Marx Was Right After All (an ongoing series)
12th January 2021
Marxism just seems right to teenagers of all ages. Teenagers’ only frame of reference is their parents, and to the inexperienced — as all teenagers by definition are — even the best parents seem willful and capricious, if not outright tyrannical. (The gray, wrinkled teenagers who refuse to learn merely substitute “society” for “their parents” in their emotional incontinence). Teenagers live in a weirdly binary world, where the switches can only be “on” or “off,” yet all terms are undefined.
That’s why the worst thing a teenager can think of is “unfair.” It’s wrong because it feels wrong, and anything that’s wrong must be somebody’s fault — again, how could it be otherwise? Parents can’t afford to let their kids learn big lessons the hard way. Literally can’t afford it, in that teenagers can’t see why, for example, you can’t take that turn at 85 mph on an icy road. You can explain it to them until you’re blue in the face, but as anyone who has spent any time around teenagers knows, there’s a large subset of them that will simply refuse to get it. Alas, those tend to be the brighter ones, and so a large part of the subtle art of teenager management is setting up smaller, less catastrophic situations for them to fuck up, such that they hopefully learn by analogy. Which is still, of course, the grownups’ fault…