It used to be said that children are the future. This evolved into young people are the answer. This mutated in later days into the notion that college students are, by default, ‘on the right side of history’. However, with Neo primitivism many refuse to accept this new culture and tradition, as they believe it is more about peer pressure and influence.
Wars caused by culture and tradition
While this statement is true for situations such as the Vietnam War and the war in Iraq, some of these confrontations end before anyone notices what was happening but still leaves behind devastation.
Take Rwanda genocide for instance, the country nastiness at a stretch, there are have been very few instances since the early1990s, in which this has been demonstrably and uncontroversially the case.
If some grumpy, jealous elders are to be believed without a shred of skepticism, what might best be described as the ‘student classes’ has been on a slow decline of self-centered decadence since the late-1960s?
Unfounded traditions
It is therefore easy to understand the Emergence of Neo Primitivism, considering the lack of evidence given to the contrary, the legacy media largely owned by aging, traditionalist types who hold such views and the ‘new media’ doing little to dissuade them (you know who you are and ought to be burning with shame).
Thankfully, it turns out that very few things are as simple as they may seem and there are often at least three sides to every issue. As may have been before, much of what is assumed by today’s youth in their late 20 s and early 30s, it is incorrect or at least incomplete.
One such assumption is that young people today are completely obsessed with technology, never go outside and would likely gag on fresh air and faint from shock if touched by even a single, warm ray of sunshine on a clear day. This is, as Bertram Wilberforce Wooster once put it, Tosh.
Neo primitivism
Back in my day, the mid to late-1990s, the world was turned on its head. What had been developing since the 1950s ended. Few, but the sharpest, saw it coming and it kicks many people square in the backside.
One of the groups of people largely spared this fate wereyounger. While the working class were scrambling and wondering what the heck happened. What they would need a computer for and pronouncing modem as two separate words, their children were finding new and exciting ways of being.
Accepting and embracing change
A deliberate and enthusiastic embrace of things such as VR and the early-Internet were part of this. There was also an undercurrent many ignore either on purpose or through ignorance.
At the time when the internet was roaming the world like a brush fire and old, linear media where one needed to see the beginning, middle and end to know anything at all, was going the way of Beta-max.
There was a large contingent of the Western World’s under-25s had a new and almost evangelical interest in Neo Primitivism. Nature-based sports such as surfing and snowboarding experience a Renaissance during this period the careful and intentional negotiating of the unpredictable, chaotic power of nature, serving as a sort of metaphor and handy training ground for the unpredictable power of what was coming regarding society.
When one can ride forty foot waves on a board and not die or even be scared the rise of the internet holds no terror. There was also a trend among the young, hip and urban toward what is know as Neo-Primalism.
New culture for the youth
High school students were spotted with tribal style tattoos and even piercing, with white North Americans getting inked like native Australians and New Zealanders. That started in the 90’s, as did the notion that it would be a good idea to get one’s tongue split at the end to become more reptiles.
These were mainly people in their mid-teens to early-20s from 1994 to 1999. People who at their youngest are now 33 and have children of their own.
According to the October 2006 issue of National Geographic such co-existence between the high-tech and the earthly has carried over into the new generation. Youngsters, at least, by comparison, unplugging and taking to national parks in a big way, in a sort of no-neo primitive.
There is a notion of the human observation that progress can only go so far before people starts to rebel and the old ways. At least the more practical aspects, begin to come back. Perhaps this is best illustrated in the modern context is the fact that many artists in the music industry have ceased using with CD, releasing their albums on MP3, which one would expect, or vinyl.
