Amerika

Today’s American high school students are far likelier than those in the 1970s to believe they’ll make outstanding spouses, parents and workers, new research shows.

They’re also much more likely to claim they are “A” students with high IQs — even though other research shows that today’s students do less homework than their counterparts did in the 1970s.

The findings, published in the November issue of Psychological Science, support the idea that the “self-esteem” movement popular among today’s parents and teachers may have gone too far, the study’s co-author said.

“What this shows is that confidence has crossed over into overconfidence,” said Jean Twenge, an associate professor of psychology at San Diego State University.

She believes that decades of relentless, uncritical boosterism by parents and school systems may be producing a generation of kids with expectations that are out of sync with the challenges of the real world.

Healthfinder.gov

Dying civilizations are like hipsters: they love to broadcast how important they are with no real reason to do so. It’s a form of passive aggression called projection by which they try to convince you of their importance, to make you back down.

It’s exactly like how your cat puffs up before a fight, to get the “I’m not going to fight something that big, am I?” from the other cat.

As we’ve lost any real claim to doing anything important, we’ve compensated with cognitive dissonance: we’re a Very Big Deal because we’re more moral, we’re more egalitarian, we’re more compassionate than others.

Nature/reality/God replies: and why does this matter?

Nature/reality/God values competence, not compassion!

Our entire culture is going the way of the hipster:

We’ve reached a point in our civilization where counterculture has mutated into a self-obsessed aesthetic vacuum. So while hipsterdom is the end product of all prior countercultures, it’s been stripped of its subversion and originality.

Ever since the Allies bombed the Axis into submission, Western civilization has had a succession of counter-culture movements that have energetically challenged the status quo. Each successive decade of the post-war era has seen it smash social standards, riot and fight to revolutionize every aspect of music, art, government and civil society.

But after punk was plasticized and hip hop lost its impetus for social change, all of the formerly dominant streams of “counter-culture” have merged together. Now, one mutating, trans-Atlantic melting pot of styles, tastes and behavior has come to define the generally indefinable idea of the “Hipster.”

An artificial appropriation of different styles from different eras, the hipster represents the end of Western civilization – a culture lost in the superficiality of its past and unable to create any new meaning. Not only is it unsustainable, it is suicidal. While previous youth movements have challenged the dysfunction and decadence of their elders, today we have the “hipster” – a youth subculture that mirrors the doomed shallowness of mainstream society.

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Hipsters murder anything they infiltrate, because a hipster is a carefully disguised generalist. They have no specific ability, except narcissism. Because narcissism — self-worship — is an addiction, they will do anything necessary to support it, especially supporting the narcissism of others.

It forms a mutual admiration society based on socialization, not accomplishment.

All societies die when they become pluralistic, or lose consensus as to their values and goal. What fills the void is socialization (compassion, altruism, egalitarianism) and narcissism, including materialism.

This is why the cultures that faced this decline earlier in history left behind people of mixed race who display acumen at marketing and business, but have deferred the question of having a soul.

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