A short conversational excerpt from a YouTube video where Trevor Noah and Simon Sinek discuss rising anger and isolation among young men, how online communities form around loneliness and channel that isolation into hate (against women and government), and how a broader loss of idealism and need for belonging fuels radicalization.
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But one of the big things I've been worried about recently is young men and how angry they've become, how angry they've become, how alone they've become, how isolated they've become. And then, ironically, how they've turned that anger, isolation into a community. And it's weird because it's literally, there's communities of young men online who have formed communities based in and around loneliness. They don't try and become friends. They don't try and teach each other to hug and to love and to feel. And. No, they sort of foment these feelings and they go, this is why we should hate women, and this is why we should hate the government.
When you find other people who are suffering what you're suffering or who get you, it's incredibly compelling. And you feel seen and you feel understood. And the work of Deah Khan, the British documentarian, she talks about this. Whether you're talking about white supremacists or we're talking about jihadis, they are not driven by hate, they are driven by love. And this is what we don't understand, which is it's people who are missing love, desperately looking for love and desperately looking for belonging. And in the world today, I think there's been a total loss of idealism. Our leaders used to talk about world peace and peace on earth. You and I having a conversation about world peace right now would sound cheesy and corny and weird. And I think there's been a loss of idealism. And when there's a loss of idealism and something to feel like we belong to, larger than ourselves, larger than our nation, larger than the work that we do, if that's missing, we still look for that. We still look for that belonging. But unfortunately, we find it down here. And I think we're witnessing the loss of idealism in the world right now, how we're finding community at low levels and tearing each other apart.
