There is a reason I have become increasingly vulgar when I talk about some of this shit.
It is not because I am trying to be edgy. It is not because I suddenly discovered profanity and decided it makes every argument stronger. It is because I am old enough to have watched the same stupid games get repackaged over and over again, each time presented as though nobody in human history has ever encountered the problem before.
Then somebody stands up and says, “Follow the science.”
All right. Let’s follow it.
But let’s follow all of it.
Not just the latest study that agrees with whatever you wanted to believe before you read it. Not just the headline somebody posted online without reading the article. Not just the institutional statement created by a committee trying to avoid offending every possible group while still protecting its funding.
Human beings have been observing human behavior for thousands of years.
We have written records. We have philosophy. We have law. We have religion. We have medical history. We have wars, collapsed governments, ruined families, failed economies, public panics, moral crusades, and entire civilizations that managed to demonstrate exactly what happens when people become too comfortable, too arrogant, too decadent, or too convinced that consequences only apply to somebody else.
Was every old idea good?
Hell no.
A lot of it was complete bullshit.
Some traditions existed because a king wanted control. Some rules existed because men wanted control. Some social structures existed because wealthy people wanted everybody beneath them to remain beneath them. Human history contains cruelty, ignorance, superstition, exploitation, and plenty of ideas that deserved to be thrown directly into the nearest fire.
But that does not mean every social norm was meaningless.
Some of those structures developed because children need protection. Families need stability. Communities need participation. Adults need responsibilities. People need some concept of restraint. A society cannot survive indefinitely if every person is encouraged to treat every impulse as an identity, every feeling as an emergency, and every limit as oppression.
That is not science.
That is marketing.
It is selling people the belief that discomfort means something is wrong, when discomfort is often how people grow.
You are supposed to experience embarrassment. You are supposed to hear “no.” You are supposed to make a mistake, remember how badly it went, and try not to do the same stupid thing again.
That is called learning.
Now we have built an entire culture around making sure nobody has to sit alone with a mistake for even five minutes.
The moment something happens, out comes the phone.
Or now, apparently, out come the glasses.
At least when George Carlin complained about camcorders, you could see the asshole holding the camcorder. There was a machine sitting on the person’s shoulder. You knew you were being recorded. You could walk away, turn around, cover your face, or tell them to knock it off.
Now somebody can be standing there in a pair of glasses, recording the entire room, and nobody knows whether they are having a conversation with a person or unknowingly performing for an audience.
Because apparently human memory is no longer enough.
You cannot simply attend the party.
You cannot watch the concert.
You cannot laugh at the joke.
You cannot see something stupid happen and allow it to disappear into the night where it belongs.
No, it has to be preserved.
It has to be uploaded.
It has to be captioned.
It has to be shared with thousands of people who were not there, do not understand the context, and have absolutely no reason to give a shit.
Somebody farted in the wind?
Get it online.
Somebody danced awkwardly after drinking too much?
Get it online.
Somebody tripped, slurred a word, misunderstood a joke, got emotional, kissed the wrong person, or made one terrible decision during one terrible night?
Put it online so strangers can inspect every frame.
And that is where we have arrived.
Into the fart.
The fart cannot simply happen anymore.
It must become content.
It must become a reaction video.
Somebody has to analyze whether the fart was problematic, whether the person who farted should apologize, whether the location of the fart was culturally insensitive, whether the fart demonstrates a larger social pattern, and whether the person who recorded the fart should receive monetization revenue.
That is where George Carlin would have had a field day.
Not because everything was better in his time. It was not.
But because he understood bullshit.
He understood the way institutions take ordinary language and turn it into slogans. He understood how people use polite words to hide ugly behavior. He understood how society pretends to become more compassionate while finding increasingly efficient ways to humiliate people.
We talk endlessly about feelings now.
Everybody’s feelings must be acknowledged.
Everybody’s feelings must be validated.
Everybody’s feelings must be protected.
Then those same compassionate people will record a stranger having a mental breakdown in a parking lot, upload it, put dramatic music under it, and invite millions of people to mock them.
That is not empathy.
That is the Coliseum.
We keep telling ourselves we have evolved past the Roman Empire because nobody is being fed to a lion in the center of town.
No.
We just improved distribution.
The Romans had to physically build an arena. They had to gather a crowd. They needed fighters, prisoners, animals, guards, and somebody powerful enough to finance the entire spectacle.
Now the arena is in your pocket.
The crowd is always assembled.
The algorithm is the emperor.
It decides who gets elevated, who gets mocked, who gets destroyed, and who disappears without anybody noticing.
The thumb replaces the imperial gesture.
Swipe up.
Swipe down.
Like.
Share.
Destroy.
Move on.
Then everybody congratulates themselves for being more civilized.
We are not necessarily more civilized. We are more efficient.
We have industrialized humiliation.
We have automated gossip.
We have turned public shame into an entertainment category.
At least the Romans knew they were going to watch blood sport.
We call ours “engagement.”
And this is also where the phrase “follow the science” starts to piss me off.
Because a lot of the people using it do not actually want science.
Science includes observation. Science includes comparison. Science includes admitting that your preferred theory might be wrong. Science includes historical evidence, behavioral patterns, unintended consequences, and the possibility that a short-term emotional solution creates a long-term social problem.
