Millennials are coming to Power
Written by Alfonso Elizondo
The most notable part of the difficulty of avoiding the current geopolitical crisis is that those who wield political power and the mainstream media lack the necessary language to express the true extent of what is taking place at the moment. The basic fact is that the world of the spoken and written word ended in the last decade of the twentieth century and now a new world has emerged that is not understood by the people who are still in power and those who control the mainstream media.
Fortunately, those who are rising to the highest positions in politics and the mass media in the world today are young people of the millennial generation who were born into the digital age and can easily speak the new iconic language of human society. Those of us who belong to earlier generations lack the ability to understand the new reality being experienced by the world and we generally think that the past was better. We refuse to enter a new world where emotions are tempered and where there is an indirect way of seeing reality that fits in perfectly with the great changes in traditional paradigms, in the structure of new social groups and in the perception of art and of political, religious and cultural myths.
The most visible symptoms of this tremendous evolution of human civilization are to be seen in the majority of artistic events presented to the public, where a clear decline is evident in the constant repetition of musical, plastic arts and artistic formulas in general that had their heyday many years ago, as well as in shows that also try to revive a reality that has died. The same thing is happening with old hits in jazz, in rock and in rhythms of all kinds, which are a replay of the days when there was a complete defense of the aristocracy or of divine power. It is obvious that most people do not perceive these symptoms of decline and want to think that they are a new form of artistic expression, especially because the mass media in the West very often repeats these shows and does not allow humans to think that the old world has come to an end and that we have entered a new reality where the mobile image is replacing the spoken and written word that dominated for over ten millennia.
The world of the spoken and written word has led human civilization in a manner that brought about considerable separation from the animal world which always followed the formula of the dominance of the strongest and their eventual coming together for the purpose of surviving changes in natural conditions and the aggressions of other animal species. Meanwhile, the spoken and written word produced great changes in the human individual, such as the reconfiguration of his brain and the ability to generate myths through stories that would be transmitted to his heirs, even if these were totally changed by them. This is in addition to the idea that every kind of material property had to be handed down to his successors, creating a still ongoing notion of natural right, or invoking divine power.
It cannot be said that in the just over ten millennia of human civilization with a sedentary homo sapiens there have been no periods of involution or at least periods of no change. Nor can one hypothesise that the new millennial generation will lead a period of civilization without clashes and without involution processes. It happened before with the Neanderthals who were endowed with greater physical strength than man and considerable brain power, and who dominated Europe for many millennia, with the exact cause of their disappearance being still unknown.
Addendum: Perhaps the most important thing about this new era that humanity will live in will be that millennials are a generation of young people who have always been opposed to violence and who tend to be autonomous. So it is very likely that they will be able to build a peaceful world where positive human emotions will appear again, as well as new concepts of art, science, mythology and metaphysics. A world without radicalism, xenophobia, messianism, narcissism and the idea of punishing those whose ideas are different using violence amounting to torture, as recorded in the history of the last ten millennia.