Twelve Rules for Un-Warping Young Minds

If young people are watching a lot of media these days, whether in the form of fiction or non-fiction, they’re at least getting plenty of advance warnings that all of society’s institutions plan to attack them and remold their minds. They may as well know that grim truth up front.

Then they may suffer less of a shock when they go on to learn from personal experience, say, that Gifted And Talented Education (G.A.T.E.) programs seem sometimes to be steering them toward military careers, that their Mormon upbringings seem part of a two-century-long eugenic program to produce people devout enough to work in the intelligence sector without qualms, or that working in TV for even a few days makes Wag the Dog seem all too plausible (and the cats are the only truly innocent characters).

As a non-leftist, I might be expected to say youth should trust their elders, but in a world where nearly every young budding terrorist like Calla Walsh (the Democratic Socialists of America member who traveled to Iran to call for the deaths of Israel and the U.S.) can rightly plead that she had an institutional-yet-lefty parent such as the director of Boston University’s college writing program, it’s probably not entirely the kids who are to blame for this world, nor the elders who offer sanity.

To compensate for the damage already done to America’s youth, I, a Gen Xer fearful of the future, offer a dozen lessons gleaned from recent media output —intended or unintended by their creators—to help Gen Z or Gen Alpha or whoever navigate the ocean of nonsense ahead of them.

Live Long and Party: I wasn’t completely horrified by the shiny, cadet-filled first episode of Star Trek: Starfleet Academy, but it’s telling that the two most exciting things about the premiere event in New York City (not counting Tig Notaro touching young, ballerina-sized costar Zoe Steiner a lot) were actresses from other series who were present, namely Tawny Newsome, best known as the voice of Beckett on the animated Star Trek: Lower Decks (arguably the best Trek thing from the 21st century) and now doing some producing and writing for other Trek shows, and Celia Rose Gooding, who plays the young version of Lt. Uhura on Star Trek: Strange New Worlds and is so upbeat and energetic that she could as plausibly be a host from the 1990s at the MTV beach house as a dead-serious 23rd-century communications officer on the Enterprise.

(Perhaps Gooding’s positive vibe, made more admirable by the fact she was orphaned at age one when her parents died in the 9/11 attacks, will serve to buck up Starfleet Academy lead Holly Hunter, who’s reportedly enraged by reports the new show’s ratings are so low that the second season has already been canceled. I don’t blame Hunter. On a show where she’s surrounded by characters who seem to be competing to see who can be fattest and/or most autistic, she has old-lady-captain gravitas and little-kid energy at the same time, sitting curled up in an unprofessional but adorable fashion in her starship command chair. I instead blame—we all blame—Alex Kurtzman, current steward of the faltering Trek franchise, whose introductory remarks at the premiere were as dry, perfunctory, and forgettable as most of his Trek output.)

Turn away from the real-life Dark Side: It’s bad enough that both the political right and left in the U.S. cozied up to child-molesting billionaire Jeffrey Epstein—and that the sleazy Clintons refuse to testify about him—but now we’re asked to believe that former Trump advisor and current podcaster Steve Bannon, who after being ousted from Trump’s first-administration inner circle tried to reinvent himself as Epstein’s P.R. man, is a plausible 2028 presidential candidate. This explains Bannon’s initially-unconstitutional-sounding remarks about Trump’s ideas deserving a “third term” in the White House. This doesn’t, however, explain or justify Bannon’s own dark, occult-sounding ideas about harnessing the spirit of proto-fascists such as Julius Evola to remake America (technically, Evola denied being a fascist and instead declared himself a “superfascist”). If Republicans, understandably, hope for an alternative to JD Vance as the next leader of the supposed party of morality and law, Bannon shouldn’t make them any more optimistic about the primaries.

Know there are Stranger Things in heaven and earth: There’s nothing wrong with a show having gay characters, nor having a mix of gay characters and gay actors (“gray asexual,” technically, in the aforementioned Celia Rose Gooding’s case), but awkwardly inserting the topic into the least-appropriate story moments serves no one’s interests, and Will coming out as gay in the penultimate episode of Stranger Things—in a protracted, group-therapy-like speech—managed the appalling trifecta of derailing the story (Will’s sexual orientation hadn’t been developed in an interesting, important way), derailing the in-universe action (the characters were literally gathering to go into a final battle to prevent the destruction of the universe when Will just had to give his choked-up confession, as if confirming every stereotype you’ve heard about gays being dysfunctional narcissists who are bad in a fight), and apparently even derailing the show production (since it reportedly took an astonishing eight hours to shoot that one simply-staged, talky scene). Priorities, people.

