Disturbing result of the
Youth value study 2021

Prof. Bernhard Heinzlmaier and Antje Maly-Samiralow on the results of the 2021 Youth Values Study.

In Austria, only a third of young people still trust the government. In Germany, the figure is 49%. Young people and young adults trust the opposition even less, just a third of those under 30. In both countries, however, the opposition was unable to capitalize on the government's poor coronavirus management.
This is fatal insofar as it shows that there are no alternatives available within the political system for those dissatisfied with the government. The crisis of representation in politics is about to take on a life of its own.
While almost 50% of young people in Austria rate the government's actions during the coronavirus crisis as "not sufficient" or "sufficient", this figure is only 15% in Germany. On the other hand, there is broad agreement that young people do not feel heard or represented, that their concerns and fears are ignored and that they are not perceived as individuals and members of society.
If 70% of the younger generation feel excluded from the political discourse, they will consequently not participate in it. Then it is not their discourse, but a debate that takes place in a different universe, so to speak. They have the impression that the political and economic elites are exclusively concerned with their own interests and have lost sight of the rest of society, meaning that they are actually operating in a separate and separate universe. Young people complain that the needs and questions of the population as a whole are simply not heard by the elites and are therefore not negotiated.
It is obvious that young people feel played off against older social groups. As soon as the elites need partners to achieve political goals among the population, it is the 50-plus generation that they tend to negotiate with. It is easier to satisfy them than young people, who, because they are at the beginning of their own lives, make significantly more radical demands.

The loss of trust also manifests itself in the evaluation of state institutions
During the pandemic, young people's trust in parliaments, governments and the European Union has fallen to an all-time low. Trust in journalists and newspapers was already catastrophically low before that. In contrast, both the under-30s in Austria and Germany trust the healthcare system. Two thirds of young people feel well looked after in hospitals and by doctors in private practice. Of all state institutions, the healthcare system enjoys the highest reputation among the younger generation, with 71% of young Austrians and 63% of young Germans. This is in marked contrast to the legal system, in which only 50% of young people have confidence.
Authoritarian threats and opinion manipulation come to nothing
Neither Austrian nor German teenagers and young adults are in the Covid risk group. The overwhelming majority had no fear of infection at the beginning of the crisis in March 2020. Worries and fears were more likely to be directed at older relatives and acquaintances.
Despite massive campaigns by the federal governments of both countries, which were conducted in close cooperation with the media with the widest reach and aimed to generate respect among young people for the dangers of the coronavirus, young people remained calm. Only 5% of Austrians and 8% of Germans are still very afraid of infection one year later, in March 2021. A country comparison shows that young Germans are more in agreement with their government than their Austrian counterparts. While 40% of young Austrians show no fear of the danger posed by the virus, only 27% in Germany are relaxed about the viral threat.
While 80% of young Germans think the restriction of social contacts is okay, the figure in Austria is only 65%. Skepticism towards the restrictions of the coronavirus policy is generally more pronounced in Austria than in Germany. In both countries, it is primarily the lower and middle educational levels that are skeptical to extremely critical of the authoritarian government measures. By contrast, the higher educational levels have a positive view of state intervention that restricts freedom. Classic thought patterns are clearly visible.

