Vicky Ferré

Sooner or later, Millennials and Gen Z as a whole are going to realize something huge. For 30 years, almost every institution that shapes how a generation thinks leaned the same way: schools, universities, media, film, culture. Not through a conspiracy. Through slow capture, one position at a time, one hire at a time. And humans, by default, believe what they're told over and over. That's not stupidity, it's biology. We trust the teacher, the journalist, the documentary. So what were we told over and over? That capitalism is the problem. That it destroys the planet, deepens inequality, crushes people. What we were almost never told: that this is the very system that lifted more than a billion people out of extreme poverty. And that the alternative, tried in the USSR, China, Cambodia, North Korea, Cuba, ended in famines, gulags and mass graves. Tens of millions dead. Nearly 100 million according to The Black Book of Communism. Who ever saw that number in a school textbook? Who ever saw a mainstream movie about the Holodomor? How many Che t-shirts for every serious class on the Khmer Rouge? That's the asymmetry. They didn't necessarily lie to a generation. They chose what to show it. And that works far better than a lie. But it never holds. Because reality always sends the bill. Young people see the rent, the taxes, the public services falling apart despite record spending. They compare. They trace the causes. They connect the dots. And the day they truly connect them, they'll understand they were the target of the biggest psychological operation in human history. On the most important questions there are: what creates wealth, what destroys societies, what kills entire peoples. That day, they won't turn to the people who held the mic for 30 years. They'll turn to the ones who called it out when it was socially costly to do so. And they'll ask them to fix it. They say we're turning to the dark side. We're just walking out of the cave.