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)

Teenagers

Last Saturday I slept in a tent in the northern part of Sweden. The camp mattresses were brand new, so getting to rest after 12 hours of canoe paddling was no problem. Slept quickly overwhelmed us.

But I should have known better. While seaching for an acceptable campsite, we had asked a flock of six approxmiately 16-year old teenagers for directions and in their own childish internally amusing way they had pointed into six different directions of the horizon. Tired and hungry we ended up camping a few hundred metres from their excursion.

I suddenly woke up around 3 AM. Flash lights were pointed at our tent from a short distance and loud voices affirmed that someone had placed themselves just outside our tent. Being covered by three layers of nylon plus a sleeping bag at the same time as you’re seriously fearing for your belongings (and who knows what else) is a very claustrophobic experience. In the process of opening up the many layers, we started yelling (loudly!) from inside the tent – telling them among other less flattering words to literally “fuck off”.

But unbelievably they stayed just outside the tent entrance pointing their flash light at my extremely angry face as I managed to unzip the last layer. At this point my angry face went back into the tent to grab our newly acquired flash light in order to get a glimpse of them (my body was still covered in sleeping bag and everything up until now had relied on reflexes).

When I had managed to find the light and move it outside, the two guys were far away. They were obviously drunk and had probably entered a bet about “annoying the Danes in the tent over there”. Nothing was stolen outside, though.

It took me a while to get back to sleep. Every sound in the woods was suspected of being another teen trying to impress the opposite sex and as I was giving up the idea of hunting down the two intruding idiots, I started wondering why actions of teenagers could be so far away from any conception an adult would expectedly have of how the world works.

Plato believed children shouldn’t be considered human beings, because they don’t contain a fully developed reason. Adolescents or teenagers are slowly moving along the right path towards increasing their awareness, while they still have a long way to go. But whereas children are conscious of their lack of reason in their commitment to adults, the thing that scares me about teenagers is that they gain contempt for the basic reasoning set up by adults throughout a long intellectual tradition and in their own arrogant stupidity teenagers believe their own unreflected view on things can secure them a better way to act.

Mix this approach with alcohol and you get two obnoxious teenagers – as unpredictable as animals – trying to provoke sleeping people in tents.