“The most common name this group is given is Gen Z; I call them Generation K, after Katniss Everdeen, the determined heroine of the Hunger Games. Like Katniss, they feel the world they inhabit is one of perpetual struggle – dystopian, unequal and harsh.”

Each successive generation has to make do with the situation they had inherited from the old one.
And whatever it ‘builds’ on top of that will constitute the starting point for the next one.

We – those born between the early 50-ies and the middle 70-ies, and who constitute the vast majority of today’s significant decision makers, have had a ‘once in the entire history’ opportunity. The fall of the communist regimes almost all over the world had lifted many of the ‘practical’ hurdles left around from the previous generations. We had been freed from all limitations but those we’ve imposed – willingly and/or unwittingly, upon ourselves. So much so that Francis Fukuyama had described the situation as ‘the end of history’.

We’ve been, indeed, the first generation in modern history – or ‘contemporary’?!?, which didn’t start a ‘wholesale’ war… if we discard the ‘war on terror’! Or that ‘on drugs’…

The point being that we’ve failed. To use the huge opportunity presented to us.
By Lady Luck… our fathers had done nothing but continued the traditions imposed upon them by their fathers…

We, on our turn, don’t have that excuse.
We didn’t have had to continue anything… Conditions had been perfect for a fresh start!
Yet we had ‘preferred’ to ‘carry on’… As if we had learned nothing from what had just happened!

Fukuyama himself, after having been lionized by his peers and then contradicted by Clio, had ‘relapsed’.
After prophesying that ‘liberalism uber alles’ he had recently attempted to explain away his failure using ‘the need for recognition‘.

In fact, he wasn’t exactly wrong in 1989 – we did have a chance to move in that direction, nor is he totally off the mark now. ‘The need for recognition’ did play a role in our failure.
Fukuyama – along with the rest of us, had made the capital error of over-trusting his own intellect.
Of convincing himself that ‘the world’ can be understood.

Hence predicted.

And who has to make do in the present situation?
To deal with our failure?

As always, the next generation!
Our children…

For the first time in 100 years, Britons are dying earlier.
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