The Juvenile Imbecile

I’ve already believed in many lies, but there is a particular one to which I was always immune: that which celebrates youth as a time of rebelliousness, of independence, of love for freedom. I never gave credit to this load of rubbish, not even when, as a young man, it flattered me. On the contrary, since my early years I was deeply displeased by the conduct of the people from my generation, their herd spirit, their fear of isolation, their subservience to the current clamor, their compulsion to feel similar and accepted by the cynical and authoritary majority, their disposition to give away and desecrate everything, in exchange for a vacancy as tyro in the group of the “cool guys”.

Youth, it is true, rebels itself many times against parents and teachers, but that is because they know that deep down these people are on their side and will never reciprocate their aggressions with full force. The fight against parents is a play, a predetermined game where one of the competitors is fighting to win and the other to help him win.

A lot different is the situation of a teen among those of his generation, which do not have towards him the complacence of paternalism. Far from protecting him, this noisy and cynical horde receives the novice with a degree of disdain and hostility that show him, from the beginning, the need to comply not to capitulate. It is from the people from his own generation that the teen receives his first experience of confrontation with power, without the mediation of that difference in age that gives him right to discounts and alleviation. It is the reign of the strongest, the most shameless, that affirms itself most crudely over the frailty of the newcomer, imposing on him torment and demands before accepting him as a member of the horde. To how many rites, how many protocols, how many humiliations does a postulant submit himself, to escape the terrifying perspective of rejection, of isolation. Not to be sent back, impotent and humiliated, to the arms of his mother, he has to pass an exam that demands of him less courage than flexibility, the skill to adapt himself to the whims of the majority – of suppressing, in sum, his personality.

It is true that he submits himself to this with pleasure, with the enthusiasm of the man in love that will do anything in exchange of a condescending smile. The mass of people from his generation represents, after all, the world, the wide world into which the teen, coming from the small domestic world, is asking for admission. And what a costly admission it is. The candidate must, early on, learn a whole new vocabulary of words, gestures, looks, a whole new code of passwords and symbols. The slightest flaw exposes to ridicule, and the name of the game is in general implicit, and one must guess it before one knows it, copy it before guessing. The way of learning is always through imitation – literal, servile, and unquestioning. The admission to the juvenile world triggers with full speed the drive of all human faltering: the mimetic desire that is mentioned by René Girard, where the object does not attract because of its intrinsic qualities, but because it is simultaneously desired by another, which Girard denominates the mediator.

It is not surprising that the group admission rite, costing such a high psychological investment, drives the youth to complete exasperation, preventing him, simultaneously, from pouring his resentment back into the group, object of love that denies itself, and because of that has the gift of transfiguring each anger impulse in new loving investment. Where will, then, the anger turn to, except to the least dangerous direction? The family appears as the providential scapegoat for all the youth’s failures in his rite of passage. If he is not successful in making himself acceptable to the group, the last thing that will occur to him will be to blame his situation to the fatuity and cynicism of those who reject him. In a cruel inversion, the blame for his humiliations will not fall to those that refuse to accept him as a man, but to those that accept him as a child. The family that gave him everything will pay for the meanness of the horde that demands from him everything. This is the summary of the famous teenage rebelliousness: love given to the strong ones that reject him, scorn for the weak ones who love him.

All mutations happen in the shade, in the twilight zone between being and not-being: the youth, in transit between what he no longer is and what he is yet to be, is, by fatality, unconscious of himself, of his situation, of the authorship and the guilt of everything that goes on inside and around him. His judgements are almost always a total inversion of reality. This is the reason why youth, since the cowardly adults have given it the authority to say and do whatever it wants, was always at the forefront of all mistakes and perversities of the 20th century: nazism, fascism, communism, pseudo-religious sects, drug consumption. It is always youth that is a step ahead in the worst direction.

A world that trusts its future to the discernment of youth is a tired, old world, without any future at all.