In one of P. J. O’Rourke’s most memorable openings, he wrote: “Every generation finds the drug it needs.” The satirist was reminding us of a constant across generations. Sometimes that drug was an actual drug, sometimes an ideology. Today, the rising generation gets high on a uniquely potent narcotic: absolute confidence in their own exceptionalism.
My contemporaries talk as if they invented human rights, democracy, environmentalism, science, and freedom, and believe they have lived through humanity’s most important events because they had to walk around wearing a muzzle in 2020 and because it’s sometimes hot outside. It’s hard to explain to them that we saw the Berlin Wall fall and witnessed the Twin Towers attacks that changed the world, and all without feeling superior to previous generations, who lived the bloody and convulsive 20th century to the fullest.
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