Privileged young people lack the guardedness that keeps them alive

Evidence

Gothics are indeed ultimately a class fantasy (or nightmare) in which the dialectic of privilege and shelter is exercised: your privileges seal you off from other people, but by the same token they constitute a protective wall through which you cannot see, and behind which therefore all kinds of envious forces may be imagined in the process of assembling, plotting, preparing to give assault; it is, if you like, the showercurtain syndrome (alluding to Hitchcock Psycho). — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 632 (#expands, via linked claim)

Apathy appears at those turning points of bourgeois history (even in ancient times) when the sovereign historical tendency makes the pauci beati aware of their own impotence. Apathy indicates the reversion of individual human spontaneity into the private world which was thereby established as the bourgeois life-form proper. Stoicism (which is the bourgeois philosophy) makes it easier for the privileged, confronted with the suffering of others, to steel themselves to their own threats. It confirms the general by elevating private existence, as a protection from the generality, to the condition of a principle. The bourgeois’ private sphere is upper-class cultural material that has lost its status. — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 83 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Privilege produces gothic anxieties by sealing people off from visibility — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 632; Family and city life confer hidden educational advantages on privileged children.; Stoic apathy lets the privileged steel themselves against others’ suffering — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 83

Broader Connections

• Privilege produces gothic anxieties by sealing people off from visibility #expands (0.82) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 632
• Family and city life confer hidden educational advantages on privileged children. #contradicts (0.75)
• Stoic apathy lets the privileged steel themselves against others’ suffering #complicates (0.72) — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 83