Snowflakes Without Minds, Are They Even Human?

Definition of Generation Snowflake:

The group of young people today that have the INSANE belief they have the right to NOT be offended by any of the beliefs/viewpoints of the other 7.1 billion people of this planet. When these fragile/infantile people are offended, most likely they will react in someway like a toddler (cry, scream, act hysterical, etc).

Ohhh look, we have some members of generation snowflake that are complaining they don’t have any Safe Spaces at the University of XYZ. __ Urban Dictionary

Physically, they have been coming of age since 2010. But their minds never gelled in a way that would allow them to think for themselves, separate from the echo choir in which they are immersed. What happens to a society when — over the generations — its people lose mental and emotional resiliency and can no longer think and act as skeptical, independent, intelligent individuals?

Megaphone Mind Control on Campus
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Speaking at numerous school and university events in recent years, I’ve noticed an increasingly aggrieved response from my young audience to any argument I put forward that they don’t like. They are genuinely distressed by ideas that run contrary to their worldview. Even making a general case for free speech can lead to gasps of disbelief. But why do they take everything so personally?

… Today, parents go to ludicrous lengths to eliminate all risk from their children’s lives. Inevitably this narrows their horizons and teaches them to be less daring. Health-and-safety mania means the young are denied resilience-building freedoms that past generations enjoyed, such as playing outdoors, climbing trees and walking to school unaided. Modern mollycoddling means that pupils have been prevented from engaging in activities such as leapfrog, marbles and conkers. Three in ten schools have banned the playground game British bulldog. Last week, a headmistress in Dundee suggested changing the colour of her school’s red uniform because ‘some research indicates that it can increase heart and breathing rates’. In March, there were moves to ban tackling in school rugby matches due to the perils of this ‘high-impact collision sport’.

Even more damaging is a child–protection industry that actively encourages children to see potential abuse everywhere. ___ Claire Fox

That was the beginning. Nationwide lockdowns and antifa/BLM riots are the middle game. Where does it all end?

Can Snowflakes Ever Grow Up?

Now that all of society has become a large snowflake factory, is there any hope for future generations — for the children of these snowflakes? Not if social media has anything to say about it.

When Minds Never Form

In her 2018 book, Reader, Come Home, [Maryanne] Wolf uses cognitive neuroscience and developmental psycholinguistics to study the reading brain and literacy development, and in doing so, helps identify what is being lost. According to Wolf, we are losing what she calls “deep literacy” or “deep reading.” This does not include decoding written symbols, writing one’s name, or making lists. Deep literacy is what happens when a reader engages with an extended piece of writing in such a way as to anticipate an author’s direction and meaning, and engages what one already knows in a dialectical process with the text. The result, with any luck, is a fusion of writer and reader, with the potential to bear original insight.

Deep literacy has wondrous effects, nurturing our capacity for abstract thought, enabling us to pose and answer difficult questions, empowering our creativity and imagination, and refining our capacity for empathy. It is also generative of successive new insight, as the brain’s circuitry for reading recursively builds itself forward. It is and does all these things in part because it touches off a “revolution in the brain,” meaning that it has distinctive and describable neurophysiological consequences. Understanding deep literacy as a revolution in the brain has potential payoffs for understanding aspects of history and contemporary politics alike.

Deep reading has in large part informed our development as humans, in ways both physiological and cultural. And it is what ultimately allowed Americans to become “We the People,” capable of self-government. If we are losing the capacity for deep reading, we must also be prepared to lose other, perhaps even more precious parts of what deep reading has helped to build.

__ Brains that Cannot Read and Think Deeply Are Not Human Brains

But snowflakes are too busy immersed in simple-minded, self-reinforcing social media, to engage in deep level reading, or in deep work generally. It is not certain that they are capable of deep reading or deep work, without massive re-training and deprogramming.

And so we see more and more students who spend 6 or more years in college, but never can settle on a specific field of study. Whether or not they eventually graduate, they are likely to carry a huge burden of student debt. These days, their job prospects often orient them toward work as professional agitators, political organizers, and ideological activists.

