Mark with an X

The COVID lockdowns have caused an increase in mental health issues in young people. Or is it social media that is responsible? Maybe it’s a lack of broccoli in their diets!

There seems little doubt that young people are showing a greater propensity towards mental ill-health. This is good for those whose job it is to posit reasons and causes – and there are no end of reasons and causes to keep us entertained and amused.

To be clear, it is not the distress and discomfort of young people which amuses – only the wise and learned explanations that purport to offer hope but, instead, contribute to the problem.

Not to reveal my evolutionary leanings, but human beings have faced nearly 200,000 years of stresses at least as harsh as any faced today. So, the question really isn’t what causes the increase in mental health problems in young people. The real question is what is it about young people today that make them less able to cope with the stresses of life?

As young people are the future of the species, it should concern us all that they seem inadequate to the task! We might all be concerned with the prospect of climate change destroying the world. We should be just as concerned with the prospect that Homo sapiens is no longer fit enough to survive.

As with climate change, so we have only ourselves to blame for the weakening of the species. We did it to ourselves!

Humanity has been so dominant over all other species and environments on this beautiful planet of ours for so long, there always has been only one threat big enough to put us at risk. Ourselves!

We are so often warned that those ignorant of history are doomed to repeat it. In fact, the truth is, we are far from repeating the past. The past is, indeed, a strange country and people very much did things different there (cf. L.P. Hartley, The Go-Between). They embraced the struggle for survival and overcame it. We can only hope, for the good of us all, that we do start to repeat the past.

Of course, we shouldn’t simply go back to any age that would strip us of the advantages that we have reaped for ourselves. What is needed is a map that shows us the way forward while allowing us to see from whence we came. The primary, number one, without-doubt reason we have reached this point of unfitness is that battery of thinking which has so convinced young people that life is all about themselves.

Life isn’t about you. Life is about us!

Whatever identity forms the basis for your politics also makes you decidedly unfit for survival.

Any form of identity politics is blind to the past. When you see life as being all about you, you become blind to the life of us. And no single individual (with one possible exception) ever saved the human race. We survived! Only when we begin to think in terms of us will we discover the road forward.

The problem, of course, as anyone aware of our history knows, is that we have always thought in very small geographies. One happy band of hunter-gatherers never gave a second of thought to the survival of any other band. This is why the map needs to show us from where we came. To crystallise the realisation that it is no longer where we are.

We now, for better or worse, live in a global village (I love the phrase, despite its sheer inadequacy!). We now need to think in global terms. (Just think about that, for a moment.) On a global scale, any one, single individual is irrelevant. My problems with life are insignificant in comparison to the needs of global survival.

The irony of this is that it is very likely the very same (young) people who actively seek action on climate change who also think in terms of themselves. It is very unlikely they can even imagine a global village. A unicorn, maybe; a global village is beyond them.

Progressivism, it seems, is all about me!

The simple fact that no one seems able to see the harmfulness of such skewed thinking is what is most worrying.

Yes, it is progressive to give autonomy to the individual. This has never happened before in our 200,000 year history. Unfortunately, yet to be expected in an inevitable sense, the concept of the individual that has gained dominance is exactly what an individual isn’t.

An individual is not just me!

An individual is me with map in hand, showing precisely from where I came and the open road down which I walk. Open in the sense that others can lead the way while others follow. Individuality means being part of the crowd, all heading in the same direction, wearing plimsolls, running shoes, or clogs. Individuality is an expression of self; not an abnegation of other selves.

Progressivism is nothing but abnegation. Stop people from talking. Stop people from having contrary thoughts. Stop people from stopping me. This is not individuality.

This is precisely what weakens the species to the extent that when a real, biological, threat arises, the young are unable to cope. Precisely because COVID gave not a damn for who it infected, those who believe life is all about them were unable to cope with it. I never went through the Blitz, but I was close enough to it that I knew those who did. This knowledge of what others have experienced bolsters one’s own determination not to let them down, not to be less than they were, to survive.

Young people lack this connection to the past. They believe that we older folk don’t understand what they are experiencing – as if life has become something so vastly different that we got through it without the troubles now being faced by youngsters.

Speaking as someone who was bullied for the whole five years of Secondary School – largely because others had questions about my sexuality – I can, at just-about-to-be Sixty, state categorically, there ain’t nothing new under the Sun.

It is only because they are so wrapped up in themselves that young people today could believe they are experiencing something never experienced before in our 200,000 year history. The arrogance!

Yet, it isn’t their fault! They are, after all, our children. We bred them to be weak! We killed any chance of our survival by breeding ourselves out of fitness.

We changed the climate and ourselves right along with it! Makes you wonder whether we should be quite so ready to dismiss Freud out of hand. Maybe his idea of Thanatos, the instinct for death, isn’t quite as far-fetched as we’d like to think!