New rites for the young right
Furthering the discussion on intergenerational responsibility and its transfer
Continuing on from this excellent article at The American Sun: Avoiding Becoming Boomers
Rites of passage in the Western world have slipped over the centuries to the point that they now no longer meaningfully exist. For our grandfathers, perhaps it was joining up for the war. For our great-grandfathers it was likely the same. Before that it was probably accepted that once you had a trade and a wife you were a man. In far olden times, it most likely involved church sacraments, where the ultimate authority (God) declared you a man. That's hard for anyone to argue with and drives home the gravity of recognising another's manhood. The destruction of these rites through the industrial revolution and world wars led to the baby boomers, who had no such progression to adulthood and lived as children their whole lives. It's easy to say this, but hard to truly fathom what it means, since for anyone in the younger generations they have always been the dominant adult population.
When I was a kid, old people had fought in World War I and were highly respected, their now-backwards social views notwithstanding. A little later and old people were the ones who had fought in World War II. Even at the time however these were smaller demographics than the overwhelming numbers of the baby boomer generation. Now there are almost no veterans of the wars left. In our time, boomers went from the dominant adult population to the dominant elderly population, and it's therefore difficult to look back and revise childhood perceptions of them. They are not, nor were they, the responsible adult figures they claimed to be. Their demographic is so large that their morality is still largely dominant in our society, with a large part of the moderate and fringe-moderate political view just being an echo of boomer liberalism and civic nationalism. Whereas the generations before them effectively had their morality censored and blacklisted by the boomers to the point of taboo, boomer morality persists and likely will continue to persist through millennials, the next largest generation. Millennials, like boomers, never had a rite of passage to adulthood. The cultural vacuum of the post-WWII world cannot be overstated, and the 1950's idyll is in reality the GI generation returning from war to peace and prosperity, and not knowing that by sparing their children the horror of global conflict and economic depression, they were in fact denying them the rite of passage that they and their parents had gone through. It bears reiterating that they likely did not know this was happening, as rites of passage had been blurred long before the GI generation were born.
The generation which is just being born now, the Alphas, are the children of millennials. They are going to be the most polarised generation ever. Millennials are split harshly between hard left, hard right, and hard don't-give-a-shit. Our children are going to have to grow up in a world where their parents attitudes have had concrete effects. The competing millennial extremist crusades of tradition and diversity are going to produce a generation born into conflict. Different cadres of the Alphas will therefore be twerking transkids, deracinated centrists, and hyper-racists. The pattern which we on the right have seen from last century is that the future will not belong to whoever has the largest demographic share, but instead to whoever wields power - whoever takes responsibility and plays the part of the adult makes the decisions.
It's of prime importance then that we give our children adequate rites of passage to graduate them into these roles. To be effective, a rite of passage must be revelatory, confronting, cathartic, and sober. The true nature of manhood must be revealed. The dire reality of the world must be confronted. There must be a shedding of the childhood world. It should be a bittersweet event, with some measure of foreboding, so that once it has been undertaken it leaves our youth with the firm line drawn in the sand between child and adult. To sum up all these qualities is to say it must be natural and reasonable for our times.
What might be some such natural and reasonable rites come the 2040's, when Alphas in mean will be reaching adulthood? The most predictable state of the world is the "Brazilian slow burn" where things just circle the drain for another century or two, although there are many competing scenarios. In the suggested scenario, traditionalist millennials will be raising their children away from the rainbow singularity, instead opting for a more hardened community somewhere secluded. An easy suggestion for a rite of passage in this context would be to do something practical, like survive a couple of days in the bush, or go hunting solo, or build a log cabin, but this would not adequately prepare them for the storm of shit that is bearing down on them and WILL seek them out from its liberal enclaves. Perhaps then we must give credit to the Amish, who allow their children out into our world to experience its depths of depravity. Maybe an extreme version would be leaving them in a city with a map and a few hundred dollars and the task to get back home. I don't know if I can honestly will that onto my children in good conscience, but the point is to be able to welcome them back home with some taste of what it is they're up against, and passing along to them the responsibilities of adulthood in this world which will soon be completely populated by children of highly variable ages. Less extreme, a guided tour of the highs and lows of the post-modern world for a few days might do the trick.
Maybe this is not something that gets drawn up in intricate detail, but instead is something that conservative-leaning millennials universally acknowledge as necessary in some form. It will probably change between families, political situations, and geographical regions. In either case, it's not overstating the severity of our situation to say that the world needs young people who are placed onto an adult footing in an appropriate way at the appropriate time. It begins with millennials accepting the reality and shouldering the burden of adulthood.