Book Project:
Advice for Young People
Adventures in Social Philosophy for the Twenty-first Century
Young people today face a more uncertain and difficult future than any generation in a century. The challenges include under-/unemployment, crippling debt, poor social mobility, increasing education demands, lack of capital (for house-buying, for example) all in the context of climate change, global conflict and a distracting digital world. This generation urgently needs insight into today’s world as well as the intellectual tools to flourish or even survive. Its clear from their activism – online and off – and what they say about themselves that young people are hungry for political and social change. But what kinds of change, and how is change possible? Unfortunately, virtually all books and other media offering advice to young people today deal with how to negotiate our contemporary (economic) reality; how to swim with the stream. The upcoming book offers a broad and in-depth view of the stream itself. It brings philosophy, history, sociology and economics to a general readership, offering a sobering but at the same time liberating account of young people and their place in the world.
This is not a self-help book. Rather it invites young people (ages 16 to 24), those who have contact with them (parents, teachers), and those interested more generally in social and political issues to look at the world and their place in it in a bold and different way through a critique of globally pervasive frames of reference including progress, individuality, objective knowledge and capitalism. Moreover, it argues that it is precisely these frames that hinder insight into the problems facing us; in other words, that part of the problem for young people today are these old ‘tools’ themselves.
In her book No is Not Enough, Noami Klein writes that if we’re going to rise to the urgency of the moment “we need skills and knowledge that we currently lack – about history, about how to change the political system, and even about how to change ourselves.” The book proposes precisely that: to help young people (and others) to develop those skills and knowledge. In another part Klein writes about the inner fascist (inner Trump) that seems hard-wired in all of us. This book explains where that hard-wiring comes from, how it works and how to short it.