From this Substack post
In Margaret Mead’s understanding of cultural transmission between generations, it appears that we may also be living in a pre-figurative culture, where the past is not the guide to the future, and many are living without a coherent sense having a world to grow into. The challenge today is not just to download the societal code, individuate from it enough to feel sane and successful, and trust the world to behave itself.
The world now is not just becoming unstable but is clearly increasingly unstable.
At the risk of generalising, people born and raised in capitalist democracies after about 1990 have been brought up as digital natives in an ecologically compromised world with economies that are not serving the common good, where exponential technological change is capable of radically altering society at the whims of a billionaire class, and gerontocratic leaders keep getting elected by telling implausible stories.
It is in that kind of world, which is figuratively and often literally on fire, that the young have to conceive a future for themselves — even though the society they are supposed to adapt to appears delusional and necrotic. This is what Perspectiva Associate Bonnitta Roy means when she says the young today have to “individuate themselves from the whole world.”