In liberal societies, the custom of giving honor to your parents has mostly been wiped out by equality (and now equity).

Most young people don’t even know they’re being transgressive when they correct their parents, elders, bosses.

They don’t know they are dishonoring them. https://twitter.com/flower_capital/status/1361302631625465858

If you learn the Mosaic Ten Precepts in school, you at least have to discuss the topic of honoring your father and mother—and what you owe older people and ancestors more generally.

When Bible education was eliminated from the schools, all this became alien terrain.

When you come from a traditional society, the entire spectacle of young employees telling their bosses how to run a university or a newspaper looks obscene.

It’s not just the contempt for your elders that’s the problem.

When your general attitude is one of judging your elders, you stop being able to learn from them.

Most people don’t realize this: That honoring your parents, grandparents, teachers, and employers is a way of opening your own mind so that you can learn from them.

A young person who doesn’t honor his parents and elders inadvertently shuts off his mind from learning from them.

That’s the cause of a very large proportion of the lunacy we see across society.

Many young people really don’t know that they have a great deal to learn from people with 30 or 40 years of experience being a parent or an employer or anything else.

What we’re seeing is not just a conscious decision to throw out everything that tradition, history and experience can teach—because the past is just bad.

It’s actually an unconscious decision:

It starts with thinking you know enough to judge your elders—and proceeds directly to your mind cutting off the input channel from each such older person as you place yourself above them.

That’s the secret of the present moment. Most young people think to themselves:

“I love my parents and grandparents. I respect my teachers and my employers.”

They don’t realize that you can *feel* like you are loving and respecting you elders—while in reality you have cut yourself off from being able to learn from them at all.

In fact, many young people are only willing to honor and learn from their friends.

That feels good because they think more like you do, and because it feels equal: Your friends teach you and you teach them.

But in an important sense, learning from your friends isn't really learning. It traps you in an "experience bubble" with people whose experiences are very similar to yours.

The reason we have parents, grandparents, and teachers is to give us lifelong access to the experiences of other times and places.

Only our elders can give us this. Books help, but they are no substitute.

To be clear: I’m not blaming young people for any of this.

You’re stuck with very real hardship, and the causes of your generation’s difficulties go back at least to WWII.

But if you’re going to do something to improve your situation, you have to understand what you’re facing.

I don’t actually know if your parents and teachers are really as unhelpful as you think.

But if they are, you’re going to have step outside the box and locate older people who really can reconnect you to the tradition.