(TL;DW The message of the video was this: Millennials are no different than anybody else and are not the cause of the culture war.)

~~~~~

Damn! That’s a great insight! Easily the most important one I’ve seen presented in weeks. Shoot. We’ve needed this one since this whole Millennial thing began.

PewDiePie is a pretty good example of a Millennial personality archetype, (I’d argue that his popularity indicates a generally accurate mirror of all the people who resonate with him). He’s not an unbearable activist snowflake. The one major difference I’d point out between him and people of my generation may have to do with a result of screen time and the internet and the effects on cognition; whatever the cause, he and his viewers seem to have a much higher per-moment processing speed. The cutting and lateral jumps in his videos are very fast.

Otherwise, he is a lot like David Letterman in terms of media significance, style and cynicism, (though I’d say he’s a lot kinder and more compassionate than Letterman, but that may be simply an isolated personality trait. Everybody at the time pretty much conceded that Letterman was a bit of a dick.)

However.., there IS *something* going on.

Activist culture is insane right now, the “Safe Space” “Trigger Warning” “Denounce Critics” thing appears to be entirely real, and it hit like a brick out of nowhere, as if somebody punched the “Start” button on some social engineering program. We nearly went full gulag back in 2016/17. -I mean that quite seriously; people have accused me of hyperbole, but in 2017 I genuinely felt and saw fear in people around me in ways I’d never seen before and it really seemed likely that some version of a Stalinist/Maoist type cultural apocalypse was beyond avoidance, -rather than today, where a somewhat balanced fight is taking place and where I feel some confidence now that we can come back from the edge. It feels like the Liar’s Revolt blew its main charge and is now just in the process of thrashing and spending the remainder of its (still vast) energy ineffectively and is being managed and mopped up by cooler prevailing heads. But it really did seem likely that it was going to overwhelm society at the time.

They began hammering the world, co-opting multiple disparate social groups which had been groomed into paranoid frenzies, corralling them behind a single effort and provided them, (like a weapons salesman) with the full weight of a mature, nihilist philosophical system which was loaded with a dozen or so killer mind-tricks nobody had ever encountered before, all designed to trap people into thirsting for violence.

The movement stunned the regular populace and took a couple of years for normal people to unpack and see the tricks and game theory behind. If things had gone just a little further during that ‘stunned’ period where normal people didn’t push back, if just a few more decent people had been publicly denounced or had shown just a little less backbone, if judges and police had been a little bit more intimidated by outrage mobs, I can easily see innocent people being jailed for thought crimes, accelerating us past the tipping point; a cascade effect of virtue signaling and shame mobs, -and violent ANTIFA groups gaining political power. Hyperbole? No sir. We were damned close.

It was eerily similar to the playbook used by the CIA when they want to start wars in other countries. Can the blame be pinned to a single generation? Partly perhaps, but I think there was something else going on.

One thing which bothered me all along, and this comes back to the insight you offer in this vid.., I don’t think we can lay all of that at the feet of the Millennial generation, because many of the people pushing it in the media are simply not of the right age. In fact, some of the worst offenders are in their 40’s and up. That always struck me as discordant with the reigning theory blaming 20-somethings.

Anyway, this is a long comment post and nobody reads these things except in smaller channels where competition for attention is much lower. (Only 64 comments at the time of my typing this). It’s weird how the most relevant discussions can only happen in small groups.

Okay. Your channel can explode now.

Cheers!

-Mark Oakley