The common, not particularly well-educated person, Ortega y Gasset argued, has ideas in his head but did not produce those ideas:

He wishes to have opinions, but is unwilling to accept the conditions and presuppositions that underlie all opinion….To have an idea means believing one is in possession of the reasons for having it, and consequently means believing that there is such a thing as reason, a world of intelligible truths. To have ideas, to form opinions, is identical with appealing to such an authority…and therefore believing that the highest form of inter-communion is the dialogue in which the reasons for our ideas are discussed. But the mass-man would feel himself lost if he accepted discussion, and instinctively repudiates the obligation of accepting that supreme authority lying outside himself.

__ Source quoting Ortega y Gasset’s “The Revolt of the Masses“

This describes today’s snowflake generation well: They have ideas in their heads, but they did not produce those ideas. The ideas were instead programmed into their heads in a long barrage of indoctrination beginning as early as nursery school.

Can these non-thinking, non-reading things ever be rehabilitated into thinking humans?

Millennial snowflakes have been sheltered so long, and have been huddled together among like-thinking peers and thought controllers for so long, that they have lost the ability to face adversity, deal with cognitive dissonance, or solve meaningful problems.

Today, our young will only cultivate grit when they are forced to be resourceful. Grit comes, psychologist Angela Duckworth says, when students must reach down and find a way to achieve something on their own. The more resources we give them, the less resourceful they tend to become. Further, research tells us we must encourage them to stick with a commitment for at least two years to see lasting results.

In experiments with adolescent rats, psychologists discovered what they later called, “learned helplessness.” Studies verified that rats stop pulling a lever to get food when nothing happens. The same response occurs with humans when participants pursue a certain goal. When nothing happens for a period of time, they conclude the goal is out of their control—and they stop trying. Too often, our young give up due to “learned helplessness.”

… What message do you suppose it sends a student when the adults in his life continue to swoop in and save him whenever something goes wrong? While it may feel good at first, it communicates: “We don’t think you have it in you to solve this problem. You need an adult to help you.” Consequently, these young people don’t feel like adults themselves until somewhere between ages 26-29. They can remain on their parents’ insurance policy until age 26. In one survey, young adults reported they believe adult-life begins with “having their first child.” Today, this doesn’t happen until long after 18 years old. So while we give them the right to vote, they may have no concept of reality. Rights without responsibilities creates virtual adults and often, spoiled brats.

As I mentioned earlier, adults have filled our kids’ lives with artificial experiences. Young people may try to act like real adults… __ The Snowflake Generation

If you want to observe these things, they are either cowering in their closets from the Wuhan virus, or they are rioting in Minneapolis or dozens of other cities in North America and beyond.

There is no mystery to the absurdities of the [Snowflake Generation]. Nor should we wonder at their sudden appearance. We — adult society — protect children from criticism and suspend our critical judgment in order to massage their self-esteem. We scare them rigid by ‘catastrophising’ an endless list of fears. We make them hypervigilant about potential abuse from adults and their peers. We encourage them to equate abusive words with physical violence. And we have, in short, shaped our own overanxious, easily offended, censoriously thin-skinned Frankenstein monster. We created Generation Snowflake. __ Snowflake Factory

Now that we are beginning to understand how these oversensitive monsters were created, and now that we know some of the critical factors that they are lacking, we may be able to head off some of the worst consequences from this slow motion train wreck in the future.

The great danger we face as we become more intimately involved with our computers… is that we’ll begin to lose our humanness, to sacrifice the very qualities that separate us from machines. __ The Shallows

Afterword: One of the implications of Generation Snowflake is that larger numbers of skilled labor will have to be imported from the outside to make up for the lack of relevant skills within the snowflake population. Emerging and developing nations will be further stripped of their elites, while advanced nations infested with snowflakes must somehow compensate for the treacherous parasites that they have spawned.

If all they can do is agitate, hide, and conform, their native intelligence will not signify. Such people may as well have IQs multiple standard deviations below the mean.

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