Youth Decline Of Manners?Losing Humanity?

[anunitu]

OK,I am going to now take a nap in the middle of the day...eat your hearts out all you non retired people...lift that bale....Old man river!!!!!

[iris]

Or Bach. That might calm him down...

True. I prefer Beethoven to Bach, but manson is one of the only things I can fall asleep to ^^

[Chessa]

We were tallking about this in one of my classes. For one thing, all anyone cares about is science and math. Schools where I live downplay, or even completely cut art and music and literatre- the things that create empathy. And empathy is the base for manners; the rest is just formality on top.

[LearningMan]

There are also those teens who convert to Satanism/Wicca to look cool (assuming a very loose definition of cool), shock parents/society, or as an excuse to be cruel. I've thankfully never met these teens, but I fear they may make it harder for teens who actually see these religions as valid spiritual paths. I fear that teens who genuinely explore their spiritual paths could be brushed aside because of this.

[B. de Corbin]

As a child of the 60s, I have to admit two things.

First, a lot of good came out of that time period.

Second, so did a lot of bad.

On the theory that good manners were a tool used to keep the underdogs underdogs, and that good manners were used to separate out the elite from the proles, manners were destroyed. Not many people in the US were taught "good manners" after the hippy era.

However, as R. Heinlein writes:
"Moving parts in rubbing contact require lubrication to avoid excessive wear. Honorifics and formal politeness provide lubrication where people rub together. Often the very young, the untravelled, the naive, the unsophisticated deplore these formalities as "empty," "meaningless," or "dishonest," and scorn to use them. No matter how "pure" their motives, they thereby throw sand into machinery that does not work too well at best."

In other words, formal politeness is what allows a multi plural society to exist, without endless murder.

It was so much easier to bring people DOWN to a certain level, but so much more difficult to bring people UP to a certain level that the difference between up & down was treated as a non-sequitur.

Manners are important. They keep us from killing each other when we disagree.

10 Polite Things People Just Don't Seem To Do Anymore

[MontyVeda]

I think, when we get to a certain age, we develop a romantic view of the past and a pessimistic view of the present. It's easy to see a bunch of gobby yobs outside a shop and think they represent youth culture... but what we don't see much of are the youths indoors, doing their studies or hobbies and so on. My teenage nephews are geeks... anything technology they love, anything 'real' they just don't get. It's strange seeing them permanently looking at their phones, as if 'what's going on' is in the gadget, and not out in the real world. My brother encouraged them to go outside and begrudgingly, they went out to find a wifi hotspot! It's so wrong... but when i think about what i was doing at their ages... i tend to shudder.

[LunarHarvest]

However, as R. Heinlein writes:
"Moving parts in rubbing contact require lubrication to avoid excessive wear. Honorifics and formal politeness provide lubrication where people rub together. Often the very young, the untravelled, the naive, the unsophisticated deplore these formalities as "empty," "meaningless," or "dishonest," and scorn to use them. No matter how "pure" their motives, they thereby throw sand into machinery that does not work too well at best."

I couldn't agree more B. de Corbin. While I could go on properly long ramble on different theories regarding this, I can summarise that I think it ultimately comes down to a lacking of proper respect for authority and a likewise drift away from Communitarianism towards a more extreme disposition towards Individualism.

It is generally a similar situation in law enforcement. People are happy with the safety and security the law generally brings. They celebrate it when it protects them and their property from harm. With that said, they only continue to follow the law properly until it is 'inconvenient' to them, or seen as 'meaningless' or 'empty' by the people, and then they become angered when the law is enforced upon their infractions. Many go against the very things which allow them to live as they do.

That being said, this is not just among the youth, but also at all ages, and this can cause a domino effect in which one generations bad habits transfer on to the next generations, and so on and so forth. After all, the youth of today were educated and conditioned in proper behaviour by the adults of today, and so the roots of the issue may lie deeper than simply the teenager demographic.