[kweks]

A year or so ago I was in Wadi Rum, the desert in the south of Jordan, near the Saudi border.

I spent a few days with a young bedouin, who in the absence of his parents, maintained the extended family, had mounted a successful business, spoke several languages fluently, hunted, played the jordanian mandolin, was humble yet strong. He was one of the most stable, centered, culutured, balanced and smart people I've ever met.

All of this at the ripe age of 19.

It made me consider his peers of my EU hometown Paris, and the only thing that came to mind was: Where has it gone so wrong. Western culture is raising generations of weak-minded, watery examples of sloth.

Travel really opens your eyes to the fact that determination, culture and independance are muscles that can be trained, apparently like their physical analogues: through reps.

[vinceguidry]

The well-off tend to have better children because they don't have crushing economic burden to worry about, so they can spend more time cultivating family. This holds across cultures.

Sure there is a trend towards helicoptoring that punches above its weight in our media, but there are plenty of solid, well-adjusted American kids in college too.

[Avshalom]

Meh, I know bilingual piano playing job holding family supporting 19 year olds too. But they're Hispanic mothers and the same people that get histrionic about weak kids these days get histrionic about: single mothers and people that can speak spanish.

"Kids these days aint shit" it never ends and we can always find enough examples to prove it to our satisfaction if we want to.

[arjie]

If he maintained the rest of the extended family, what was the rest of the extended family doing?

[DominikR]

Our problem is that we have produced a society where the next generation inherits the reliance on social security and the government from their parents.

This is a dangerous, deadly cycle as it produces a society where more and more people are incapable of acting independent and looking out for themselves.

And what is our answer to this? Utopian phantasies like unconditional basic income for everyone, because why can't we all just sit at home and play video games instead of doing something productive for ourselves and our society?

I'm not against social security per se, but it should only be available to those who objectively can't survive without outside help.

We've perverted this into a system where healthy, capable people can choose to not work and this doesn't hurt just them but the whole of society including businesses because they have to pay for this.

For example in Austria where I am 75% of all taxes are paid by the top 10% of incomes (with a >50% income tax), yet the other 90% still complain that we at the top are all thieves and we should give them more free stuff.

[s_q_b]

These arguments that primitive cultures produce stronger more capable individuals ignores the inherent massive trade offs.

Modern healthcare, farming, family planning, improved access to education, and the liberation of women cause an extended adolescence.

In exchange, you get to live like a king, enjoy unprecedented personal security, have a constant supply of goods from the world over, and very decreased likliehood of dying.

Of course primitive cultures produce more rugged individuals. It's not that their methods of living are superior.

It's that everyone else is already dead.

[kiba]

Doesn't really jive with the article.

Being self independent in a modern society means being able to find a job, tie one's shoes, take out the trash, do homework and so on all without active management by the parental units.

It doesn't mean surviving out in the wilderness.

[s_q_b]

"Able to find a job" sounds very easy from our vantage point. For the majority of people, it most assuredly is not.

And that is the root of the problem.

[antisthenes]

Finding a job is easy.

Finding a job that pays the bills and affords the worker a certain lifestyle is the difficult part.

[kweks]

I'm unsure that Jordan could be called primitive by any quantitative means.

The metric of 'having a constant supply of goods' equating to living like a king seems like a personal opinion.

As the article alludes: material possession appears to have little positive effect towards creating strong independant youth.

[venomsnake]

Which will lead to interesting clash of personalities with recent migrants in Europe. The guys that come - they may be anything else - but they are extremely tough. You don't survive trek on foot from Afghanistan, Eritrea, Nigeria to Berlin otherwise.

So not only they skew the male/female ratio in their age cohorts heavily towards male (Europe should work hard to increase single female immigration to balance, but no one is talking about it), but they posses toughness that few of their contemporaries in the West have - a trait that is generally liked.

The dating game for the people around 16-22 in the areas where the migrant influx is greatest will be quite interesting to observe.

[legutierr]

Why are you saying that Jordanian culture is primitive? It's rather insulting.

[s_q_b]

Scientific accomplishment, individual rights, human rights... Sorry, not a relativist.

N.B The parent was edited. The original text was substantially different, and referred to the Bedouin people.

[legutierr]

I don't know if it matters, but what I originally wrote was this:

"Why are you saying that Bedouin culture is primitive? By what standard?"

I edited it to better get my point across.

And, by the way, s_b_q, you don't need to be a "relativist" to recognize that using the term "primitive culture" in this context is not only imprecise, but also borders on being racist--regardless of whether we are talking about Jordanian or Bedouin culture--and detracts from the conversation.

[s_q_b]

Cultural criticism is not racist, and that word has been used for far too long to shut down far too reasonable discourse.

Bedouin culture is primitive, in the sense that it resembles the state of earlier societies in history.

It has norms that significantly conflict with basic human rights. Attempting to conflate comparative cultural criticism with racism is nonsense. We should not hesitate to criticize societies that condone the systemic abuse of women, lack basic respect for human dignity, and encourage outright brutality. To that say that culture is primitive is to put it mildly.

Bedouin culture is also significantly different than urban Jordanian culture. Thus editing the question significantly altered the debate.

[antisthenes]

Have you met the future Muad'dib ?

The parallels drawn here unmistakably read like something from Dune