Why Are Millennials Wary of Freedom?

I'll throw a simple stereotype at this:

People are simply being raised into being part of a machine that supports them, down to their self-identity and worth requiring unwavering reinforcement to be "healthy", as opposed to a more independent view of the self that deals with both the good & the bad that comes in life.

Freedom means that others may or may not engage in supporting you, and that goes against fundamental social interaction being drilled in at public schools. Independent thought is punished, and strongly individualized personalities are medicated away and lumped in with the kids who have legitimate medical issues. There is no dealing with good and bad, there's only dealing with good and enforced elimination of anything that might be construed as bad, and "bad" encompasses more and more every social cycle.

People are simply giving up on the notion of the independently maintained "self" entirely, not just benefiting from support from society, but shifting to demanding that unwavering personal support from society. That's incompatible with freedom.

I'm not even talking about money or power. I'm simply talking about social interaction. Plenty of disadvantaged people across history held their individual dignity in how they personally acted, took care of their family, etc, regardless of how they're treated, or if they weren't going to be able to rise the ranks.

It's not more than enough for a person without dependents to live comfortably.

it's enough that you won't starve to death.

Hmm. Seems like Millennials are wary of the abuse of freedom.

Because freedom has failed them. Or, at least, "freedom" as defined implicitly by the author to mean "only a specifically enumerated list of negative freedoms that primarily benefit the wealthy" and "the ability to cast a vote which fundamentally does not matter" -- remember the adage "if voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal".

Millenials don't feel particularly free to speak when they live in permanent debt, begging the wealthy to gift them with an unpaid internship and praying they don't get sick. When they do speak, their voices are drowned out by billions of dollars in propaganda campaigns. Yet they are told "this is freedom" and you're surprised they value it less?

If you asked them whether they want "freedom" of course they would say yes. But it's ridiculous to say a homeless person is "free" because the cops don't arrest and harass him for speaking his mind. It's ridiculous to say a millenial is "free" when those of them lucky enough to get jobs have to toe the line and obey every command from their employer, watching what they say on social media, accepting the most egregious reaches of corporate power into their personal lives so that they have a prayer at one day paying back their insurmountable debts.

Millenials, unlike the generation before them, recognize that material conditions are of fundamental importance and that any notion of "freedom" that ignores them is not worth much. The "freedom" to buy a news organization or bribe a politician with infinite dark money is just enshrining corporate power. The "freedom" to buy healthcare is meaningless without the means to also afford it. Millenials see through the very shallow veneer of whines about "freedom" that do nothing but obscure blatant attempts to preserve current power structures.

Consider tech contracts: companies write contracts so that they own what you think in your off time. They write contracts so that if you decide to quit, you cannot legally work for years. That is not freedom, it is the opposite. Yet the libertarian screed is "well, in the abstract, you have the freedom to make that contract or not as you see fit"; what consolation to those who need a job to pay rent or buy food.

This attitude shift is mostly definitional semantics and is just a natural result of decades of libertarian/conservative weasel-wording around "freedom" so that it is a meaningless platitude that expresses nothing more than "a principle which benefits those with means".

> - Freedom and democracy are different things, if some people think democracy isn't that important, it does not mean they do not value freedom.

e.g. Switzerland's infamous vote to ban minarets[1]. A lot of European countries seem to have a problem with religious freedom, despite being very democratic. Contrast with the undemocratic Singapore where people of different religions coexist relatively harmoniously.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_minaret_referendum,_2009