What many people want is authority.
They want a phrase that ends the conversation.
They do not want questions.
They want compliance.
They want to say, “The science is settled,” while discussing human behavior, family life, childhood development, education, identity, economics, and social organization—subjects involving billions of variables and thousands of years of evidence.
Human beings are not laboratory mice.
Societies are not controlled experiments.
You cannot change every norm, remove every expectation, dismantle every boundary, and then pretend surprise when the results are unstable.
Again, that does not mean the old system was perfect.
It means that when you remove a support beam, you should probably figure out whether it was holding up the roof before calling everybody who warned you a bigot, a dinosaur, or an enemy of progress.
That is especially true when children are involved.
Adults can make adult choices.
Adults can rename themselves, reinvent themselves, abandon traditions, adopt new beliefs, reject their families, rebuild their lives, and live however they choose, provided they are not harming somebody else.
But children are not simply miniature adults with smaller shoes.
They are inexperienced human beings.
They are supposed to question their parents. They are supposed to think their parents are full of shit. That is practically part of adolescence.
I thought adults were full of shit when I was young.
Sometimes I was correct.
Sometimes I was an idiot.
That is also part of being young.
The dangerous move is when institutions step into that natural tension and tell children that secrecy from their parents is automatically empowerment.
Sometimes parents are abusive. Sometimes parents are dangerous. Sometimes outside intervention is necessary.
But those exceptions should not become the operating assumption for every family.
A school, counselor, app, influencer, activist, or government agency should not automatically position itself as the child’s true ally against the backward adults at home.
Parents do not receive an owner’s manual.
Most of them are improvising.
They are relying on what their parents taught them, what they learned through experience, what they read, what they observed, and whatever judgment they can summon while tired, overworked, and terrified of screwing up another human being.
Being a parent is, in many ways, proof that your childhood had a point.
You learned something.
You survived something.
You carry it forward.
That does not mean repeating every mistake your parents made. It means becoming responsible for somebody besides yourself.
And responsibility is what seems to have gone missing from the conversation.
We keep hearing that the human brain is not fully developed until around 25, as though this means nobody under 25 can reasonably be expected to do a damn thing.
What were you doing during those years?
Were you working?
Were you learning?
Were you building relationships?
Were you making mistakes and correcting them?
Were you developing judgment?
Or were you told that adolescence now lasts until your late twenties and adulthood begins whenever you finally feel comfortable?
The brain develops through experience.
Judgment develops through consequences.
Responsibility develops by having responsibilities.
You do not prepare people for adulthood by protecting them from every adult expectation until they are almost 30.
Then we send them to college.
For four years, sometimes six, sometimes more.
They borrow tens of thousands of dollars.
Sometimes more than $100,000.
They are told the degree will transform their lives.
Then they choose a program without researching the job market, spend years drinking from Thursday night through Sunday morning, experiment with whatever drugs are circulating through campus, and later announce that somebody should forgive the debt because the degree did not guarantee them a career.
The college promised an education.
That is what it sold.
It may have marketed the value dishonestly. It may have exaggerated employment outcomes. Lenders may have acted irresponsibly. Tuition may be obscene. The entire financing system may be predatory.
All of those things can be true.
But the student still made choices.
You cannot spend four years treating college as an extended resort experience and then claim the networking was the real value.
What networking?
The network that knew who had cocaine?
The network formed between Thirsty Thursday and Sober Up Sunday?
The network of people who all graduated with the same debt, the same bad habits, and no idea what they were supposed to do Monday morning?
Congratulations.
You spent $100,000 developing a hangover and a contact list.
And yes, that statement is vulgar.
Because polite language has not fixed the situation.
We have spent years wrapping obvious dysfunction in therapeutic terminology.
We renamed irresponsibility.
We renamed addiction.
We renamed avoidance.
We renamed selfishness.
We renamed failure.
Then we acted as though changing the label changed the outcome.
Sometimes people need help.
Sometimes they need compassion.
Sometimes they need treatment, support, patience, and another chance.
But compassion without standards becomes permission.
Understanding without consequences becomes encouragement.
Acceptance without judgment becomes indifference.
And a society that refuses to tell anybody they are making a terrible decision is not kind.
It is cowardly.
That is what I am watching unfurl.
A culture terrified to say no, addicted to public spectacle, obsessed with recording itself, and increasingly unable to distinguish between freedom and impulse.
Everybody wants to be seen.
Nobody wants to be remembered accurately.
Everybody wants validation.
Nobody wants correction.
Everybody wants the science when it supports them, history when it flatters them, tradition when it benefits them, and rebellion when there is attention available.
Then they wonder why somebody old enough to recognize the pattern is standing off to the side saying, “This is fucked.”
It is because I have seen enough to know that stupid games produce stupid prizes.
The technology changes.
The slogans change.
The clothing changes.
The drugs change.
The camera gets smaller.
The arena gets larger.
But human beings remain remarkably consistent.
We still crave attention.
We still follow crowds.
We still confuse popularity with truth.
We still enjoy watching somebody else fall.
We still believe consequences will happen to another person.
The Roman Empire did not disappear because humans evolved beyond it.
The architecture changed.
The Coliseum became the feed.
The mob became the comment section.
The spectacle became vertical video.
And the fart?
The fart became permanent.