankind isn’t doomed (and I don’t feel
we are), the future truly is now. It’s up to us, the
dwindling number of inwardly alive human beings, whatever
our age, to create a different course.
So young people
don’t give up before you’ve even started. Question and
grow in stillness, insight and understanding of the good and
bad soil within yourself. That’s true learning, and it
never ends.
Martin
LeFevre
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