The Idolization of the Youth

I find it unbelievable that in today’s postmodern world, leaders are “pretending” to take their cue from young people on how to govern and make the world a better place.

Before I am misunderstood, I am not anti-youth. I am against the hypocrisy of leaders who are pretending to listen to the young, but the truth is that they are promoting their political and ideological agenda.

Sadly, some of these leaders are unwittingly making themselves as puppets by importing “hook, line and sinker” those liberal agenda from the West.

Let the young be young (whatever that means in today’s society), and then when it is their time (whenever that will be), let them do what they are saying today.

But some are too impatient because they want to make a difference now or it may be too late. After all the world is going to end soon (according to those prophets of doom because of climate change). So, they want change NOW!

I hope that today’s idealistic youth will remain as such when it is their time because the leaders that we have today were once idealistic youth in the past.

But it would be hypocritical on both sides of the generation gap to pretend that they are better than the other. We need to listen to each other. The elders need to listen to the youth while the youth also has to listen to their elders.

The older generation cannot claim that they did a good job when there is too much to wrongs to be undone while on the other hand, the youth cannot just be catapulted to pedestals of wisdom just because their elders failed.

The youth as wise while the old are foolish!  This is the impression that I am getting in reading the news with deals with the youth. True, the older generation has failed the younger generation in so many ways, but it does not mean that the young are now better than their elders.

For example, there were so many people who praised Greta Thunberg for her advocacy about the environment. The liberals have made Thunberg a “environment advocate superstar.”

It is laudable, indeed, because we need the youth’s ideals, but it does not necessarily make them right at all times. Good for her; she is living in a first world country where she got the best that the industrial world got to give. Maybe she should try living in Africa and perhaps in the slums of the Philippines.

When you watch the consultancy and coaching industry, there is a growing trend of young people conducting corporate consultancy and coaching on how to make one’s company successful.

Ironically, these young consultants do not have any successful companies except their “business of talking.”

Expertise, before, was based on one’s success in the field where the experts claimed they are “experts” of. Nowadays, it seems that having “ideals” and being young are the two main important elements of being considered as “experts.”

There are also young “life coaches” who preached how to make your life better when these coaches themselves are barely past their thirties or forties.

What we are having is an “inversion” of our own human experience.

The old, due to their experience, are supposed to be wise while the youth needs to learn.

I was reading an article that criticizes this principle. The author claimed that the world is now different. The older generation is not necessarily wise because experience does not necessarily make one wise. Granting without conceding to this point, I would also propose that being young does not make you wiser either.

Unfortunately, those in the leadership (who should have known better) are also tolerating this trend to the point that they would even make dramatic gestures to drive this point about the young. How about abdicating their leadership positions and giving it to the young?

I hope that today’s idealistic youth will remain as such when it is their time to lead because the leaders that we have today were once idealistic youth in the past.

Same story, different characters.

How I wish to be proven wrong.

PS:

When I was young, my mother would always tell me to wake up early (whether it is class day or not) and make my bed every morning.

Maybe those who are thinking of changing society should think first about keeping their room clean before fixing society.

Or perhaps they have no time to clean their rooms because the world is about to end, which we keep hearing on social media, because of climate change.

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