Tonspur jugendlicher Moralität

Over on LinkedIn, I recently participated in a discussion revolving around the special needs of younger generations. I lingered there because I remembered the purported emergence of so-called Indigo children at the end of the nineties. A hypothesis that sought to positively reinterpret the phenomenon of so-called problem children.

The seemingly difficult children were said to have something special. They were described as pioneers of a new era and were not merely exhibiting behavioral problems? Lee Carroll and Jan Tober gathered experts from various fields in their bestseller, who viewed this new generation with competence and appreciation. I read this book back then.

In this essay here and today, I have decided to talk about children. Otherwise, I enjoy speaking with them, albeit not with scientific zeal. Therefore, we turn to the moral psychological work of Jonathan Haidt and consider in this context the moral philosophical perspective of Philipp Hübl, whom I would like to expressly welcome into the family of my teachers. Readers who give me some time may perhaps also learn why Aristotle might have been wrong in his assessment when he recommends conducting political deliberation better without the youth.

Launch of the Discussion

The LinkedIn post summarizes the following. I quote some fragments.

Many highly sensitive and empathetic children often feel alien in this world – they ›do not understand this game here‹ and sometimes wish to ›leave the earth‹. Adults also know this feeling of being overwhelmed and the longing for a place of peace. It's not about suicidality, but about the deep longing for ›home‹. These children don't need a diagnosis, but people who ›give them the space to open up‹ and who want to ›lead from the heart‹. They need to be reminded that they ›are right, just as they are‹.

For the sake of completeness, I mention that the post is about an invitation to training for people who want to lead from the heart and make the world more appreciative. I am not connected to the offer but merely use the inspiration of the post to outline my own position.

So I asked under the post whether the phenomenon described in the post finally proves the arrival of the Indigo children? Somewhat unsettled, I received an answer about what was meant by this. I confessed that I wanted this to be understood as a question and trigger and thus addressed those dealing with the Indigo child hypothesis. As a young father, I was fascinated by it and saw it as a sign of hope. Today, the theory is controversial and considered esoteric – possibly rightfully so. After 25 years, I view the topic significantly more differentiated.

Generation Fear

Jonathan Haidt is a co-founder of the Moral-Foundation-Theory (MFT). Recently, Jonathan Haidt gained greater attention with his book Generation Fear. In it, he writes that the use of social media aggravates mental problems among adolescents because it hinders direct interaction and free play. As a solution, he suggests restricting social media and cell phones in schools to foster direct interactions between children.

A critique accuses Haidt of seeing social media consistently the way older white professors do: As a place where people contradict and ridicule them. This can be seen as described above. Less so the emergence of the Indigo children. Rather, the accelerated drift between generations intensifies. If we took our children seriously, we wouldn’t just label them as digital natives. We would pay more comprehensive attention to their perspectives to learn how we could better come together and act collaboratively across generations.

Young people maintain multiple digital networks. Apparently, social participation is changing and is already at a level that leaves all those born before 1980 behind. Whether this is good or bad cannot be accurately said today. Every technological and cultural revolution leaves traces, and I explicitly emphasize here that social media are not comparable to the Beatles, the Walkman, or the personal computer. We should remain vigilant but not become more intrusive than is due as a parental generation. Because, and this is becoming increasingly clear in these agitated times. Emotions are not a good compass when we initially consider them detached from reason.

Maren Urner recently argued that emotions do not – as often assumed – stand in the way of rational thinking, but play a central, constructive role in our thinking, decision-making, and social actions. She criticizes the widespread separation between "reason" and "emotion" as outdated and advocates for understanding emotions as an integral part of rational judgment formation and collective problem-solving. However, this presupposes that we understand thinking as a sense, do not mistake our identity for our brain, and do not deny the younger generations their reason because we exaggerate their emotions, as we ourselves are emotional. So, let’s clarify this.

Moral Psychological Principles

Since sciences have increasingly focused on the emotional part of human existence, there has been contention. The dissent is described along the significance we attribute to emotions in coming to moral judgments. The camps can be simplified as those of sentimentalists and rationalists.

The Moral-Foundation-Theory (MFT) is internationally one of the most influential and most discussed approaches of empirical moral psychology. It was developed by the already mentioned Jonathan Haidt, Jesse Graham, Craig Joseph, and others and has been validated in numerous studies since the 2000s, especially in the comparison of political and cultural groups. The six foundations are empirically well-supported, specifically the clustering of progressive and conservative moral profiles.

There is currently still debate about the conclusions regarding the weighting or sequence of intuition and cognition or, more simply put: The debate is whether we are at the mercy of our emotions or capable enough to arrive at moral judgments more intelligently along a rational deliberation.

