If You Don’t Care Enough, You’re a Bad Person: How We’re Killing our Millennials and iGens with Injustice and Guilt

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Not long ago, a group of friends of mine were having an email discussion about a problem facing our nation at the time.

They’re all good, well-intentioned and successful people. We all agreed that a certain behavior was deeply wrong, but we had deep disagreements about the nature of the problem and the best solution to fix that problem.

The email exchange got spirited. At one point, one of the participants said that if you didn’t understand the injustice his way and you didn’t agree with his solution, you were guilty of participating in the injustice yourself.

Take a second to think about that. If you don’t agree with me,  you’re guilty of the evil behavior yourself.

I brought this up in a discussion with some millennials and iGens I know, and they nodded their heads knowingly.

“It gets worse than that,” they said. “Not only are you evil if you don’t see things my way, but if you aren’t taking action on all the problems in the world right now, you’re a bad person.”

You’re not a good person because you stopped using plastic straws. You can only be a good person if you don’t use straws and eat the right foods from the right farms and boycott products from certain companies and countries and solve homelessness in your town and post social media support for certain movements in certain overseas nations and oppose this policy and care about that species and, and, and…. (insert a list of at least a hundred other things).

In earlier times, society used college and the media to help people understand Beauty and Truth and Morality so that people could practice and seek those things in life. Learning about Beauty and Truth and Morality made us aware of the injustices and problems in life, and we worked together to fix them.

It was a positive view of life that brought hope, built relationships and Happiness, and solved problems.

That positive understanding of life has worked pretty well. We forget that the problems humanity faced for thousands of years—deep hunger and poverty, rampant disease, early death—were much worse in the past than today. We forget the enormous progress we’ve made in very challenging times.

Today, we have more wealth, education and technology than any time in human history. We live better and longer. We’ve made enormous progress addressing hunger, disease and shelter.

Yet, through the postmodern thinking that dominates colleges and the media today, we’ve taught our younger generations to see the world and life only in terms of radical injustice and power.

We’ve taught them that there is very little good going on in our society. Life is dominated by injustice and evil. You are either a victim suffering injustice or an oppressor imposing injustice.

There is no meaning or purpose. Love is a lie. Society is irredeemable. Life is hopeless and dystopian.

• If you’re not buying and boycotting all the right things…
• If you’re not working at a job that actively solves injustices…
• If you’re not attending all of the protests about all the important issues (by the way, they’re all important)…
• If you’re not spending all your time on the Internet railing against injustice and attacking bad people…

Then you don’t care and you are a really bad person.

As one millennial put it: “We’ve been told that the world is full of injustice and that we are supposed to solve all of it. We’re supposed to care about every issue we’re told about. If we don’t take action, that means we don’t care and we’re a bad person. But there are so many injustices and we can’t solve them all and its overwhelming and exhausting.”

We have used college and the media to overwhelm millennials and iGens with injustice, then we psychologically bully them, bending them to our will, our issues and our solutions.

Some in older generations may be ok with that. They think it’s just the price of their version of justice.

But it’s killing those in younger generations.

“I wouldn’t mind getting hit by a bus,” one iGen said. “I graduated from college. Now I’m supposed to go to work and be miserable for the next 60 years. And then die. Why not just go now?”

We are teaching younger generations that the world and life suck, that they are responsible for solving all of the world’s injustices right now, and that anything less than total commitment to fixing my injustice my way means they are failures .

Then we are surprised that our younger generations are more anxious and depressed than ever, and that suicide has become the second leading cause of death for ages 10 to 35.

That’s not a typo. Suicide is the second leading cause of death for 10-year old’s.

Instead of teaching younger generations that life is a crazy, wonderful adventure in which they learn about Truth, Beauty and Wisdom, we’re teaching them that the only thing that matters is Power.

Instead of teaching them to pursue Happiness through high-quality, loving relationships, we’re teaching them to bully and hate to force others to do what we want. Power.

We don’t teach the younger generations that they will find hope, meaning and purpose through loving relationships with each other. Instead, we teach them that the world is an irredeemable, hopeless, dystopian mess without transcendent meaning.

Instead of doing what’s best for our younger generations, we’re turning them into our pawns. We’re lying to them about life. We’re using them to achieve whatever we want in the name of power and “social justice”.

It is literally killing them psychologically, spiritually and physically.

That is Unjust. That is profoundly Evil.

It is our responsibility to do something about that.

I’m Pete Bowen.