Woke zombies can be great, it turns out: The zombie movie 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple not only redeems the weird ending of the prior film in the franchise, 28 Years Later—which concluded with an outta-nowhere scene of blatantly Jimmy Savile-inspired, child-menacing, long-haired thugs confronting our young protagonist—but with its unrelentingly tense thugs-vs.-zombies action redeems the career of director Nia DaCosta, whose prior biggest claim to fame was doing the diversely-cast but lowest-earning Marvel Cinematic Universe movie, The Marvels. I thought The Marvels had some basic plot problems that weren’t likely the director’s fault but also had some nicely choreographed and rather complex action sequences, and after seeing Bone Temple, I’m even more inclined to believe DaCosta’s polite yet damning defense that The Marvels wasn’t really her film so much as Marvel president Kevin Feige’s film. With both 28 and the MCU, DaCosta may simply have come along just as audiences were growing impatient with the franchise, amplifying her small missteps.

(If she nonetheless gets a chance to do another 28 movie and it combines her flair for Capt. Marvel-esque flight scenes and Danny Boyle-style zombie scenes, I hope they consider calling it Bone Temple Pilot. They could continue Bone Temple’s trope of using rock music in very theatrical fashion but add some grunge. I’d love it if someone in Danny Boyle’s orbit planned a stage musical adaptation of Bone Temple. That central pile of skulls and Ralph Fiennes’ blood-soaked, Satanic prancing to Iron Maiden would work spectacularly on Broadway.)

Love reign o’er me: I can’t help wondering if the use of multiple characters named Jimmy, including hapless kids, in a rock-filled movie, means Bone Temple was also tipping its hat to the suicidal, gang-menaced protagonist of the Who’s rock opera film Quadrophenia. That film, too, had a blond-haired, cultish villain of sorts in the form of the mod gang member played by Sting. He played a surprising number of film villains for a guy we 20th-century-born folk all now think of fondly. In addition to the Quadrophenia Bell Boy, there was his turn as a stealthy rapist in Dennis Potter’s Brimstone & Treacle and the deranged outer-space aristocrat Feyd in David Lynch’s Dune. I suppose Sting was sort of punk, and there was a time not so long ago when punk was scary. Now it’s safe to love all this stuff, the way you might smile at all the freaks out on Halloween.

Sometimes critics are right: I saw the poorly-reviewed movie After the Hunt starring Julia Roberts and Andrew Garfield mainly because I don’t trust critics to judge films about controversial subjects like campus politics and sexual harassment, but the critics were right and I should’ve stayed away. One of several strikingly lame things about this turkey (by the jerk who made Call Me By Your Name, speaking of abusing youths) was that it was probably inspired by empires-analyzing historian (and “Tiger Mom”) Amy Chua and her husband allegedly seducing students at Yale, and while it bore no resemblance to those real-world events, it still bore the emphatic opening title card: “IT HAPPENED AT YALE.” Did it, though?

Invent new planets the way George Lucas does: Better that, anyway, than virtually all attempts by Hollywood to depict “actual events,” including major well-known episodes from history. If I were a historian (Chua, perhaps, since she seems to know how to have a good time), I think the mere existence of biopics and historical dramas, given their ludicrous and usually gratuitous flights of fancy, would leave me in a constant rage. If you’re going to depict Thomas Jefferson as a Satanist or give a famous royal family a whole added sibling while maintaining a tone of documentary realism, just do the respectable thing and really telegraph the fact it’s all a complete fantasy. No “based on real events” b.s. Ditto when depicting heavily altered incidents from your own life, as with the stalker-victim memoir miniseries Baby Reindeer. And I applaud some of Trump’s libel lawsuits against the smug and long seemingly-immune news media, even if the man has otherwise worn out his welcome.

