In
the June 16th Agenda Weekly for the World Economic Forum, there is
an article by Keith Breene titled “Millennials are rapidly losing interest in
democracy.” It delves into this
proposition from a number of angles. The
number of millennials who are in favor of a leader who is free from the checks
applied by a legislature and free elections has grown considerably in countries
around the world including the United States and Mexico. Millennials are also less interested in
voting. In addition, there has been an
ongoing decrease in the number of people in this group who feel that living in
a democracy is very important to them.
Within the last thirty years, there has also been an ongoing decline in
trust in democratic institutions like legislatures and courts, and this is
reflected in the fundamental attitudes of the millennials. There is a discrepancy in attitudes towards
the military taking over a democratic government, when the latter is
experiencing major problems of performance.
More than twice as many older people are afraid of such an intrusion
compared to younger people. And,
although interest in politics tends to increase as one gets older, young people
today are beginning from a lower base of interest than previous generations of
young people.
This
loss of connection with politics represents a very dangerous state of affairs
for democracies around the world. Do we
really want to go back in time to an era of predominance of authoritarian
governments? Paradoxically, it would
appear that there may be elements in our modern technological living
environments that are predisposing younger people to want to give up the
political freedom for which their forefathers fought for so long to obtain.
Modern
technological living environments are making life increasingly frictionless,
increasingly easy to experience. More
and more things are done by technology, relatively free of human
involvement. Devices, machines,
computers and robots are taking over the processes and ultimately the narrative
of life. There is less and less need for
people to expend great effort and to experience great friction in order to get
something done. This frictionless living
environment is experienced as a vacuum where people sink into numbness, feel a
sense of powerlessness and withdraw into a world of dreams. In relation to the external world, such
people are seen as being passive, increasingly incapable of taking charge of
tasks that require a long-term sustained effort. Young people, in particular, today want it
all and they want it now. Technology has
taught them at an early age that in so many areas of life today, things can be
accomplished without friction-filled narratives. And, of course, the implicit line of
reasoning would go, if this is true for some areas of life, why can’t it be
true for all areas of life? Why do there
have to be messy situations that don’t lend themselves to clear simple
frictionless solutions?
Politics
in a democracy is such a messy complex situation. One has to work hard to try to implement
one’s plans both on the local level and on the national level. What is required is meaningful participation
and constant vigilance. In a democracy
one can fight for what one wants, but one usually doesn’t totally get one’s
way. One has to compromise with other
people. This leads to a frequent sense
of frustration and disappointment. For
people like the millennials who want it all and want it now, such frequent
frustration and disappointment can become unbearable, intolerable.
Better
not to put oneself in a situation where such unbearable intolerable frustration
can take place in the first place.
Better not to get involved in the flowing blendable continual mess of
politics. Better to let one strong man
or woman take over and configure a direction for the nation and make one’s
decisions for oneself with regard to taking the best courses of political action. This way a person doesn’t have to thrash
about and struggle to pull oneself out of one’s numbness in order to begin to
participate in a meaningful way in the complex mixed-up human interactions that
are involved in democracy. According to
surveys, American millennials did not tend to be in favor of Trump. At the same time, a large number of them
didn’t bother to vote against him either.
One can only wonder if, on some unconscious level, they did want a
strong man like Trump to make all the important political decisions. In many countries, where the roots of
democratic institutions are less firmly planted, the increase in open vocal
support for authoritarian leaders among millennials has been much more marked.
This
passivity in politics is also manifest in other areas of the millennials’
lives. Many millennials are having
trouble finding jobs and leaving home.
It is as if the ongoing experiential vacuum in which they live is
stimulating them to regress and move backward with their lives rather than grow
and move forward. It is as if the
experiential vacuum that has been created by technology is infantilizing
them. Perhaps, it is as if, not finding
much grounding in their modern technological living environments, millennials
are dying psychologically by moving backward towards the womb in their
minds. They recreate the womb - the
foundational sense of grounding - in their heads and more precisely in their
dreams. However, such a mentality leaves
them susceptible to being mobilized in the external world by an authoritarian leader
who can give them grounding there as well as become a source of a meaningful
life narrative in the external world.
On
another level, the lack of organic friction created by modern technology
results in a lack of opportunities for traction to pull oneself out of one’s
numbness and to then make organic imprints to feel alive and preserve some of
them for a surrogate immortality in order to prepare for death. Many millennials live out their desired meaningful
narratives for making and preserving imprints primarily in their dreams, which
means they are not really making or preserving their desired individual organic
imprints at all. Of course, this is
where an authoritarian leader come in. He invites people to merge their
individual narratives with his narrative and thus to participate in his
individual imprints by merging their imprints with his imprints to form larger
collective imprints. Millennials are
susceptible to this approach in the same way they are susceptible to the
ravages of the opioid epidemic.
All
in all, this is a very dangerous state of affairs not only for millennials but also
for the democracies in which they live, and strategies have to be developed to
deal with it effectively or else modern democracy may be translated into
something not at all recognizably democratic.
© 2017 Laurence Mesirow
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