The social divide is widening - factually and ideologically
While the middle classes have been concerned with maintaining their status over the past two decades, as evidenced by the extreme efforts of the middle classes to send their offspring to secondary school because education was the only guarantee of economic prosperity, the fear of relegation is currently on the rise. In the lower social classes, the hope of social advancement has been buried. Meanwhile, the upper third of society seems to be hardly or not at all affected by fears of social decline. The assessments of the coronavirus measures are correspondingly negative:
While 43% of members of the working and middle classes in Austria consider the measures to be "far too strict", only 32% of young people from the upper classes do so. In Germany, this ratio is 38% to 23%. It is striking that young people from the middle and educated classes are much more open to extreme measures that restrict freedom than young people from the working class, who are much more affected by the economic consequences of such measures, in some cases to an existential extent.
The activists of the post-structuralist left, most of whom come from academic and high-school graduate families, are more or less advocating the Chinese way in their demands. The state is being called upon to make the virus disappear with strict lockdown measures lasting several weeks, without weighing up economic, cultural or social goods. Although this is a similarly unrealistic strategy as the idea of creating a functioning social housing market by nationalizing the large real estate companies, this idea continues to be floated, especially by a platform called "Zero-Covid".
The left seems to have returned to the world of ideas of simple solutions, in the tradition of Lenin's under-complex saying, "Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country". Measures are only considered sensible if they are particularly rigid, undifferentiated and, above all, HARD and are enforced without pardon.
It is hardly surprising that members of the higher educational classes place more trust in state institutions than members of the lower and middle educational classes. This may be due to the fact that those who sit in the respective institutions, whether as teachers, civil servants, judges or politicians, come from their own milieu, while working-class children hardly find any representatives of their class there. They represent their own interests. And so it is only logical that the economic and social consequences of the HARD measures have to be shouldered primarily by socially disadvantaged young people and their families.
While unemployment in the lower income segment, in which people from educationally disadvantaged backgrounds predominantly work, has risen sharply, which has also had an impact on the number of training places available, it has remained relatively stable among university graduates. Public sector employees and civil servants as well as higher-paid jobs in companies have hardly been affected by cuts so far.
In terms of the lives of young people over the past year, this means that the lower and middle classes have had to cope with more significant cuts. In addition to the economic restrictions, there is also pressure within families. Where people live closely together, tensions are more likely to arise, which young people can hardly avoid.
The material class divide between the educated classes on the one hand and the middle and lower educated on the other is increasingly reflected in the consciousness of the underprivileged. The first signs of a new form of class consciousness are evidently emerging, giving rise to a sense of community solidarity among the losers of the class divide and thus also the willingness to take to the streets with the others affected and fight together for a society based on solidarity.
What further reinforces the division in society between the "bottom" and the "top" is the increasingly classist everyday rhetoric of the educated classes, but above all the academic/university milieu and the art and culture industry, which sometimes deny the common people the qualification to participate in democracy, partly because they vote for right-wing populist parties. When cultural professionals speak of "dull underclasses", they deepen the rifts instead of overcoming them and drive those despised in this way into the arms of right-wing parties, where they believe they will be heard and feel at home.

Fear of the future and loss of age-appropriate development opportunities
The second sore point revealed by the study is young people's fear of the future and loss, which primarily affects the middle and lower income classes. This applies to both the younger generation and their parents, who for the first time since 1945 do not assume that their children will be better off, but at best hope that they can maintain their status. This increases the pressure on young people to perform in an increasingly competitive environment to an extent that is likely to induce highly toxic stress with far-reaching consequences for their mental and physical health. While they are competing for fewer apprenticeships and jobs, the lockdown policy deprives them of the opportunity to prepare for their future lives. Cutting the cord from family security into independent life is thwarted to a certain extent because they are deprived of their natural environment, their peer groups, on which they depend.
Since the 1980s, value studies have asked which areas of life are particularly important to people. Study participants are asked to assess the areas of politics, religion, work, education, friends, family and leisure. If there was one notable long-term trend to be observed, it was the steady increase in importance of the relationship areas "friends" and "leisure". In the 2010s, the scene remained relatively stable, with hardly any major shifts between the different areas of life. And then came the coronavirus.
For many young people, the lockdown policy has brought dramatic changes to their lives. Friendship relationships in particular have been put to the test. A comparison of figures should prove this. In 2019, over 70% of young Austrians aged 16 to 29 stated that "friends and acquaintances" was a "very important" area of life for them. At that time, there were no coronavirus restrictions, so young people were largely free to organize their everyday lives according to their own wishes and needs.
One year later, in the midst of the first lockdown in March 2020, the importance of this area of life had already fallen to 55% and another year later, in March 2021, we arrived at 50%. These figures not only mean that young people's contact with their friends has drastically reduced, but that the intensity of friendship relationships has also decreased significantly. Where friendship contacts used to dominate everyday life, today loneliness or the dominance of parental control has become stronger again. Where you used to be able to enjoy the adventure of freedom with your peers, you now find yourself under the guiding control of your parents, whose rule has been restored by the coronavirus restrictions.

