life is more than a dress rehearsal

Today The Emperor has been computerized into a system willing to grant its children lordly prerequisites and sexual license while remaining resistant to essential reform. Under today’s system the young often appear as a generation of Rudolfs [the Crown Prince of Austria who committed suicide in 1889]: free and glamorous in theory, crushingly impotent in action; freely skeptical yet unable to establish one skeptic-proof premise; free to see themselves as unbounded individuals without ever arriving at successful individuality; free to press pleasure into numb excess; free to demand the absolute of their senses and their ideals only to be failed by both, overprivileged and hapless at once; free to sound the depths of sophisticated frustration.