The Finite Ecstasy of Ignorance
Concerns about societal decline and the behavior of younger generations have been expressed across many ancient cultures. Thousands of generations have looked at their spawn and despaired. Certainly, a few minutes on TikTok makes me feel despondent.
Despite millennia of hand-wringing, humanity has survived and apparently flourished, at least from a biological point of view. So what’s the Big Deal? Well, let’s start by listening to what the ancients have said to us over the eons.
In the Instruction of Ptahhotep, an Egyptian text from the Middle Kingdom period, the vizier Ptahhotep (~2000 BC) laments the loss of respect for traditions:
“Youth are corrupted by luxury, and the wisdom of the old is ignored.”
An apocryphal Sumerian proverb from about the same time expresses frustration about the younger generation:
“In those days, there was no reverence for the elder, no reverence for teachers; the young men would sit in the gate, chattering away, saying whatever pleased them.”
That gate could easily be replaced with modern SocMed. No word on what the young women were doing, but one assumes they were enablers.
Socrates (~450 BC), as quoted by Plato, allegedly criticized the youth of Athens:
“The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise.”
Philosophers like Hesiod also ranted about decline in Works and Days (~700 BC), writing about the “Five Ages of Man,” where humanity declines in morality over time.
The Roman poet Horace complained (~20 BC)( about societal changes, particularly the loss of traditional Roman family values, in his Odes (Carmina):
“Our sires’ age, worse than our grandsires’, produced us, yet more wicked, soon to yield a race more wicked still.”
Cicero (~30 BC) lamented the moral decline of his era in his speeches and writings, suggesting that the youth were more self-serving and less committed to traditional Roman virtues. I’ve always pictured him as the William Buckley of the ancient world.
The grousing wasn’t limited to the Western world. Confucianism frequently bemoaned the decline of morality and respect for authority. Confucius himself (~400 BC) stated:
“The common people can be made to follow a path but not to understand it.”
(Analects, 8.9) He also dropped, “If the people have no respect, what becomes of the state?” (Analects,
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LewRockwell.com is a libertarian website that publishes articles, essays, and blog posts advocating for minimal government, free markets, and individual liberty. The site was founded by Lew Rockwell, an American libertarian political commentator, activist, and former congressional staffer. The website often features content that is critical of mainstream politics, state intervention, and foreign policy, among other topics. It is a platform frequently used to disseminate Austrian economics, a school of economic thought that is popular among some libertarians.
