Youth are the rebels, everybody knows that.

But I’ve been mulling over a line from a link

while teenagers are often portrayed in popular culture as being naturally “rebellious”, they are in fact incredibly conformist and hypersensitive to matters regarding social opinion and approval. This may seem unbelievable to any parent who has experienced the struggle with surly and disobedient adolescents, probing for opportunities to reset the boundaries of dominance and power in the relationship. But that ‘rebellion’ is merely the manifestation of the teenager’s status radars switching targets away from their parents and locking instead to the worldview and attitudes of their peers and that of the general mainstream culture.

-from here.

Anyone who has ever been a teenager or been around them remembers the hyperconformity.  That’s doubly true today when teenagerhood extends well into people’s 20s.

So where does the rebel thing come from?  The linked explanation isn’t the whole of it.

The real explanation is this.  Youth aren’t very experienced.  They are not wise.  They absorb their culture’s expectations in the form of a few bright line rules and then massively conform to those expectations by attacking all the apparently unprincipled exceptions, the nuanced actual reality of the principles when expressed in a community of living humans.  They rebel against the real thing in conformity to a strawman.

There is no intrinsic direction of youth rebellion and conformity.   It can be harnessed for good, like the Prophet is trying to do now.