After the untimely passing of legendary comedian and actor, Robin Williams, the outpouring of grief could be heard and felt everywhere, with a notable exception: the millenials, many of whom seemed unmoved by his death.
From the Beetles to the The Monkees, Ed Sullivan and even Farrah Fawcett, the Baby Boomers grew up idolizing famous ‘mainstream’ entertainers, and this continued until adulthood. However, blessed by the Flynn Effect, a rigorous public education and superior critical thinking skills, the smartest generation (the millennials) aren’t infatuated with Hollywood and stardom like their parents, or at least ‘stardom’ in the conventional sense. The alt comic on twitter with 100,000 followers and millions of Youtube views or socialites such as the Kardashian family, whose only talents are self-marketing and down-to-earth appeal, are today’s ‘celebrities’ for the smartest generation. Richard Dawkins is another individual with celebrity status that doesn’t meet the conventional mold for a celebrity. Same for Charles Murray, Steven Pinker, Slavoj Žižek, Bill Nye, Noam Chomsky, Neil Degrasse Tyson, Steven Levitt and dozens of other intellectuals that have attained celebrity status among the smartest generation.
From Urban Directory to Wikipedia, they, the smarties, are changing and shaping the intellectual debate on a variety of issues and replacing obsolete, staid technologies with better ones. In the face of change, liberals want to cling to their old, dying industries and ways of life. They attack Tesla for subverting dealerships and for alleged crony capitalism. They, the liberals, attack Facebook for making a profit and for supposed privacy lapses, while the smartest generation sees Facebook and Tesla as free market success stories.
As we’ve said before, the smartest generation, on social media sites like Reddit, Buzzfeed, Vice and Twitter, values critical thinking and empiricism over partisan orthodoxy. That’s why it may come as a surprise to some conservatives who dismiss millennials as being hopefully brainwashed and indoctrinated by liberalism, that is was actually millennials on Reddit that, thanks to their critical thinking skills and questioning of authority, who doubted the liberal media’s initial reports that, in Ferguson County, an innocent kid had been shot by police, and they, the Reddit users, were willing to give the officer in question the benefit of the doubt, as the mainstream media, showing a complete disregard for honest reporting and integrity, were already setting up the stockades. Video evidence from the convenience story robbery later revealed, despite the best efforts of the corrupt Eric Holder Justice Department to keep it clandestine, that the slain ‘kid’ was an 18 year-old, 290-pound, 6′ 4″ brute and certainly not innocent. The officer probably felt his life was threatened, a reasonable assumption given what happened to the store clerk.
The millenials, while less materialistic than earlier generation, are less inclined to vilify the rich and multinationals than liberals of earlier generations. Due to a greater understanding of economics, they know that rich people earn their wealth through the economic value they create, and secondly, the rich have many of the same personal problems ordinary Americans have, except perhaps money problems. From Warren Buffett to the Wall St. Bond Trader, they, the smartest generation, see the rich as a superior people worthy of our unconditional loyalty, and deservedly so, because to be rich means you’re a smarter, better person that made good life decisions and have a lot of talent and IQ. The rich are just like us, but better.
Some have called the millenials ‘crotchety young men’, simmering with righteous indignation. They are crotchety because they are tired of being lied to by the politically correct politicians and media, salespeople, and pseudo-intellectual bullshit peddlers like Malcom Gladwell. Reddit, Twitter, 4chan, Wall St. (or any trading floor or trading desk), the public universities, the public schools, and research institutions such as MIT and Caltech are the only bastions of truth, where proselytizing and pandering cedes to moral nihilism, rigor and empirical evidence. To be smart means being unmoved by pleads to subjective concepts like ‘decency’, only being swayed by where the data leads you.
Rejecting political labels and the herd mentality, they, the smartest generation, are notorious non-conformists, to a fault. Josh Barrow, a gay economist, millenial, and very smart person tweeted: Is it time yet for the backlash to the Ice Bucket Challenge backlash?
Is it time? Leave it to a millenial to pose the question as babyboomers, without hesitation, dunk their heads in ice water. The connection between ice water and ALS is obvious, isn’t it? How about dunking your head in pudding for AIDS or sticking your hand in a bottle of mustard for Down Syndrome? Time to be creative.
Vice.com, a magazine created by and marketed to millenials, dismisses the Ice Bucket Challenge as “basically narcissism masked as altruism,” as was retweeted by millenial, Catherine Rampell. Because the millenials are so smart and so immune to bullshit, they are very critical, and rightfully so, of mass social movements such as a Ice Bucket Challenge. They see it as just another anti-science cult, similar to the religious masses who persecuted scientists in the renaissance.
