There's No Uglier Sight Than Mobs Of People Devoid Of Perspective

There is no uglier sight in society today than young lefties, with the best standard of living of any group of human beings that have ever been alive, taking to the streets to splutter and moan about how indignant they are that free sweeties that someone else has to pay for are not being given to them in such plentiful quantities.

It is no coincidence that the majority of the Corbynistas are young people. Young people have no capital and often no job yet, so directly they pay none of the costs of redistributionist policies, but enjoy many of the benefits. They are also not as experienced in life, so haven't had the chance to develop a more informed worldview.

But there is another reason why they demand such economic foolishness from our politicians - they don't actually know how lucky they are, and have been born into a world in which the many riches we enjoy are not only just taken for granted, but have actually primed young people to expect more and more without really having a proper perspective of just how remarkable and incipient this economic enrichment for humans actually is.

Young people of today live under conditions that their grandparents would have found luxurious, and that their great-great-great-great grandparents wouldn't have even thought possible, and that most of the people that have ever lived in our 200,000 year history wouldn't have even been able to contemplate was possible - yet they still go around like spoiled brats complaining about how unfair and unequal society is.

Society has many tough elements, and it may be a quite ghastly place compared to our best utopian fantasies - but when juxtaposed with the reality of 99.9% of human history, we are in the period of a great enrichment that is, lest we forget, still in its infancy. By all means, let's speak out against things that are genuinely wrong in society, but for goodness' sake, please can the parents of these young lefties help rattle a sense of perspective into their parochial little minds?

The great irony
The great irony they need to be made to realise is that it is only because we have experienced such a progression explosion in the past 150 years that we even think in such terms of an improved standard of living and harbour expectations about material prosperity for all. Such is the incredible progress we have made, that we live our lives through a lens of expecting economic progress with a sense of entitlement that would be completely alien to anyone who lived prior to the Industrial Revolution.

And just a little further back, it just wouldn't have occurred to someone living in the time of Shakespeare to ask whether they were materially better off than their parents, because nobody really had any reason to think that humans could progress very much more than they had already - after all, for the 10,000 years prior to Shakespeare, progression, compared to what we know now, was occurring at the pace of a snail wading through treacle.

And you'll notice this is why the phenomenon occurs so readily in young people: the reason young people demand such a higher standard of living is because they have such a relatively high standard of living. Far fewer older people are likely to be on the streets exclaiming how tough today's standards of living are because they have had decades to appreciate just how much progress we and the rest of the world have made. Young people, on the other hand, have just taken exponential progress for granted, and are too often mincing around with their placards utterly devoid of just how incomprehensibly incredible their lifestyle would have been for their great-grandparents.  

Perhaps the best example that underpins what I'm saying is the widespread obsession people have with the so-called injustices of inequality (a subject on which I've blogged numerous times before). Yes we do have inequality, but as above, the main reason we have it is because we have so much human wealth, and because the economy is not a fixed pie, so people who provide lots of value for others can increase their wealth and make millions of others better off by doing so.

Inequality is actually a good problem; it's not something that people in Shakespeare's time would have had to worry about much because there wasn't anything like as much wealth to focus on. Nobody in the world today is poorer than they would have been in pretty much any other time in human history.

Finally, on top of not knowing just how remarkably prosperous their lives are, the other alarming thing I find about the young left is just how full of bile, hate and intolerance so many of them are. Most of them are not careful thinkers who have weighed up the arguments of both sides - they are chameleon-like reactionaries that have joined together as part of a mob mentality that detests the things that have made humans prosper and pulled us out of the quagmire of hardship and low life expectancy.

And while they are in this frame of mind, buoyed by a simpleton cult figure like Corbyn, and egged on by a Shadow Cabinet with about as much intellectual proficiency as a KFC 14 piece Bargain Bucket, heaven only knows what damage and economic stultification they are capable of inflicting on our society if they ever get into power.