Cutting the cord under difficult conditions
The circle of friends is the most important social institution alongside the family when it comes to the development of adolescents into adults. In the course of their development, young people have the task of breaking away from the particularistic family and integrating into a universalistic society. This means that they must also learn to survive in an environment that is emotionally neutral, skeptical or hostile towards them.
While the family is an emotional bond between people who are close to each other and who predominantly treat each other with solidarity, society is a social space in which rational calculation and competition dominate. This difficult transition from being emotionally uplifted in a primary group characterized by solidarity relationships to a coolly calculating, rational, competitive society geared towards market-based exchange processes is accompanied by groups of friends and peers, who help to overcome the challenges of this transitory phase of life.
In times of the coronavirus pandemic, peer groups were predominantly only accessible via the media, and many young people realized that digital communication cannot replace unmediated contact, which allows the use of a much larger repertoire of symbolic means of expression and also enables physical contact and closeness. Face-to-face communication is easier and, above all, more error-free than the distancing medium of a laptop or cell phone.
The quality of social relationships in coronavirus times was only half as good and peer support was only half as effective. People were particularly restricted where the power of the logical-rational discourse medium of language ended and the sphere of presentational symbolism, communication with the help of speechless signs, understanding with the support of mimetic-physical gestures began.
The halving of communication through the exclusion of the touchable and fully visible body from interpersonal exchange ultimately led not only to a feeling of emotional abandonment and sensual isolation, but also right into a phenomenon that Mark Fisher called "depressive hedonia" and which consists of young people, relegated to the commercial offerings of the digital market, no longer being able to follow anything other than their own capacity for pleasure and thus at the same time moving further and further away from the fulfillment of their desires for pleasure.
The addiction to pleasure, the constant attempts to experience the sensational and the extraordinary, means that in the end the pleasure becomes stale, boring, dull and dreary. We have already seen everything, felt everything, experienced everything and so all that remains in the end is the repetition of worn-out and used screen experiences that can neither ignite a fire, nor trigger passions, nor satisfy desire and thus lead straight into a permanent melancholy.
So the isolated young person sits alone at home, at the mercy of the pleasures constantly flickering across the screen, but all of which are located outside of a social situation, a community of solidarity, and thus miss the goal of gaining pleasure. Because true pleasure and genuine fulfillment of desire are closely linked to communal experiences, to meeting real people and real and unmediated experiences.
Unsatisfied, people fall into a state of excessive demands and lethargy, into constant self-reflection and introspection. At the end of the day, there is the uncertainty of no longer being able to control their own life planning, of not being able to achieve the goals they have set themselves, of not being able to get into a stable situation at all, of not being able to act and live without the support of their parents.
At the same time, the young people feel pushed back into the family. The independence they have already achieved is taken back, at least in part, and the control-free space they have conquered is reappropriated by their parents. The close parental ties that are now re-established, the reconstruction of a control and surveillance culture that has long since been overcome, leads to tensions within the family that are experienced as particularly oppressive, especially by the under-18s, who are still in a state of partial autonomy, because they end up having to submit once again to the state-legitimized position of power of their parents, who, now that they are working from home, once again have constant access to the young people.
Satisfactory and well-functioning parent-adolescent relationships, which can only be conducted on an equal footing with mutual respect due to the young people's ability to keep their distance and relative autonomy, are once again turning into relationships with an asymmetrical distribution of power, in which the adults decide and the young people have to obey. The "shared home office" of the generations is particularly oppressive where the living space is small and there is too little retreat space available for the individual family member. It is easier for the four of us to survive a lockdown in a 300m² apartment than in an apartment measuring just 75m². The stress that young people affected by cramped living conditions are now experiencing is not an individual but a social issue and must therefore be tackled as a social problem and attempted to be solved through social measures. The aim is therefore not to increase the resilience of young people, but to improve the material resource situation of the families.
If we now compare the situation in the various areas of young people's lives in Austria with that in Germany at a glance, we can see that there are hardly any differences. Institutionalized religion and party politics are equally irrelevant to the everyday lives of under-30s in both countries. Friends, education and work have lost importance in both countries due to school closures, short-time work in companies and unemployment. The two fields of activity that dominate everything are leisure and family. They are more important to young people than ever before. However, leisure time is now more heavily burdened with the phenomenon of "depressive hedonism", a listless preoccupation with consumption, and the family with an increased level of stress caused by the restoration of asymmetrical power relations that have been overcome and the lack of material resources.

The future is getting bleaker, but not for everyone equally
The coronavirus pandemic has led to a darkening of many young people's view of the future. The group of people in Austria who see the future of society as "rather gloomy" now stands at 42%, while only 23% are confident about the future and the rest have a mixed view of the situation. If we look at the development of the pessimistic view of the future of the community in Austria since last year, we must note that the group of pessimists has increased by 10 percentage points from March 2020 to March 2021. Among young women, the proportion of those pessimistic about the future has even risen by 15 percentage points. In Germany, the situation is less drastic, but even there the group of pessimists is significantly larger than that of optimists.
Only 41% of German young people and 37% of Austrian young people still have an expectation of advancement, while the rest believe that they will either maintain the status of their family of origin or even descend. A look at the subgroups of the Austrian data reveals a surprising result, as it is the group of young people with a migrant background who literally give Austrian society an injection of optimism.
45% of them believe that their children will be better off than they are today. Among young Austrians, only 26% believe this. Almost 40% of Austrians even assume that their children will one day be worse off than they are and will descend from the social sphere in which they currently find themselves.
Why are young migrants in particular, who in sociological literature are generally accused of multiple disadvantages and stylized as the victim group par excellence, so optimistic compared to Austrians? Based on the research of recent years, the answer is quite clear. The main reason is that the vast majority of them do NOT see themselves as victims, but on the contrary, as combative climbers who will roll up the field from behind.
Above all, those who manage to free themselves from the oppressive community obligations of their cultures of origin, who manage to take on the currently socially dominant "Western" role of the individualistic lone fighter with family ties and who throw themselves into the competition for a good education and top jobs, are usually superior to their competitors without a migration background because they have a valuable asset for a competitive society: the unconditional will to rise. In contrast to young Germans and Austrians, who are excessively self-reflective, scrupulous and full of guilt, especially if they come from an educational background, the young upwardly mobile migrant thinks pragmatically, is self-confident and has the unconditional will to take advantage of the opportunities offered by two of the richest countries in the world.

