The Prison of Correctness

On the debilitating arrogance of young men.

Being a young man is a bit like living through a historical revolution. Revolutions themselves depend on young men to carry them out and the up-and-coming youth are always eager to overthrow their fathers and establish themselves as dominant. The connection is more than literal. The world that we come of age in is dominated by an older generation. Even if they are not ideological foes, it is natural to be scornful of those has-been dinosaurs, squatting on our place in the sun. Ideology as a vector for human conflict is relatively new - acting as a proxy for this perennial rivalry. Young men are pumped full of a worldshaking restlessness that will latch onto anything to justify unseating the geriatric old buggers in the way. In something of a paradox though, even as you rage against the elders and their vision of the world, every few years you realise how foolish and wrong you were about everything a few short years before.

The most incomprehensible thing to the mind is its own limitations, which makes sense: how can you conceive being able to conceive more than you can? The sentence alone is confusing! I am always surprised at just how puny and idiotic I see my own thinking from not even that long ago - how ignorant I was of the paths I have travelled since and what they have had to show me. This disconnect between the older and younger self is a cause of a lot of the strife between youth and elder; neither understands the other, but is certain that they do. In short, we cannot possibly know how wrong we are, in either case. The young are too lacking in experience to know what the old know and the old are too far gone down their own roads to see what the future might hold. When we are born we are nothing but potential - a hypothetical person bursting with possible outcomes stood at an infinite crossroads. The older we get, the less and less “potential” we have, as our path narrows and we become actual. Actuality is what the elder knows and actuality, which slaps you in the face at frequent intervals throughout life, is what the young man most struggles to accept, take on and overcome.

“Overcoming actuality” is not an impossible task. What I mean is confronting the world as it is, or better as it presents itself to you, and making your way despite the shock you sustain and how it breaks you into shape. The arrogance of the young man, which I think has affected me and, I would guess, many of my readers more than the average person, gives you no ability to adapt to actuality. The “prison of correctness” refers to the dark side of the tendency that a certain type of young man has - to seek truth at all costs. That sounds laudable and is, but while it does take courage to challenge orthodoxy, it isn’t the be-all and end-all of living. In fact, it has little to nothing to do with living, or with living well. It is perfectly possible to be completely wrong about a lot of things, particularly overarching philosophical or profound things, and live perfectly well - even better than those who are correct about them. Now I am not for one second saying that it is not noble and good to seek truth and that it is not a worthy aim. What I am saying is that having correct ideas is not in and of itself the key to flourishing and that sometimes truth is enacted more profoundly in an unconscious way than by being based™. You can find yourself so possessed by the need to be “right” about things that you detach from living a virtuous and prosperous life, focusing on what is correct, not on what is truly right.

This tendency reflects a naive attitude towards truth to begin with. That truth can ever be “known” in itself. The human race at large shares this young arrogance in its pretence at being able to comprehend the universe beyond its limited ability. Respect for what you are incapable of understanding - for the wisdom of the elders - is a form of humility before God. And since, as mentioned, this is beyond us to conceive, it requires a kind of piety. You must believe and accept that there are things you do not and cannot know, even when it is impossible to convince your rational mind of the existence of that which it does not or cannot understand.

To make my point a bit more concrete, picture the archetypal angry, young, autistic man online. This is not an attack, brothers. He knows that something - many things - are wrong at a societal level. He can see past the social conditioning, having no mental walls of agreeableness and cooperative self-deceit. Indeed, it stresses him out not to acknowledge and point out the truth. Disillusioned with the lies and nauseating conformity around him, he cultivates a deep disdain for the “normie” who can comfortably accept and live in the unacceptable and unlivable hell that surrounds him. All of this is justified. Where things go wrong is that, far too often, the young man stops there. Having compiled a perfectly reasoned and watertight critique of the world at large, dizzyingly crooked and corrupt, he freezes. His work is done.

Somewhere along the way, his baulking at “going along to get along” gets the better of him and he falls into a prideful mockery of being human. Getting along itself becomes an insufficient motive for action. The sainted truth alone is worthy - the correct ideas, disentangled from human concerns, are the only solid thing. The world is in a rotten state and people who do not realise that (or who don’t think so in the specific way that he thinks it is) are impossibly naive and spiritually vacant. How can they labour on when everything is so poisoned and desolate? How can he possibly take advice on how to live from people who are wrong?

Correctness becomes a prison. It becomes enough for the young man to know how the world is an unbearable mess, supplementing his desire to excel and grow within it as a man - as a being. In critiquing the state of his world he has cut himself off from it and hardly sees himself as part of it. He also does not have the age or experience to be a true “hermit”. He has not lived enough of “the old barren ways of men”¹ to know what it is he does in discarding them. You have to have been dealt a hand to discard it: you have to play the game to quit and have your quitting mean a thing.

In reply to the 95 theses of the young man, the world retorts

“ok, and?”

Has he made the obstacles in his way any less real? Has he confronted the world or snuck out underneath it? Is he showing piety or arrogance - forgetting again how wrong he will feel in a few years’ time?

M.L.

P.S.

Living Religion has not been cancelled, don’t worry. Life has changed a lot since I was writing it, in ways not entirely unrelated to this article. It will be published soon, once I sort out the cover and edit it into a better shape than it currently is in.

Needless to say, writing a book did not replace the need to live a life.

1. Ezra Pound. La Fraisne.