To me it’s historically unmatched. I’ve never read or heard of a period like this and I’ve read about many historical periods. But not one in which you can talk to young people the way you can at the college level today and find out that they believe nothing, want nothing, hope nothing, expect nothing, dream nothing, desire nothing. Push them far enough and they’ll say “yeah, I’ve got to get a job. I spent a lot of money at Duke”. That’s not what I’m talking about here. They hope nothing. Expect nothing. Dream nothing. Desire nothing. And it is a fair question to ask whether a society that produces this reaction in its young is worthy of existence at all. It really is. It’s worth asking that. Whether it’s worth being here at all

In 1993 Rick Roderick talks about the students he met while teaching at Duke university. As he goes on to say, these are the youth he met at a site of great privilege… what of youth elsewhere? More to the point, what of the society which works to produce the conditions within this (postmodern) reason manifests itself. What I take Roderick to essentially be saying here is that late capitalism has begun to produce the last men of whom Nietzsche wrote a century earlier. Of course this is ultimately an empirical thesis and one that can only be investigated from a standpoint which takes human concerns seriously. Otherwise the possibility of understanding their debasement and loss is foreclosed from the start.