Miserable youth

A long battle seems to have ended in Copenhagen. The groups of young Danes demanding a replacement for Ungdomshuset (“the Youth House”) have been given a house on Dortheavej. The left-wing politicians are satisfied, the right-wing disappointed.

Personally, I think these underground groups should have places to meet and unfold their creativity, but have become very annoyed with their immature and unconstructive “we are against the establishment, but demand more money from the establishment or else we’ll trash the city” attitude. Hopefully, the recent societal gesture will shut them up for a while.

On another level, I can’t help being fascinated by how these clashes between generations seem to be a repetitive loop in history. They have always been characterized by the paradox between the elders’ postive will to bring the future of the tribe from acts of “lust and desire” to “sound reasoning” and the youth’s revolt against such upbringing.

Just listen to the description of youth given by Socrates (through the writing of Plato) approximately 410 BC:

“Children nowadays are tyrants. They contradict their parents, gobble their food and tyrannise their teachers.“

(photo by mil_es)

The making of sense

Did you know this: The harder you work, the more you experience that your life is blessed with meaning. This is one of the core theories presented by Karl E. Weick and published in “Making Sense of the Organization” (2001), in which the authour deals with enactment (of the individual) and sense-making (for the individual in the organization). Weick analyses how organizations have become the new “churches” in delivering meaning to the individual.

A thread brings us back to the postmodernism: When the non-believing individual lost its “grand narrative” as presented by Lyotard in the late 60s, it was left with a giant vacuum. Instead of building existences on religious, ideological og historical meta-stories, individuals were forced to seek “communities of meaning”. And these communities, suggests Weick, have ended up being organizations.

Bottom line, the happier people feel, the more likely they are to be hospitalized for stress symptoms.

Russian wisdom

“The general had never regretted this early marriage, had never tried to portray it as a result of juvenile haste, and he felt the greatest respect for his wife and at times even had such fear for her that it bordered on sincere love!” (Dostoevsky’s “The Idiot”)

The letters of Dostoevsky’s “Crime and Punishment” were burnt onto my cerebral cortex as an eternal psychologizing voice whispering a constant moral guideline (yes, scary!). Nonetheless, I have dared myself into his other masterpiece, “The Idiot”. And so far, it’s freaking amazing.

Empty competences

In a Danish newspaper article today a Swiss professor of philosophy and in recent years a profoundly acknowledged writer of literature, Pascal Mercier, was quoted of saying the following (freely translated):

“When you in your youth start studying the likes of philosophy, you do not have jobs, money and success in mind. These things have absolutely nothing to do with the matter. You start such a study, because you wish to develop yourself. Consequently, I become so infinitely angry, when universities, including my own, now start talking about being “fit for the future” and “fit for jobs and money”, all that inharmonious management nonsense. It makes me so angry, because we are losing the dimension called culture and thus losing the most important thing in life. What use does it have, if we are so and so competent, if we are not able to do anything with our inner lives? If I may ask!”

His last question is important.

Read his book “Night Train to Lisboa” from 2004.