Return to conservatism
The development of values and attitudes shows a clear shift towards conservatism among young people. In Germany and Austria, around 70% of respondents value "traditions", over 80% each value "cleanliness, order and thriftiness" and the traditional middle-class family is also highly valued in both countries. National pride has reached a new high among young Austrians during the coronavirus crisis. As early as December 2019, 76% of respondents were proud to be Austrian. In the course of the coronavirus crisis, this figure increased slightly to almost 82% by March 2021.
Patriotism is much more pronounced among young Austrians than among their German peers. Only 72% of young Germans have a strongly developed national consciousness. So why has patriotism developed so strongly among young people in both countries and in all subgroups of society, i.e. to the same extent among men, women, educated and uneducated people, and even among people with a migration background, there are still 65% in Germany who are proud to be German?
One reason for this could be the "retrotopian" mood that has gripped young people in both countries over the last 20 years. People in a retrotopian mood are both skeptical about the future and in love with the past. They are inspired by the belief that not everything was better in the past, but many things were. They envy the fact that their parents were still able to build their lives in stable, socially regulated conditions. Jobs were secure, incomes rose from year to year, education was still worth something and competition in the world of work and business was still "civilized" by social partnership regulations. You could get a loan from the bank on favorable terms and neighbors helped build houses when they had time. A sense of community pervaded the time.
With the beginning of the neoliberal era in the 1980s, this idyll gradually came under pressure. The welfare state was dismantled, nationalized companies were privatized, the pressure to perform in companies and educational institutions increased, wage increases decreased and precarious employment spread. In line with the logic of neoliberal theorists, society was flooded with competition. Homo oeconomicus entered the scene, whose purpose in life stems from the battle of man against man and woman against woman and who only enters into communal relationships with others if he can use them for his own personal advantage. The market, freed from obstructive regulations, was able to unleash innovative and later disruptive forces and develop its dynamic for change.
In neoliberalism, change goes hand in hand with the destabilization of human living and working conditions as well as the spread of insecurity and fear, caused by deregulation of those systems of order that stabilize coexistence and an economization of the social. In particular, the financial capital empowered by the liberalization of stock exchange trading has transformed the world into a place where capital chases around the globe in search of opportunities for exploitation and subjects all conditions to its inhumane high-speed rhythm.
Young people from the middle and lower classes in particular do not see the changes taking place in the economy and society as the result of political and economic developments that come from within the society in which they live. Rather, they believe that these are coming to their country from outside in the course of digitalization and globalization and mediated by supranational structures. For example, the "social market economy" or the "social partnership" is seen as an Austrian or German achievement that must now be defended against the "gig economy" and "digital super corporations" that are invading their country from outside.
In the course of this "defensive struggle", the symbolic resources of the cultural sphere of the "homeland countries" are also mobilized in order to distinguish themselves from the neoliberal external enemies. Suddenly, people are no longer just proud to be Austrian, but are also bringing traditions, folk culture and old values into play in order to defend themselves against the onslaught of unleashed market totalitarianism.
As a result, 65% of young Germans and almost 70% of young Austrians suddenly find traditions important and 30% of Germans and over 50% of Austrians simply love folk music and traditional costumes. At the same time, old values such as thrift, order and cleanliness are experiencing a revival. Conservatism, conformism, emotional community ties, retraditionalization and regional ties are being used as cultural capital to defend the "homeland" against unwanted changes from outside. But traditions, old values, folk culture and community romance are only the colourful cultural façade behind which the real motives of the revolt against globalization are hidden, and these are material and socio-political interests such as secure jobs, wage increases, state health care and a stable pension system. On closer inspection, the upsurge in traditions, old values and nationalism reflects nothing other than young people's desire for "stability in life", a stable life course, material security and the desire for protection against social decline.

Conclusion
Young people are being subjected to an open-ended social experiment, which for many - as the data from the study already shows - is accompanied by a considerable loss of enjoyment of life and a simultaneous lack of prospects, which presumably does not allow for too many options.

Source: Institute for Youth Culture Research