YOUNG PEOPLE IN PAX ARE BUILT DIFFERENT
A CASE STUDY OF HOW HISTORY SHAPES WORLDVIEWS
Yadmila Shafik
Young people in the Emberwood Coast are shedding the constraints of gender identity and romantic attraction, indulging in exotic and experimental belief systems and upending capitalist economic dogma. They’re sporting extravagant colours, revealing clothing, unafraid of tattoos and piercings, colorful hair and prone to alternative and loud music.
In contrast, the young people in Packilvania are doubling down on stringent gender roles, championing strict adherence to religious dogma, openly supportive of missionary work and the state-sanctioned use of physical force to quash atheists and apostates. Young people in Pax are sharing the latest trends on head-coverings and full-length robes.
Why are the two so different?
In Packilvania, the Communist Party of Packilvania heavily repressed religion and was responsible for genocide and the use of nuclear weapons against its own citizens. People in the older generation were indoctrinated with a far more loose understanding of Paxism that had adapted under Communist rule be less overtly religious. Older people had come to be less worried about gender roles and so on and older people are simultaneously highly speciest and xenophobic. Old people do not value the old art forms and ways of dress that were serverely threatened by the Communists.
The trauma that the nation experienced under Communist rule, the triumph of monarchy and religion over it and the economic prosperity that has arisen from liberalisation of the economy, has shaped young people to view the relative gender equality, atheism and the stark Socialist aesthetic as being associated with and inextricably linked from a government that was even more cruel and brutal than the one we have today (which is both remarkable and frightening given that Packilvania’s scores on the Freedom in the World Index are appalling).
Although the nation has become more advanced, prosperous and the world in which it exists more closely connected, the reality is that the circumstances and history have shaped the aspirations of young people. Young people in Packilvania aspire to marriage because of the status and stability it brings, the mutual economic support it provides and out of the trauma that teenage pregnancy, wanton physical appetites, fatherless households, and widespread divorce brought under their parents and grandparents during the Communist Party’s rule which included assailing traditional Paxist family values.
Young people in Packilvania also have less access to higher education and white-collar professions than their peers in other countries. Whereas an Emberitian or Volkian might aspire to a post-graduate university qualification and job in consultancy and a modern furnished apartment, a young person in Packilvania might aspire to write their 12th grade examination, get a carpentry apprenticeship, start a shop, become a vehicle mechanic or add machines to his family’s farm. These might seem like trite or even backwards aspirations in a world that is moving full-steam in the direction of global trade, the service economy and gig-work, but the reality is that although Pax’s economy has grown, the base from which it started is far lower than its peers.
Young people in Packilvania are drawn to prayer, regular attendance and participation in religious institutions and to subsequently support its dogma and ideals because it offers a sense community, a place to socialise and explore one’s extracurricular interests and it channels the energy and ideas of young people through missionary work, and service to the community. The reality is that Packilvanian communities in the past did not have many services or forms of entertainment nor did the Communist Party provide space for young people to be involved in the way that the Magisterium of Paxism has. As such, young people in Packilvania are more likely to be religious fundamentalists and literalist interpreters of the Writings of Paxism.
Although there is modern entertainment and media, the heavy censorship, surveillance and restrictions on the formation of politically-inclined groupings like student associations etc., young people in Packilvania do not have the same ready access to information about the outside world and alternative perspectives as their counterparts abroad. Supplemented by state propaganda, young people in Packilvania are more sceptical of foreign ideals and less likely to fall under their influence. Furthermore, the world is growing away from Packilvania is areas such as language, dress, to basic things like telling the time, counting etc., that the outside world feels more alien and hostile than it might to young people from South Hills or FPS.
Young people are also a demographic that the government cannot ignore. This might be surprising in a country where the government seems to ignore all of its citizens. Because most young groupings exist within and express themselves through the lens of Paxism, the government is incentivised to listen to them and has shown more leniency in allowing these groupings to form and express themselves. For instance, female activist Dumila Shabar has been a well-known advocate of the abolition of divorce because of how women often lose their status and wealth in a way that men don’t and she’s part of the Girls for Noi organisation that espouses female submission to religious values while making female hygiene products more widely accessible and women’s health issues less taboo. The government has buckled to this pressure by announcing that they will be receiving public comments for and developing legislation to look at addressing the issue of divorce.
Another young leader, Rubal Jimhadeen, has called for arranged marriages. Young men from Packilvania who move from the countryside to the city struggle to find wives in the city because of differing lifestyles and economic positions. Thus, Rubal has called for parents to take arranged marriages more seriously to give these frustrated young men the traditional and Conservative households and children that they long for. This machismo and self-serving hypermasculine worldview might be troublesome in the Liberal nations but we’re seeing this idea catch on, as dating apps have been developed to link parents and help them advertise their children for marriage.
Young men in Pax who are filled with religious and nationalist zeal, whose work is on the fields and in the factories instead of behind the desk as their Liberal peers, see military duty and combat experience as a dignified and prestigious and masculine outlet for their energy and adventuring spirit. Thus, military action in foreign nations serves the tertiary purpose of relieving them of some of that appetite and helping them excise it. Young people resent their parents for their lax attitude to prayer and conspicuous lack of attendance in religious services. Coupled with the charisma of famous preachers, they are drawn to this adventurist religious nationalist identity.
In conclusion, we in the Liberal democracies often take for granted what a young person desires and is like, but nations like Packilvania (of which we are grateful there are not many), show us how different people can be and how differently they can operate.