Из разговоров - 2

[posic]

Ряд моих родственников ужасно огорчаются, видя, что их дети или внуки не проявляют интереса к сложной, содержательной, нетривиальной профессиональной учебе или профессиональной деятельности. Им не приходит в голову обратить внимание на простое обстоятельство, что они живут в мире, где содержательная профессиональная деятельность практически не вознаграждается и не пользуется уважением, в том числе, со стороны их самих. Они сами радостно воспроизводят вокруг себя мир, где главным источником жизненных благ, моральных и материальных, является социальный конформизм и чисто социальная, психологическая манипуляция. В этом есть своя логика, конечно, поскольку точно так же устроен и современный большой окружающий внешний мир. Но, вот и дети их вырастают социально-психологическими манипуляторами, а не глубокими профессионалами, как им почему-то хотелось бы.

Comments

[posic.livejournal.com]

The situation with my relatives, as I see it, is this. We are Jews. Back some 120 or 150 years ago our ancestors lived in small towns (shtetls) where there were no jobs, no money, and no future for their children. The main road to a future with money and meaningful place in the society was professional training, like becoming an engineer or a doctor. This required a talent, as the competition was fierce. Even to become a musician with a musical school education was probably a big advance in one's position in life. Talented children who were interested in things, studied something nontrivial etc. were looked up to.

Fast forward to the present times, and we live in an epoch of cheap and dirty mass education, where the road to social success lies in one's ability to manipulate the system and milk the government more than in anything else. My relatives still hold to the romantic idea of professional talent, but they cannot reproduce the environment of respect for creative or professional work in their families, of the kind that still existed, e.g., in my family when I was a child. There are lots of more important priorities in their decisionmaking. But then they feel genuine sadness when it turns out that their children or grandchildren are not interested in anything in particular, even though they can easily observe that those of their friends or family members who are interested in something in particular are not rewarded for it either by the society at large, or even by the family.

[chaource.livejournal.com]

The way I see it, the children who are "not interested in anything in particular" is a necessary product of the super-affluent society. (The society of 1980s Moscow was already super-affluent by my definition.) In my view, and according to what I see in today's world, this universal loss of motivation will happen to every society and every social group, quite regardless of what beliefs it held in the past about the value of professional or liberal education. Young people who were raised in super-affluent, super-comfortable conditions after 2 generations will never aspire to anything in their lives (statistically speaking, modulo 5% exceptional people). They will take the super-affluence for granted, and they build up their lifestyle on the tacit expectation that someone will magically provide them with everything they ever want. https://chaource.dreamwidth.org/164219.html

You are talking about a different effect - that children of Jews are not following the professional education that used to define their identity. I think this is a related phenomenon. The social group of Soviet Jews became super-affluent in 1980s. In the first generation, the children of these Jews will still aspire to professional education. The second generation will be, as you say, "social manipulators". The third generation will do nothing at all - neither professionally nor socially.

[posic.livejournal.com]

There is no such thing as a "super-affluent society", as all affluence is relative. The society of XIX century Europe or USA (at about every particular point in the XIX century) was more affluent than ever before. So was the society of the second half of the XIX century. So is the society of the beginning of the XXI century. Absolute phenomena, such as motivation or realistic world outlook, cannot be explained by affluence and material comfort, which is all relative to the expectations.

My explanation for the observable lack of motivation in young people is not that they already have everything they want, but that they cannot really achieve much of anything with their talents and hard work anymore. There is nothing to work on. While they are still very young, compulsory or almost compulsory activities eat up all their time and energy. When they grow more mature, they discover that there is just too much taxation and regulation (in fact, they know it in advance, by observing older folks).