Indeed, there seem to be some biological dispositions that we can shift into more civilized behavior through an act of self-censorship. Our skepticism about strangeness seems to be quite ingrained in the limbic system of our consciousness. Only with one more thought can we arrange resulting reason not to frame the unfamiliar as a danger. This even becomes intuitively comprehensible when we wonder why we tolerate the hustle and bustle of a big city. After an initial overwhelm, we get used to the unfamiliar or recognize a big city as our natural habitat if we grew up there. In a big city, we encounter so many unfamiliar people that it is part of the lifestyle. Especially young people are fascinated by the city for exactly these reasons of diversity. Possibly the negative emotions toward the unfamiliar of an older population in comparatively ethnically homogeneous rural areas can be explained in this way.

In recent days I have engaged with Philipp Hübl's book "The Excited Society". In it, he picks up on the six moral psychological principles and further develops them beyond mere sentimentalism. Although Hübl strongly draws on MFT in content, he classifies Jonathan Haidt in the book as a "sentimentalist". In doing so, he refers to Haidt's thesis that moral judgments are primarily emotional (intuitive) and not rational (cognitive). Hübl shares this basic assumption of the moral psychologist but distances himself as a philosopher in the question of how far reason and reflection play a role in moral development and social progress.

He emphasizes that we are not at the mercy of our emotions, but moral self-determination and progress remain possible – an accent that is less pronounced in Haidt.

The six moral psychological principles are stated in the mentioned book: Care, Fairness, Liberty as well as Authority, Loyalty, and Purity. The clustering occurs along two world perspectives. Care, Fairness, and Liberty form the progressive block. Authority, Loyalty, and Purity shape the conservative worldview. Every person in every culture carries all six principles with them. Depending on socialization, experience, and competence in reflection and analytical thinking, the constellation changes. Hübl adopts the principles as an analytical tool but emphasizes more strongly than Haidt the possibility of moral self-reflection and reason. Thus, we are not at the mercy of our emotions (sentimentalism) but have control over them. However, the conditions must be met.

Cultural Foresight

The core of my work is to establish cultural foresight as a strategic management tool. For this, we use a form of Causal Layered Analysis (CLA). This method belongs to the critically reflexive methods of futures research, and we apply it more to cultural development than usual.

When we devote ourselves to the world on the layer of images, we cannot avoid the emergence of ideologies. By analyzing the situation based on the previously described moral principles according to the MFT, we recognize, away from the litanies, what is currently going on in the world.

Currently, conservative resistance is forming worldwide against the progressive revolution*, whose goals seem to appear at a new level with each generation.

To illustrate conservative resistance: Authority is exercised by the second Trump administration from American universities, demanding loyalty. One of numerous demanded confessions is that of purity; namely when Harvard University should limit the consideration of diversity in admissions. In this case, all three conservative principles are met. Lastly, I wrote in the essay Arming Empathy about the neuro-political fallacies of the US Vice President, which matches the perspective expressed here.

A highly gifted child with the electric vehicle factory and a fascination for a colony on Mars recently titled empathy not unnoticed by the progressive camp as the greatest weakness for Western civilization.

Also, in Germany, there is talk these months of a rightward shift, which is to be understood as a response to allegedly too woke views. It becomes dangerous when conservatism begins to create facts that, until further notice, cannot be countered with appeals to care, fairness (justice), and liberty. Many Progressives therefore perceive the current developments as a step backward. Anyone interested in the built-in illiberalism of this form of conservatism is referred to this publication.

I expressly do not want to stigmatize conservatism here as inherently negative. I would sometimes describe myself as temperamentally conservative. I grew up in a strictly Catholic environment in its remnants, exposing me to the conservative habitus until almost my twentieth year. I sat between the chairs for a long time and today describe myself as progressive, still enjoying attending the traditional shooting festivals in Sauerland, engaging in the Catholic-influenced local and historical association, and dedicating myself to historicity to better understand why people here walk around with wooden rifles to assure themselves of their community. After several escape attempts, I've come to terms with it.

The electorate in the constituency of the designated Federal Chancellor Friedrich Merz gave the CDU over 80% of their vote in the 2024 European elections. Life is good here. Sometimes one despairs of the fellow citizens' worldview. But for some time now, I know that I cannot assess this in a cultural relativistic way. Relativism is the natural enemy of objectivity. Why this is so, I have written here. Because it is recognizable that despite conservative voting behavior, a staunchly conservative county has progressively changed over the decades.

Children Demanding Care, Fairness, and Liberty.

