When I was a young man, we used to hunt the mammoth and pray to the sky gods for guidance and forgiveness. When not doing that, we were trying to find our way in the world. I was not much different from my coevals in that I had no patience for the lectures of old men about how I should live my life. That did not mean I thought they were mistaken. It’s just that I wanted to drink liquor and chase women, even knowing that it would lead to a bad end. Life is for living.

Of course, I was a knucklehead who thought he knew more than he did about most things. Again, that just means I was like everyone else my age. I always appreciated, however, when adults treated me as an equal. I never liked to be patronized. As I grew older, I tried hard to never patronize young adults. I figured if I hated it, I should not do it. That’s worked pretty well. In the rare cases when a young person has asked for advice, I was happy to offer what I could. Otherwise, I avoid playing the old man card.

The point here is that I like to joke around about being the Clint Eastwood character from Gran Torino, but I am pretty much the opposite of that guy. I don’t look my age, I sure as hell don’t act my age and most important, I don’t think anyone should act their age. Live your life as you see fit and enjoy your time. It goes by quickly and you never have enough of it. Letting others tell you how to live is a sure way to not live and, life if for living.

That’s the Tao of Z.

That said, I do think the millennials are a departure from American culture. They were raised in the communications revolution. They were educated in schools awash in Cultural Marxism. They have never known tough times as the economy has been relatively strong for thirty years. Yeah, young people have record unemployment and many still live with mom, but there’s zero pressure on them to get a job and move out of the basement. As with so much else, that’s different with the millennials versus everyone who came before them.

What got me thinking about this is a post by Razib Kahn the other day that had me laughing. Kahn is a super smart guy and very serious young man. His choice of subject matter may be why I forget he is so young. But, the sacramentalizing of the iPhone is one of those generational markers that jumps out at me. If you think it was an inflection point in human evolution, you’re a millennial. If you once owned a Palm, you’re not. If you once owned a Merlin then you’re probably near death or should be or whatever.

Anyway, it got me thinking about millennials a bit this week. Last summer I did a post on millennials, but it is not a subject I write about very much, beyond the wise crack here or there. What sprung to mind reading Razib’s post is that millennials appear to have adopted the Left’s non-linear sense of time. Some past events are talked about as if they just happened, while other recent events are treated as if they happened in the Middle Ages. In other words, events are not sorted on a time line. Instead, positional relevance on the time line is driven by emotional awareness. The iPhone looms large so it just happened. The iPod is irrelevant so it was like a million years ago.

It’s easy to write this off to solipsism, and there’s a fair bit of that. This is a generation raised in front of a mirror, but it also the first generation to be thoroughly immersed in Cultural Marxism. There we see the non-liner timeline as an integral part of ideology. Vast parts of the timeline and its events simply disappear, while other events, those of importance to the movement, are talked about with the same emotional zeal as if they happened yesterday. Events are positioned on the time by emotional relevance. I wonder if millennials have internalized this as a habit of mind.

Something else I see is a strange need for validation. Again, I suspect this is a product of the schools. It’s easy to forget that schools changed a great deal starting in the 70’s when the Boomers started taking up spots in education. The modern school looks a lot like what the Soviets or Chinese practiced. The teacher is elevated to the level of moral and spiritual guide. In China, teachers are often treated as minor deities. In the Soviet system, the teacher was also an ideological guide to make sure the pupils were coming up in the orthodoxy.

The result is a student that is focused on the pat on the head and the gold star. Learning the material for personal satisfaction is irrelevant when everything is judged in relation to the teacher’s affection. I saw this at Yale a few years back. The grad students looked at an old person like me as someone to preen for in search of that pat on the head. It was very weird and I just wrote it off to Ivy League social skills, but I now think it is a generational thing. Millennials are a generation of suck-ups.

The flip side of that is a fear of being judged. In fact, millennials seem to obsess over judgements. In that Razib post there’s a comment using the magic phrase “value-laden.” That’s an abracadabra phrase for young people. Again, this goes to the immersion in Cultural Marxism. Noticing differences is treated as a a mortal sin. Therefore, anything that even hints at comparison causes sphincters to knot up, thus making value-laden words and phrases taboo.

Finally and related to the allergy to comparison is the nasty response to anything resembling a slight. This also touches on the validation thing. In royal courts and petty dictatorships, like the classroom, one’s rise to the top is really a rise to number two. No matter how smart and capable, you are not going to be king. Similarly, the best student will never be the teacher. Therefore, there are no winners, just degrees of loser. The guy closest to the top is just less of a loser than his rivals.

The result is a eery lack of empathy. Business people I know report that dealing with millennials as a vendor is strange and often unpleasant. You do a favor for them and they feel no obligation to return the favor. At the same time, they expect you to do them favors. I know a few business people who have dropped accounts because they find dealing with a 30-year old sociopath intolerable. Anecdotes are not data, but that Navy paper alludes to this as well. Transactional relationships are no way to build a society at least not one that can maintain large scale organization.

That Navy paper suggests the institutions of America will have to adapt. That’s probably true, but I wonder if it is entirely possible. A society of ruthless attention seekers sounds pretty awful. A nation of transactional people with little empathy for one another is going to need something else to prevent it from descending into madness. What that is, I don’t know, but that does not mean it does not exist. Maybe the millennials are the first generation to usher in the new era of humanity. The rest of us could be the Neanderthals of this age. Or, things will get much worse in the coming decades.