We’re confronted not with a generation that believes in so few objective truths that it will believe anything. Rather, they believe nothing.
It might have begun as a self-soothing exercise in blame-shifting, but the crisis of confidence in America’s few remaining gatekeeping institutions has become the sincere preoccupation of Democratic elected officials. Gone are the disingenuous admonitions directed at elderly Facebook users who supposedly were bamboozled by amateurish Russian memes into voting for Donald Trump. Today, it’s America’s supposedly gullible youth that takes up disproportionate space in Democratic imaginations. The concerns Democrats have expressed about the plague of miseducated young people, though these may be as politically motivated as ever, are sober and earnest. And yet, while they have accurately identified the symptoms of the malady they seek to address, they cannot discern its cause.
This week, New York governor Kathy Hochul announced a plan to direct the state’s Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Services to develop a “media literacy” curriculum for K–12 students in public schools. “This will help students and even teachers to help understand how to spot conspiracy theories and misinformation, disinformation, and online hate,” she said. By giving young people the “tools” to discern what is “digital fact and digital fiction, we can better inoculate them from hatred and the spread of it.”
The conditions that precipitated the move range from the discomfiting to the dire. From the 2022 massacre of black New Yorkers in a Buffalo supermarket to the threats against Jewish students at New York’s universities to the humiliatingly viral epiphanies that young Americans reported experiencing upon contact with Osama bin Laden’s anti-American philosophy, delusional paranoia can no longer be allowed to fester until it manifests in real-world violence. It’s time to “intervene,” Hochul said, “to give people who are being radicalized online an off-ramp.”
Hochul’s initiative dovetails with a similar effort to introduce “media literacy” to California’s curriculum, though the specters against which Governor Gavin Newsom inveighed were exclusively right-wing phenomena. “From climate denial to vaccine conspiracy theories to the January 6 attack on our nation’s Capital, the spread of online misinformation has had global and deadly consequences,” Newsom insisted. This was an admission against interest. By articulating the instrumental goal his “media literacy” campaign is designed to achieve, Newsom reinforced the nagging suspicion among young people that they are regarded by their elders as little more than instruments. Those young people are not imagining things.
For well over a decade, the stewards of institutions ostensibly devoted to the promotion of a shared reality abdicated that duty. In its place, they promoted subjectivity as an ideal. “My truth” was as valid as the truth, even if it was gleaned only after carefully consulting the observer’s own demographic traits. Colleges and universities promulgated the notion that activism and protest were credit-eligible academic exercises. Credentialed journalists retailed the idea that objectivity was an unattainable goal to which only the naïve aspired. Instead, “moral clarity” should be the goal. And even if pursuing that objective meant mangling the facts of one case or the other, the higher virtue was the promotion of a greater cosmic truth. It was a utilitarian campaign, and it made utilities of its subscribers.
This generation could be forgiven for concluding they were being groomed for service in a vanguard. They absolutely were. And little by little, that generation became aware of the unrealities with which they were surrounded.
Well before the advent of eerily lifelike AI-generated images and “deep fake” media products, younger Americans were increasingly drawn to the conclusion that the people around them were faithless actors. By the end of 2018, more than seven in ten Americans under the age of 29 told Pew pollsters that “people just look out for themselves” and “most people would try to take advantage of you if they got the chance.” Sixty percent of this demographic subscribed to the idea that “most people can’t be trusted” — a depressing conclusion born of bitter experience.
Young Americans have turned to alternative media sources for information, but they don’t necessarily regard them as reliable either. A 2021 study of Americans between the ages of 15 and 24 found that just 17 percent of respondents trust social media to provide “accurate information.” That’s less of a comfort given this demographic’s mistrust of government, religious institutions, conventional media outlets, the police, and even “family and friends.”
These are expressions of trauma and abuse. We’re confronted not with a generation that believes in so few objective truths that it will believe anything. Rather, they believe nothing. Nothing is known or even knowable. No truth is beyond dispute. There is nothing so sound, durable, or permanent that it is resistant to critical deconstruction. What we’re witnessing is a broader trend toward nihilism. It can sound overwrought to hear theatrically inclined youth wax profound about their drift in the doldrums of a society beset by a variety of intersecting existential crises, but Nietzschean skepticism is as sound a coping mechanism as any.
If younger Americans respond with reflexive skepticism to even the most empirically observable realities, that is a learned response. They have been misled and, in that, betrayed. A generation of Americans have come of age convinced they are the targets of a multiaxial confidence game. That conclusion is not a product of mass psychosis or the full flowering of a conspiracy to incept misinformation into impressionable American minds. They’re right.