GEN'S -Z & ALPHA- GEMS : FANS GLOBAL ESSAY

HANNAH ARENDT - in ' On Violence ' , warned that force may destroy authority but cannot create legitimacy in its place.

THOSE who insist that age is merely a number and dismiss the reality of generations would do well to revisit Karl Mannheim's essay, '' The Sociological Problem of Generations ''. Mannheim argues that generations become a political reality when they come into '' fresh contact '' with the defining crises of their time.

In other words, a generation is shaped less by its year of birth than by the experiences it is forced to confront together.

The Global Founder Framers - and almost 69% of the students of the world, have already lived through more than your share of crises. Yet the context shaping you most decisively, as I see it, is neither political nor economic, but technological.

To update your knowledge, my generation had to run to libraries and leaf through heavy volumes.  Thanks to the internet, smart devices and new generative AI, the accumulated knowledge of ages is available to you almost instantly.

But while technology equips you uniquely, history has a habit of casting generations into familiar roles.

William Strauss and Neil Howe, in Generations : The History of America's Future, 1584 - 2069, showed how each cohort is assigned a script, rebel, builder, cynic, idealist, each shaped by its crises.

The real challenge is learning when to inhabit that role, and when to refuse it.

For your generation, the script oscillates between fragility and volatility. The change of fragility is often little more than an attempt to corner you for knowing your rights better than earlier generations did.

Societal sensibilities have not evolved much since the days of Oliver Twist, and asking for more has always been portrayed as entitlement. There is nothing novel about that.

Volatility, however, is a different matter. Youth has always carried energy, urgency, and a desire for rapid change. When that momentum is allowed to run without direction, It often collapses into one off history's most exhausted figures, the perpetually angry young man.

Countercultures have repeatedly mistaken intensity of strategy, only to find themselves carrying forward changes they neither intended nor controlled.

Recent history offered a cautionary tale. The Arab Spring showed how quickly entrenched regimes can be displaced when youth movements supply energy, legitimacy and moral force.

What it also showed, more quietly, is how rarely that energy translates into durable control.  Governments fell, but power oten reassembled itself, sometimes in harder, more disciplined forms.

This Essay continues into the future. The World Students Society thanks Farrukh Khan Pitafi.