One can only speculate about the forces that drive this crisis, but odds are that we are witnessing a cultural mood that cannot be reduced to political-economic considerations. There’s a generalized anxiety when one has always been supervised, as this generation has. Moreover, students suffer under mountainous debt loads. Professional work is being destabilized. Careers dissolve into serial jobs, or the insecure “gig economy.”

The prospect of gargantuan, destructive climate change must also have young people rattled. It ought to. There are actual apocalypses in the making.

But movements that change the world are the creations of confident people — confident despite their hurt, confident despite their fear. If they don’t start out confident, they learn how to create strong communities and become more so. As leaders test themselves in action, the better ones rise and the lesser ones fade. The militants suffer, yes, but they find ways to learn a broader repertoire of feelings and skills. They can imagine putting an end to their suffering, at least much of it.

Accordingly, they make plans. Excited by the prospect of testing their strength and winning victories, they set out to line up friends, isolate adversaries, change the minds of those they hold responsible or, that failing, throw them off. When they win victories, they celebrate them, and look toward next steps. They are not only, as Dostoyevsky wrote, “the insulted and injured”; they are also the empowered.