By Jonah Goldberg
Friday, December 26, 21025
The Wall Street Journal reports
on the eruption of “six seven” mania
overtaking America’s youth.
Math teachers are at the front line of this numerological
contagion. “If you’re like, ‘Hey, you need to do questions six, seven,’ they
just immediately start yelling, ‘Six Seven!’” a teacher recounts. “It’s like
throwing catnip at cats.”
“Now teachers avoid breaking kids into groups of six or
seven, or asking them to turn to page 67, or instructing them to take six or
seven minutes for a task,” the Journal’s Ellen Gamerman writes. “Six is
a perfect number, and seven is a prime number, but only a glutton for
punishment would put them together in front of a bunch of 13-year-olds.”
Gamerman goes on, “The meme’s meaning (and its whole
point) is that it has no meaning. Maybe if French philosopher Albert Camus had
a TikTok, he could explain it, given how well he understood repetitive cycles
of senselessness.”
It’s true—Camus wrote a lot about the absurdity and
irrationality of the world and man’s desire to impose coherence and order upon
it. “Man stands face to face with the irrational,” Camus observed in The
Myth of Sisyphus. “He feels within him his longing for happiness and for
reason.”
“The absurd is born,” according to Camus, from the
“confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the
world.” But what did Camus say of children? I don’t know. So maybe the kids are
not so existentialist as the Journal suggests?
Perhaps the kids are concerned with the president’s abuse
of executive power—the exact topic addressed by Alexander Hamilton in Federalist
No. 67? Coincidence? You decide.
Maybe Generation Alpha is despairing of the moral rot and
decay of the culture they are inheriting. Why should the youth live in a world
where virtue is so corrupted? Isn’t that precisely the question posed by
Shakespeare in his Sonnet
67?
Or perhaps it’s a more numerologically rich cri de coeur.
Yes, six is a mathematically “perfect” number—it equals the sum of its proper
divisors—and seven is a prime number. But 67 is a super-prime number. By which
I mean, of course, that 67 is the 19th prime number, making it a
“super-prime” because 19 is also prime. It’s also part of a “sexy prime
quadruplet” (61, 67, 73, 79) where the primes differ by six. I don’t have to
tell you what happened in the years 1961, 1967, 1973, or 1979.
Nor do I need to remind you that Genesis 24 contains
exactly 67 verses. This is part of the Bible where the dying Abraham instructs
his servant to ensure that Isaac marries within the tribe and not to the
Canaanites so that the covenant may continue. This is the first time in the
Bible when the covenant depends on human will and planning—not God’s
intervention—to survive. Isaac represents the need for the next generation to
continue Abraham’s promise. It is also one of the most important statements on
the need for monogamous marriage and female or matriarchal agency to perpetuate
the covenant. The sacred is carried forward in the mundane work of faith and
prayer.
Whether this has anything to do with the fact that Paul
might have written 2 Timothy in the year 67 or that the Great Jewish Revolt
against Rome erupted that year can be reasonably debated.
But it can be simpler than that. Six is the number of
creation, labor, toil, while seven is the number of completion: Earth was
created in six days, finished on the seventh. After all, this is why there are
six letters in the word “sinful” and seven in “correct.”
Perhaps this is just a pithy statement on the cycle of
life (implicit in Sonnet 67); from alpha to omega. In other words the
youth—Generation Alpha—are offering a reminder to us all that they, like Isaac,
are being asked to pick up the generational torch. Of course, the work of
mankind is never complete in this world, which might explain that the
Protestant Bible only has 66 books. One more would imply man’s work is done.
Such apocalyptic speculation is buttressed by the fact
that six plus seven equals 13, the number of betrayal, much like Loki, the 13th guest
at the Valhalla feast at which he orchestrated the murder of Baldr. Twelve
is the number of completeness—12 months in the year—while 13 introduced
disorder into the world.
Thirteen is of course the first year we affix the suffix
“-teen” to and the age of manhood and womanhood in Judaism. Perhaps this “six
seven” tempest is a protest against the loss of innocence and the burdens of
adulthood?
Obviously, I could be overthinking this. After all, “six
seven” is another way of saying “June 7.” The significance of this date cannot be
exaggerated. More than ever before, kids today are monitored by the panopticon
of modern technology. Why not allude to the fact that June 7, 1949, was the day
before the publication of George Orwell’s 1984, harkening back to a
simpler time before we’d been exposed to the terrible burden of his secular
prophecy?
Today’s children crave both a connection to the past, a
sense of independence, and a revival of patriotism. What better way to achieve
all three than to celebrate the day the Declaration of Independence was
formally introduced at the Continental Congress?
You don’t have to be a mathematical genius and
codebreaker like Alan Turing to see the signs. I mean, Turing died on June 7,
1954. Nor do you have to catastrophize about the numerous demographic and
environmental crises looming over Generation Alpha to appreciate that Malthus’
essay on population was published
on June 7, 1798.
Surely, some or all of these explanations are true,
particularly if we feel that there’s truth to them. As Steve Bannon says,
“There are no conspiracies but there are no coincidences.” To believe that
children, those fonts of wisdom and innocence, would be celebrating absurdity
just to torture their elders is too terrible to contemplate. It was a child who
spotted the falsity of the emperor’s new clothes. Children are the great
“noticers” in every civilization, and they can see the connections where jaded
adults have voluntarily rendered themselves blind.
To reject the wisdom that comes out of the mouths of
babes is to deny the very idea that children are the embodiment of virtue and
to reject the idea that feelings are superior to facts.
What’s next? Are we to reject the way the youth have
suddenly “noticed”
the Jews? This would be like rejecting the causal connection between Tylenol
and autism simply because “science” says there isn’t one. Are we to believe
that America put a man on the moon just because our elders say it happened? Are
we going to take “Mrs.” Macron’s
word for it that “she” is a woman or are we going to go with our feelings?
“Six seven” must mean something, for to believe
otherwise is to believe that the passion of the young can be of no consequence
or significance. If youthful passion can have no weight, no meaning, beyond the
youthful desire to be part of something fun, regardless of how stupid, silly, or
pointless it may be, then we might have to contend with the reality that truth
is not simply a fad or feeling, and that “noticing” is not proof of anything
other than one’s desire to see what we want to see. Some
things have to be believed to be seen. And as we know from those fake
moon-landing films, merely seeing doesn’t require believing.
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