In Defense of the Millennials

The Grey Enlightenment is probably the only conservative/libertarian themed blog that takes a more optimistic view of the millennials.

On millennials, Gavin McInnes writes:

Things have been getting progressively more insane since then. Today we have NYU students barricading themselves in the cafeteria, demanding the school provide them with Palestinian friends (see 10:16); Duke University almost wound up sounding the Muslim call to prayer on Fridays.

I dunno how true this is. He may be falling for the fallacy of composition. A few liberal wackos at a school doesn’t means everyone there is a wacko. From my observation, the overwhelming majority of young people online opposed the attack and expressed solidarity with the victims. That’s what irks me about some conservative commentators – they use the same flawed rhetorical devices as liberals. They point to a single instance of idiocy at a college and say it’s representative of the entire institution or the entire demographic, just like how libs point to a single instance of gun violence and use it to admonish all gun owners.

But the millennials are not a homogeneous group. They are a very numerous and diverse population that spans many ideologies. One one hand you have the useless SJWs, but then you also have millions of millennial STEM majors, the Red Pill movement, MGTOW, Internet Libertarianism, HBD, and so on. It was millennials on Reddit and 4chan who made 2014 a very bad year for the SJWs, exposing all their lies and omissions for the world to see.

2015 is starting off badly for the SJWs as everyone on Reddit and elsewhere rejects the left’s nonsense that the Oscars are racist.

More so than their baby boomer parents, millennials attribute biological factors for individual socioeconomic success or failure, rather than the left who tend to simply blame rich people and greedy corporations for the poor falling between the cracks. Many millennials are smart enough to understand that poverty cannot be fixed by trying to soak the rich, but by understanding that maybe some people are biologically preordained to fail at life (low IQs, poor impulse control) and that platitudes about ‘working harder’, as well leftist wealth redistribution programs, are counterproductive.

Millenials, being on the vanguard of post-2008 rise of nerd culture, know social skills are overrated compared to IQ and talent. All of the millennials’ intellectual and business heroes, from Steve Jobs to Mark Zuckerberg to Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, all demonstrate better skills at creating cool technologies than relating to people. Millenials equate poor social skills with authenticity, intellect, and honesty and see ‘good social skills’ as a crutch for the duplicitous, incompetent and disingenuous. That’s why millennials, unlike their baby boomer parents, don’t like Tony Robbins and Malcom Gladwell, but millennials love Charles Murray and Steven Pinker, agreeing with the later’s views on biological determinism.

In the post-2008 era, the celebration of IQ, authenticity, self-sufficiency, wealth and success has become the new national religion, with those having the more of the aforementioned qualities being more important people than everyone else. Millennials are the disciples, spreading the word and elevating the stature of these great intellectual and business giants. As an example of the celebration of intellect in the post-2008 era, the most up-voted comment on a Facebook post uses science to debunk erroneous liberalism:

Baby boomers, on the other hand, care more about superficiality and collectivism. Michael Lewis, famous for writing a book about baseball, is an example of a babyboomer liberal who attacks successful, smart rich people and who wants society to regress. There’s millions like like him. Millennials, while tending to be socially liberal, could more pro-business than earlier generation. Millennials celebrate the success of Tesla, Facebook and Uber – not begrudge it. They are optimistic about the future of the world and the technologies borne into existence by smart people.

What crotchety liberals call narcissism, millennials (as well as neo-conservatives) call self-actualization. By ‘selfishly’ eschewing leftist communal norms, they are creating better futures for themselves.

Another liberal laments about millennials (or any generation I suppose) being too self-absorbed to appreciate the world around them, “People nowadays do not notice the beauty of things like ancient cities or nature itself. They look at themselves from smartphones and take selfies instead, the latter the most obnoxious tool in the kit of digital narcissism. If it weren’t annoying enough to watch people photograph the food they’re about to devour, we now have to have it on celluloid.”

So what? Self-absorbed behavior, as repulsive as it may seem to outsiders who bear witnesses to it, does fit in the Randian framework of self-actualization and individualism over collectivism. The SJW left, on the other hand, want to stick their noses in other people’s business whether that person is a game programmer or a college athlete.

Once your sort out the rotten apples (OWS and the like), because of their intelligence, outspokenness, predilection for biological determinism, and capacity for abstract and original thought, and their support of capitalism and free markets, millennials could play a key role in undoing the damage and brainwashing wrought by decades of welfare liberalism.