[Demiurge]

Dtaisk Afai. Cof Lemma, 19:1, 2, 549-552 / https://www.jstor.org/stable/25414613

Let me first give you four quotations.

Firstly: “Our youth loves luxury, has bad manners, disregards authority, and has no respect whatsoever for age. Our children today are tyrants; they do not get up when an elderly man enters the room—they talk back to their parents—they are just very bad.”

Secondly: “I no longer have any hope for the future of our country if today’s youth should ever become the leaders of tomorrow, because this youth is unbearable, reckless—just terrible.”

Thirdly: “Our world has reached a critical stage; children no longer listen to their parents; the end of the world cannot be far away.”

Finally: “This youth is rotten from the very bottom of their hearts; the young people are malicious and lazy; they will never be as youth happened to be before. Today’s youth will not be able to maintain our culture.”

The first quote came from Socrates (470–399 B.C.); the second from Hesiod (circa 720 B.C.); the third from an Egyptian priest about 2,000 years ago; and the last was recently discovered on clay pots in the ruins of Old Babylon, which are more than 3,000 years old.

[knodi123]

Firstly: The Plato quote is fake - It was crafted by a student, Kenneth John Freeman, for his Cambridge dissertation published in 1907.

Secondly: Hesiod was right, his culture no longer exists. ;-)

Thirdly: Yep, that quote is fake too. https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/10/22/world-end/

Can't find any sources on that fourth one, but I suggest that the British Medical Journal might want to update their article.

[emj]

> Hesiod was right, his culture no longer exists. ;-)

Hesoid lived when ancient greece got started what followed was 6 centuries of Greek dominance in the mediterranean region. :-)

[Demiurge]

Good to know, appreciate the review :)

[voidmain0001]

Yes, your quotes' source is from a 1971 paper and I realize this source isn't much better than you saying otherwise, but it could be that the Socrates quote is not accurate - https://maverickphilosopher.typepad.com/maverick_philosopher...

The Egyptian priest quote is muddied too - https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/4923/was-this-q...

I wouldn't build an argument on them...

[gershy]

On the matter of holistic degradation with each generation I always think about american presidential debates from several decades ago which, to me, offer irrefutable evidence of an older society with greater command of speech, wit, rationality, temper, etc. What do you think?

[hyggetrold]

"It seems like nobody wants to work these days" has been a refrain since ancient Mesopotamia!

[Demiurge]

That's probably why they call it work! :D

[bazoom42]

The Socrates quote is certainly fake. Are the other quotes from the same source?

[ethbr1]

I mean, all of those civilizations rose and fell, so there was certainly a point at which the productivity level was no longer sufficiently globally dominant.

[deepsun]

Some historians say that the main cause for the Fall of Rome is rising inequality. Initially, society was mainly based on small farmers/warriors, doing war close to their home.

But as Rome grew, wars tended to get farther and farther from home, so farmers could no longer tend to their farms, and also large influx of slaves made them noncompetitive against large slave-owners. So they had to sell their farms to those large owners, exacerbating the problem even more.

I honestly don't know any single revolution that happened for any reason other than inequality.

[kurthr]

That's the thing, everyone can be right here. You don't want to regularly yell "fascist, racist, pimp, rapist" or the power of those words disappears. At the same time, if you refuse to use the words when they apply, then their power is irrelevant. Stability breeds complacency, complacency breeds contempt, contempt breeds instability.

The Kids perceptions and mores change every generation (both in some multidimensional average and in their dispersion) based in response to their elder's beliefs and their material conditions. Those changes could be destructive or not, but the idea that "there is no truth" or we've reached "the end of history" mark a more dangerous part of the cycle.

[bigstrat2003]

Veracity of the quotes aside, people always bust this sort of thing out like it proves that the current young people aren't so bad. But if anything, it convinces me that these historical figures were probably right! I can see, with my own eyes, how bad my own generation is (let alone those after me). So if that's the case, then maybe the ancient old guys were right in their cases as well.