Let's return to the children mentioned at the beginning. I do not wish to amplify the hypothesis of the Indigo children but to appreciate the progressive portion of the theory. As a reminder, here once again what was offered in the mentioned LinkedIn post.

Many highly sensitive and empathetic children often feel alien in this world – they ›do not understand this game here‹ and sometimes wish to ›leave the earth‹. Adults also know this feeling of being overwhelmed and the longing for a place of peace. It's not about suicidality, but about the deep longing for ›home‹. These children don't need a diagnosis, but people who ›give them the space to open up‹ and who want to ›lead from the heart‹. They need to be reminded that they ›are right, just as they are‹.

We must acknowledge that the emergence of this phenomenon is not a new development but has always occurred, albeit less corrected away nowadays. According to my understanding, this has been happening for at least 50 years. For several reasons, I see myself reflected in this. Although, with the cohort of 1974 due to my over-50 status, I do not fit the grid. If children demanding care and questioning authoritarian systems are classified with the progressive spectrum, then I am progressive. Fairness and liberty also seem to be particularly strongly anchored in younger generations.

The point I wish to make. The observations regarding the need for care from the original thread suggest that we are currently experiencing how the progressive movement is struggling to find the right leverage to give a new voice to the inevitable revolt of social progress.

By the way, the term "progressive revolution" should not be confused with progressivism or accelerationism. Such a view would reduce the profound cultural and social changes that unfold over generations to mere technological or economic acceleration. Instead, it is about a fundamental change in the moral values and social relationships.

This distinction is important as it helps us understand that genuine social progress is not achieved by the great acceleration of innovations but by profound transformation of the cultural and moral foundations of our society. Openness to technology is all well and good. Changes need time to become transformation. Reflection and especially the active participation of all generations in social dialogue are inevitable. The current conservative resistance is oriented exclusively toward archaic knowledge and questionable traditions. It often lacks the unconstrained compulsion of the better argument. Younger, progressive generations often seem to me to be more correct in their arguments.

During the 2025 Bundestag elections, although we also measured a rightward shift among young people. With Philipp Hübl, I have realized that we must achieve one thing. The younger generations must be engaged in conversation. For at least two decades, a tendency towards gerontocracy has been developing due to the demographics of many Western countries; a rule of the elderly through dominance in election decisions. Allegedly, we become more conservative as we age. Some young people compensate for the lack of openness to the future by radicalizing themselves and wanting to outperform the elderly in voting behavior. Perhaps defiance is an apt expression that seeks to counteract the lost feeling described above with something emotional. Possibly, the reflex to give the vote to a party on the edge of the constitutional arc is that covert progressiveness that emphasizes liberty, renounces bourgeois conventions, and expresses the question of the system not through violence, but along a neuropolitical fallacy along the principle of care.

The conservative resistance essentially emanates from the elder statesmen who are disgusted by more illuminated worldviews because they forgo meat but insist on diversity and read gender. This merely hampers the progressive revolution.

In terms of the US, one can be more pessimistic about a quick return to the path of virtuous progressivism, as since the post-war era, postmodernism seems to have asserted itself due to an overwhelming consumer loyalty. The different forms of capitalism transfer there at breathtaking speed to the field of politics. The transactional logic of deal-making has arrived in the White House. Once capitalism was competence in solving problems through smart economics, but comparable approaches may not be transferable to societal-political deliberation.

Europe, despite right-wing populist tendencies, appears more sensitive than the United States. This offers hope that we do not have to go through a comparable plight as the Americans. Yet, we are affected when this colossus lifts the global economy out of its joints.

Aristotle argues that political and ethical issues require not only theoretical knowledge but practical insight gained from experience. Young people, in his view, would be more guided by passions (emotions) and therefore could not properly assess the purposes of political action. This statement is found in the Nicomachean Ethics, which has been repeatedly quoted for 2,300 years when younger generations are to be kept in check. Perhaps this is even correct. Our children do not yet possess sufficient experience. Yet, the experiences they do make lie within our responsibility, and we should consult them on what they need, contrary to the recommendation.

Hopefully, it has become clear that the dynamic between progressive revolution and conservative resistance is a human constant whose gradual excess has never meant the doom of the world. Even when we have traversed the darkest chapters of human history. Progress would therefore lie in giving the younger generations more influence so they can better judge what humankind needs when they themselves co-determine the world's affairs. Care, Fairness, and Liberty.

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*The term revolution appears inappropriate when we talk about changes that unfold over generations. Even the agricultural revolution took about 3,000 years. Nonetheless, the term "progressive revolution" is used here intentionally to highlight the tendency and intentionality of the generations mentioned earlier and their sentiments.