Don’t slap warning labels on everything, though: If Texas A&M reportedly feels the need to label or even ban parts of Plato as offensive to right-wing sensibilities, maybe we have reached the reductio ad absurdum of conservatism, a political philosophy that once held Plato in high esteem. Maybe nixing Plato is an unintended double-blow against the far right, though, since the ban makes them look stupid, and since Plato himself was something of a fascist, idolizing Sparta more than his home base of Athens and dreaming of a perfect dictatorship. From this nut grew the whole tree of Western philosophy, they say, and sometimes it shows.

Libertarians should be far more libertarian: You let your guard down, and even the most libertarian-sounding political figures will turn on you and do something authoritarian (from which it doesn’t logically follow that you should prefer open authoritarians, of course). Take Jonathan Haidt. I never fully trusted this formerly moderate-liberal, formerly John Kerry-advising psychologist and author to stick to libertarian principles, even when he did a fine job of arguing for more open debate on campuses (I applied to work for his group Heterodox Academy at one point, in fact). Now, it appears his work has inspired laws against minors using social media without time limits or governmental supervision in Australia and now, more alarmingly, Virginia, where people ought to know better. (Meanwhile, the Netflix drama Adolescence, about a boy driven to murder by an insulting emoji, hopes to tighten the screws on social media users, as the show’s makers admit. But then, they’re British, and England may already be a lost cause.) Admittedly, the rights of minors aren’t obviously the same as the rights of adults, but we should prefer parental supervision to the abusive hand of government whenever possible.

Conservatives are sometimes preferable to the left: My fellow Novak Fellow (one of many political writers who benefited from that grant program) Naomi Riley argued earlier this month at the Soho Forum in NYC that Child Protective Services doesn’t intervene enough to protect at-risk children from their own home environments. I’d prefer the law be structured so as to allow responsible private Samaritans to intervene in sufficiently abusive or neglectful situations, not government agencies, so I expected to disagree with Riley, but politics often confronts one with reminders that there are worse options. Her debate foe Martin Guggenheim was a classic old-school leftist, arguing in essence that one can’t separate children from parents until society has first healed all ills, giving negligent moms more money, more counseling, more opportunities, more everything, with CPS being as shameful a solution as, well, sending the police to stop a murderer when you could send another $100 million worth of welfare state efforts. Riley was impressively patient with a noisy, heckling, left-wing crowd—but the crowd has reason to be suspicious of government intervention even in blatantly dysfunctional lives. Colorado state government, for instance, will quietly keep your attempted child support payments if it thinks the other parent, to whom you’re sending the money, is already getting enough money from government sources—and, rather arbitrarily and sneakily, if the payment was sent late, the government doesn’t inform the parents that it has seized the “excess” payment. Government can’t even count or refrain from theft, and we want it to enforce good child-rearing practices?

Even science-backed efforts by the establishment to help kids are suspect: The Atlantic’s Benjamin Mazer wrote in December that some kids, it should now be acknowledged, died from the Covid vaccine—which is an admirably frank admission—but Mazer frames it, as does The Atlantic in its ads for the piece, by stressing that denying the facts “only serves the aims of the anti-vaxxers” by undermining establishment credibility. Not that! What does it take for the anti-vaxxers to stop being the villains of a piece about the pandemic, even if only for one day? Can’t they just be described as right about some things and wrong about others, like normal human beings—with new evidence always, always welcome?

But don’t teach kids life is a constant death-struggle, in any case: Kids crave simple solutions, and fighting is dangerously, alluringly simple. Beats nuance and time-consuming diplomacy. Caving to that desire for quick, visceral thrills risks turning the world into an endless melee, though, like the street-theater fisticuffs into which our right/left politics seems to be devolving. Don’t let the lives of the young end up looking like the Japanese movie Battle Royale, which Quentin Tarantino is probably right to peg as a major influence on Hunger Games, which also depicts teens forced by government to fight to the death and do so with regional pride. I look forward to this year’s Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping as much as the next nerd—and in earlier movies in the series loved both the moment when an arrow strikes a surveillance camera and the moment when one finds a megalomaniacal rebel leader—but in real life, kids should be spared combat, ideally of all kinds. Inure them to it and you’re raising monsters, no matter how it’s gussied up.

—Todd Seavey is the author of Libertarianism for Beginners and is on X at @ToddSeavey