I remember vividly a hippy student teacher we briefly had as a substitute in my primary school class in the mid-’70s. This fellow was a wild-eyed, long-haired radical straight out of a Bircher fantasy.
Not that he stood out that much from our regular teacher, really. I never thought it odd at the time, but my school then was clearly an early salient in the Marxists’ Long March through the Institutions. The teachers played Richard Nixon’s resignation speech live over the school PA. My classroom teacher put a copy of the Little Red Book at the front of the room for weeks when Mao died.
So, what made this particular hippy commie stand out in my memory so much? The time he solemnly lectured us about how ‘old timey’ societies forced everyone to do what the old people said. “They thought, just because a person was old, they were wiser than everyone else – and that’s a pretty stupid idea, isn’t it?”
Ooh, yeah, preach it, brother: Well a young man, ain’t got nothin’ in the world these days! (Keith Moon drum solo). I swallowed it wholesale.
It was only much later that I realised that this long-haired freaky person was just full of shit.
Aristotle didn’t think young people should study politics.
Near the beginning of the Nicomachean Ethics, he says:
“This is why a youth is not a suitable student of political science; for he lacks experience of the actions in life, which are the subject and premises of our arguments.”
The Greek philosopher knew better than any modern education department apparatchik that raw youth is no qualification for judging the messy business of running a society.
Politics, Aristotle argues, isn’t like mathematics, where the same formula always produces the same answer. It deals with human beings, and human beings are messy, emotional, inconsistent, and endlessly complicated. Understanding them requires living.
Someone who has never managed a family, worked through failure, experienced betrayal, or carried real responsibility simply hasn’t seen enough of life to judge it well. They may know the theories, but they don’t yet know people.
That’s why experience remains one of the greatest teachers. Wisdom doesn’t come from another TikTok rant or winning another argument on campus. It comes from years of watching how people actually behave and learning the difference between what sounds good and what actually works.
Cognitive science has since confirmed what Aristotle observed from hard living. Young brains are not fully developed until the mid-20s. Before that, young people are, in every sense of the word, retarded: impaired intellectual development in key executive functions, delayed maturity and prone to socially inappropriate or foolish behaviour under pressure.
Progressives are perfectly happy to cite this science when it suits their agenda. They demand we treat juveniles as not fully responsible for their actions in the criminal justice system. They insist on restricting teenagers from social media precisely because their undeveloped pea-brains are vulnerable to addiction, manipulation and mental health damage. ‘Protect the children from their own immature neurology,’ they cry.
Yet the same crowd insists these same tiny-brained morons are mature enough to decide the future direction of entire nations by casting a vote that carries exactly the same weight as a 50-year-old who has raised kids, paid taxes for decades, fought wars or buried parents.
It is the most glaring hypocrisy in modern politics. If a 16-year-old’s brain isn’t ready for unfiltered Instagram or adult criminal responsibility, how in God’s name is it ready to steer the ship of state on climate policy, immigration, energy or war?
The Greens know exactly what they’re doing. They are the party of perpetual adolescence, forever promising that feelings and slogans will triumph over reality. Lowering the voting age to 16 isn’t about ‘empowering youth’. It’s about importing a fresh cohort of indoctrinated, low-information voters who have been marinated in school curricula that treat Western civilisation as original sin and treat experience as bigotry.
Well, now we know why the Greens are so desperate to lower the voting age to 16: they’re the only people stupid enough to vote Green.
