CENTRAL NEWS
Youth distinguishes itself ontologically in its mode of life, thought and emotionality from other sections of society. It also differs from other temporal stages of individual human life; it expresses the end of an era of dependency and reliance on the care of others, as well as a departure onto deep quests for meaning and purpose in life. Youth marks the period with which a person starts being able to work and organize independently, while having great hopes and expectations for the future, alongside questions and reactions to the status quo.
The hegemonic order is afraid of the youth. Modern developments turn the youth into a class-like entity, while youth movements constitute strong and fast-paced ideological and organizational foundations that can act like a party or an army during periods of social rupture and transformation. This leadership potential makes the youth a threat to the established system. That is why youth are specifically targeted by organized and planned policies and efforts to corrupt and obstruct society’s tendencies, consciousness, organization and advance towards freedom, equality and justice. The crucial role of youth, as a sociological category, for social change and mobilization as a non-class societal section with autonomous characteristics must be adequately understood.
It is a policy of the hegemonic system to turn youth into selfish, profit-oriented, foreign-determined, atomized entities and assimilate them into the dominant order. Youthful features such as quests for freedom, change, innovation, idealism, courage and excitement are corrupted, distorted and emptied off their meaning through a variety of means and methods under capitalism. Today, backward and conservative systems worldwide are engaged in an active war against the youth, ideologically, politically and psychologically. In an organized and planned fashion, and with the involvement of scientific and technological advancements, special experts, psychologists and sociologists are hired to study the phenomenon of youth and to develop policies and organizations to undermine and drain the youth’s otherwise dangerously subversive energy.
It is possible to speak of a global effort to suffocate the youth in this light. The struggle of the capitalist modernist system against youth transcends all national borders and has taken a systematic shape on a global scale. At the same time, the family, tribe, sect, school and the constantly self-reproducing hegemonic system are all engaged in vested efforts to project their attributes, behaviours and mentalities onto the youth. Resisting this desire to deprive them off their will, the youth often rebel against such impositions of external identities and modes of living. Obtaining a self-determined personality requires an engaged struggle with an appropriate spirit.
Thus, the youth are made to reach the end of their educational journeys, or training programmes, feeling the void of what they used to be. What they used to be, infact, is young. Questioning, courageous and whole.
