Thanks to you, we could develop free from all social obligations and values; thanks to you we go lost and lonely through life. You’ve destroyed everything that could have offered us identity and refuge, yet you’re shocked that we’re unhappy.
You want to know who we are? Where we come from? What moves us?
We’ll tell you.
We are the changing times; we are the rising wind; the new generation.
We are the answer to you, for we are your children.
You’ve thrown us into this world, uprooted and disoriented, without telling us where to go, or where our path lies. You’ve destroyed every means for us to orient ourselves.
You’ve reduced the Church to rubble, so that now only a few of us still find refuge in the ruins of that community.
You’ve devalued the state, so that none of us wants to serve it anymore.
You’ve split the family. Our domestic idyll has been plunged into divorce, conflict, and violence.
You’ve subjected love to a reductionist deconstruction, and so instead of a deep bond, only the animal drive remains.
You’ve ruined the economy, so we inherit mountains of debt.
You’ve questioned and criticised everything, so we now believe in nothing and no one.
You’ve left us no values, yet you now accuse us of being amoral.
But we are not.
*
You’ve promised yourselves a utopia, a peaceful, multicultural society of prosperity and tolerance.
We are the heirs of this utopia, and our reality looks very different.
You buy your peace with ever-mounting debt.
Today, we’re watching your prosperity disappear throughout Europe.
For us, your multicultural society means nothing but hatred and violence.
In the name of your ‘tolerance’ you hunt down all who criticise you, and call those you hunt intolerant.
We’ve had enough!
Your utopias have lost all legitimacy for us.
Realise at last that we don’t live in a unified world or in a global village. Wars, the poor, and the oppressed will always be with us.
This world will never be a heaven on Earth.
Your delusions have only accomplished one thing: You have uprooted your children.
We are the lost, the homeless. ‘Who are we?’ we ask ourselves. ‘Where are we going?’
We’ve seen through your answers and understood that they are lies. We aren’t ‘humanity’ and we don’t want your paradise.
So we have come up with our own answer to these questions.
We turn to what you have demonised. To ourselves.
We search for our identity, and find it under the rubble of your destructive rage. We must dig deep to find ourselves again.
Our history, our homeland, and our culture give us what you have taken from us.
We don’t want to be citizens of the world. We are happier with our own countries.
We don’t want the end of history, for our history doesn’t give us cause to complain.
We don’t want a multicultural society where our own culture is left to burn in the melting pot.
We are less demanding than you, yet we want so much more!
While you’ve chased utopias your entire lives, we want real values.
What we demand actually exists; to possess it is our ancestral right. We desire nothing more than our inheritance, and won’t tolerate your withholding it any longer.
We are the answer to you and to the failure of your utopia.
For we are generation identity.
*
We’re a great riddle to you. An incomprehensible phenomenon.
Our words and deeds refute all your theories and arguments.
We live in the world you dreamt of, yet this world disgusts us.
Thanks to you, we could develop free from all social obligations and values; thanks to you we go lost and lonely through life.
You’ve destroyed everything that could have offered us identity and refuge, yet you’re shocked that we’re unhappy.
For deep in us lies a constant feeling of being alone, of being lost. We do everything to numb this feeling.
We throw the wildest parties and meet in glowing malls; we dance all night, take drugs, or hide behind our computers. Any means is justified in order to overcome this loneliness, but we are always still alone in the end.
You have taught us that we can buy anything. But where can we buy a remedy for loneliness?
Not that we didn’t try. With brand names, labels, and the latest clothing styles, we want to belong to a certain group. It may seem laughable to you, but for us, this is one of the last remaining possibilities to somehow find a place where we belong.
Sometimes we manage to convince ourselves in our despair that we are absolutely unique, that we don’t need to belong to anything. In this way we give ourselves strength when the loneliness overcomes us.
Even if, one day, we become part of a group, because our innermost selves long for identity and belonging, we still can’t enjoy it. We always hear your nagging voices in our heads, warning us about the dangers of peer pressure and the loss of our individuality. This inner conflict plunges us into yet deeper despair.
*
The dark companion of loneliness is boredom.
It’s the boredom that first reveals how lonely we are. We don’t ever want to be bored, because then we couldn’t lie to ourselves anymore.
Yet boredom is our constant companion. It envelops us like a dark cloud and makes itself felt whenever we briefly pause from our frenzied searching.
This is why we seek to numb our boredom and loneliness, with means that become ever wilder and ever more reckless. But no artificial euphoria lasts long enough to bring us peace. No pleasure leads us to anything but desperate collapse.
So we wander through life, half-lost and half-high.
For we are generation identity.
The above are the first two chapters from Markus Willinger‘s highly regarded book Generation Identity, which was first published in 2013 by Arktos.
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