Disclosure: this is largely based on online interactions with people I guess are under 25. I don’t meet too many of them in person these days, or interact much with them 1:1 in any depth. So this has Highly Online Convenience Sampling Bias (HOCSB, like WEIRD).
Conversation
You expect intelligent young people under 25 to have strong theoretical political views (left or right) and span the spectrum from culturally conservative to liberal, with interests ranging from classical music to the latest parent-upsetting genre.
That’s normal. I was this way.
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Equally, you expect the not-too-bright under-25 to not give a shit about this stuff and focus on partying, and when challenged to think, retreat to laziest comforting derp that stops the conversation/restarts the party.
That too is normal. I was never this way (shocker, huh?).
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In either case you expect most *behaviors* (as opposed to thoughts/talk) to be messy, experimental, inexpert, fumbling, exploratory, boundary-testing, slightly risky, imaginative. You *don’t* expect to see rut-like behavior. Ruts are for the middle-aged to have crises in.
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In short traditionalism is not something you expect in the young. You might expect aspiration in that direction, and admiration for tradition from some fraction, but not actual traditionalism.
Actual traditionalism is by definition something that you grow into rather than adopt
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But traditionalism is neither a political ideology nor a cultural/aesthetic preference. It is not an intellectual attitude at all, but a non-lazy behavioral disposition. A predisposition to do things in a certain demanding way, not think about them from a certain perspective.
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Traditionalism does not necessarily imply political+cultural conservatism though that’s the most common comorbidity. For example, in the US you can have a child raised by hippies be “traditionally” activist, do recycling etc.
It’s not the thinking, it’s the behaviors.
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Traditionalism is marked by uncritically mimetic behavior. The reason it is commonly politically+culturally conservative is, by definition that’s the most imitable pattern. In someone under 25, traditionalism is the opposite of rebellion.
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Traditionalism in thought and speech is marked not so much by content but the sense that it is prerecorded speech. Parrot talk borrowed from some invisible but guessable source. You get the sense someone is saying things without *quite* understanding them, *or caring to*.
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It’s like phatic speech, but big talk instead of small talk. You can’t engage it as thought at all. It’s more like habitual behavior, like riding a bike or brushing teeth.
It shares features with bullshit. Indifference to truth/falsity, except here it’s behavioral, not cognitive
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Here’s why it is weird. Traditionalism as such doesn’t really exist. In actual traditional societies (which don’t exist anymore) it is merely the only game in town. Perpetuating tradition and learning adult skills are the same thing. To rebel, you’d have to pioneer an option.
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In modern societies, traditionalism is simply habits you acquire when young that you insist on keeping when you’re old, despite changes in the environment that make them weird/maladaptive. At the time of acquisition, the habits may not have been traditional at all.
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You also have to distinguish ironic traditionalism, tactical conflict-avoidance, and simple insularity (growing up in a small town without much exposure to rebellious cultural choices) from the kind of traditionalism I’m sensing.
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Summary: creepy traditionalism is intelligent 22-year-olds acting and talking like 70-year-olds in ruts when you’d expect some mix of rebellion and super-earnest politics + messy behaviors. It is creepy because it suggests premature pattern-locking as an anxiety coping mechanism.
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Why are we seeing this?
I have a theory. This is a generation that was raised in the cult of doerism. Hands-on everything. Trial-and-error. Gamified pedagogy. Self-directed learning. Hacking as growing up. They’ve been taught to distrust theory, reflection and contemplation.
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This works great for a lot of stuff industrial schooling is supposed to teach, but fails to.
People < 25 are used to their developmental environment world being figure-outable by trial and error, without manuals. Reflection is the all-else-fails option.
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What happens when you throw a doerist mindset into the much more complex and ambiguous world of adult society where most things aren’t set up to be learnable through trial-and-error doing?
You’re likely to quickly find, imitate, and lock-on to, the simplest patterns that work.
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Normal 14-25 ways of growing aren’t doerist. They include wild speculation, unreasonable experiments, weird obsessions, rebellion, etc. The space explored is much larger than efficiently learnable doerist space. It includes lots of angsty contemplation, inaction, reflection.
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It isn’t all efficient test-driven trial-and-error learning. It has a lot of potential for breaking out of tradition because it is *bad* at tradition. Tradition is something youth settles into at 35 as it runs out of energy rather than locks on to at 19 after A/B testing of chaos
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Maybe I’m overfitting some very limited and sparse observational data, but I think there’s something real here. Something analogous, in fact, to deep learning AIs. Gen Z is deep-learning the world rather than GOFAI-learning it like every previous generation.
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It might seem weird to call this traditionalism, since the *content* is not necessarily traditional. It’s some uncanny valley memetic soup mixing ancient statuary, “classical” aesthetics, anime, black reaction gifs etc. But the low-energy signature is that of traditionalism.
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Is this good or bad? I don’t know. It’s like asking if deep learning is good or bad vis-a-vis GOFAI. I am trying to resist my own sense that it is bad. I’m trying to see how it might be adaptive.
But it’s hard not to sense the cost being incurred.
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I can’t resist the sense that this is a prematurely aged, prematurely optimized, pattern-locked generation that has been *too good* at learning for its own good. That I was perhaps well-served by my learning environment being “bad”, anti-doerist, and forcing reflection.
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tldr: This is either an H. L. Mencken generation that has figured out the "an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong" for the complex problem of “life’ by trial and error, OR it is a transcended generation that is experiencing an enlightenment that will leave us oldies behind.
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