I think it was Epictetus who said it takes a lifetime to learn how to live. I think he also added that learning how to die is a logical extension of learning how to live.
The point and purpose of culture is to provide a sort of guidebook, something that describes at least some good solutions to the problems of meaning and purpose that occur to all thoughtful people, which over some time horizon is at least momentarily all of us. No one is so stupid that they do not at least occasionally think of death, or wonder if they are on the right path in life.
In a traditional culture the elderly are the BTDT’s, the Been There Done That’s. That is why the wise young look to them for guidance. They have tested life’s hypotheses, to varying extents. A leads reliably to B, and C to D. They have seen it.
Nothing could be stupider than honoring the opinions of young people who have done nothing, and seen nothing, PARTICULARLY when they have been as sheltered and overprotected as most of America’s children have been. They have not even seen, at 22, what an average child in Africa has seen by age 10.
The point of culture is to save time, to provide good starting points, so the wheel doesn’t have to be fully reinvented with each generation. Because every hypothesis advanced that was falsified long ago is a waste of time.
Almost nothing that the kids nowadays are proposing was not millennia old a thousand years ago. Communism is nothing new: it is the ideal of the Perfect King and the Consummate Order, wrought by Divine Competence as manifested in the Divine Ruler. It is the society happy because governed perfectly.
And this whole Trans thing is really, to me, just next level childishness. It is a neurotic desire to escape adult responsibilities through what amounts to next level consumerism. You get to dabble in this identity and that identity, like tasting so many ice cream flavors, none of them contributing to a mature sense of life, and none of them manifesting anything approaching a stable and responsible sense of self. If this sort of thing is new, it is only because only in the richest world ever seen can people afford to be so ludicrous.
We have everything, so we invent things to pursue that are not on the menu, and not for sale at Amazon.
It’s hard for me to foresee things getting sane again within my lifetime. But life is change. Perhaps my children or their children will be able to rebuild something worth a damn.