Weeding through the buried notes from listening to podcasts while out on a walk. A few of these go back to 2019.
Primogeniture is not a common inheritance strategy in nomadic societies. Herds can be divided easily. Orchards and barns not so much.
It seems odd to me that we have a rising generation that shows its "rebellion" by being rule-followers and insisting others do as well. So quick to appeal to authority, rather than admiring those who are trying to evade authority, as their parents and grandparents did. Of course, this may not be so. We may have the same percentage of rebels and rule-followers in all generations, but have structured things to reward one group more than usual, so that they have more power than they did in previous eras. Some young people are empowered to be the shock troops for the authoritarian elders.
I have to check myself not to withhold deserved sympathy just because I think some other group has it worse and is even more overlooked. Irritation rises up in me when I hear about how hard life is for teenage girls, even though their suicide rate and assault victimisation rates are lower, their school success much higher, their problems more closely studied...well, you have seen me go through the list on that before. What about the boys? But I have internally overcorrected on this. Of course it is hard for teenage girls. It is hard to come of age at all, without a solid personality to fend off anxieties. Girls have vulnerabilities boys do not and inhabit a world that is often more socially complicated and precarious. Or at least it seems precarious, until one reaches levels of assurance about identity and "why should I care what she thinks anyway?"
"You become, of course, paranoid when you have been working on spies for about five years. So there is actually a danger that you see plots everywhere." Nadine Akkerman, author of Invisible Agents: Women and Espionage in 17th Century Britain.
You don't say...
One thing that is not well understood is the degree to which Naziism was a *youth movement*.
ReplyDeleteYes, and heavily intellectual at first - artists, philosophers, university professors and students. American intellectuals, even during the war, preferred to paint the Germans as doltish peasants
ReplyDeleteI'm writing without glasses. It's a little blurry and far away.
ReplyDeleteI remember reading once about primogeniture. As I remember it was a practice that one culture alone on the planet followed for centuries. I think it was one of Jared Diamond's books. In one culture, the ruling class never split the land or the wealth. I think there were a handful of other elite ruling families that did the same. Seoond sons got the priesthood or the military.