Suzanne Harrington: Gen Z are temperamentally unsuited to dictatorship
Suzanne Harrington at home in Brighton. Pic: Andrew Dunsmore.
We seem to be increasingly loving sensationalised misinformation as the old world order is replaced by no order, as stable structures and alliances collapse like wet cardboard, and previously senior sober political settings are reduced to Armando Iannucci levels of squirming farce as Trump asks his cabinet, “Is anyone unhappy with Elon?”
Cue buttock clenching, nose scratching, eyeball swivelling, throat clearing, armpit prickling, as the non-elected non-Cabinet member hovers behind the table of suited old white men – and a handful of decorative women – like a Pound Shop Darth Vadar in his all-black and pathetic baseball cap. This is going to make a great comedy one day – just not right now.
But that’s not the misinformation I’m talking about – the presence of an unelected far-right oligarch pulling the strings of an American white supremacist wannabe dictator is, terribly unfortunately, horrid fact.
No, this is about recent reports from Channel 4 suggesting that half of Gen Z would quite like a dictator to be in charge.
This was reported as fact in several UK publications, including , which ran a piece headed, “Voting’s such a hassle… of course Gen Z like dictators.”
Except the true figure of 13 to 27-year-olds who’d favour dictatorship over the supposed “hassle” of democracy turns out to be not 52% but 6%.
Smelling a misinformation rat – seemingly more from slack data analysis and lazy, sensationalist media interpretation than anything more dastardly – some academics conducted further research, which concluded that Gen Z are not, in fact, a bunch of little fascists.
They also concluded that online polling, where people are required to give tick-box responses to complex questions, can be prone to gross oversimplification and skewed results, on which the media fall like slavering dogs, howling about how Gen Z want Kim Jong Un to be their dad.
These academics who corrected the misinformation could just as easily have asked the parents of Gen Z about how they think their children would fare under dictatorship, and been deafened by the sonic boom of hollow laughter.
Did anyone conducting the original research actually come into contact with a living, breathing member of this demographic?
The same Gen Z who scream oppression when asked to remove mouldy pizza boxes from under their beds, who call their lawyer when requested to pick wet towels off the floor, who’ll cancel you without even looking up from their phones when you suggest they empty the bin?
Never has a generation been clearer about who is not the boss of them.
Once, when trying to instigate a democratic washing-up rota, where my two Gen Zers would do the dishes on alternate evenings, I put a sheet of paper on the fridge with seven columns, Mon-Tues-Wed-Thurs-Fri-Sat-Sun.
In response, in each column they wrote a single letter - F. U. C. K. O. F. F.
(I have kept this sheet of paper, and made two copies, to present them each on the birth of their first child).
And invested in a dishwasher, having concluded that Gen Z are temperamentally unsuited to dictatorship, the way ice is unsuited to sunlight. It melts down.
