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I’d like to say when they failed to mature into adults.
Maybe that age old problem of the oppressed in society becoming the oppressor (whose consciousness they have internalized – which is why media can be so powerful) . As a result of some sort of survival response the oppressed seek to become like the oppressors and seek share in their better way of life.
The oppressed are unable to take full responsibility for their lives and their families. Which could be a definition of being an adult.
They/we became oppressors as soon as we fell for Thatcherism in the late 1970’s. That’s when. This day was always on the cards even when the previous Tory PM’s presided over an expansion in credit.
It made a lot of us comfortable, gave us unlimited impact-free it seemed travel (the great car economy and an expansion in air travel). And now it’s all about to unravel.
But that’s because we were lied to. We’ve been lied to every inch of the way. The example I always look to is public transport – particularly railways, the place where I always start.
Railways were closed down because they were ‘inefficient’ and the land it stood on was sold off where possible for property development; trains, trolley buses and trams that gave us cleaner inner city travel were all sacrificed on the altar of car ownership and pollution called ‘freedom’; emission standards were set by unpolitical ‘experts’ – the car makers themselves who lied – and our economics was also beset by the same type of liar who told us greed was good; flying is so fast it has to be efficient (but lets not look at emissions or the tax breaks flying gets on its fuel and lets addle the Chunnel with loads of debt so it can’ t compete with air).
Our industry – wrongly accused of being quaint and outmoded was simply pillaged by the stock market and raped of its assets in the name of ‘efficiency’ – not even defended by the ministers who came from the cabal of financial raiders that destroyed it.
Our whole lives up to this point has been nothing but a confection that benefits the few over the interests of the many. It’s just so short-termist but portrayed as ‘natural’. We’ve been steered by vested interests into the wrong directions.
Freedom? Pah! Is freedom really freedom, or the illusion of freedom? In the West it is the latter I can tell you.
And now, having got used to all that, some of us – and I bet you it’s those mostly at the top – just do not want the party to end. The fact that all of a sudden we can’t do this or that is really hard to take but it also shows us something else.
Fear. ‘They’ are scared. They that have more to lose are scared. Really scared. And this is what you get.
A country that can’t sort out its pot holes, won’t let you speak your mind, starves its people but can stump up the cash for the coronation of a spoilt royal brat and his bit on the side – and we call that ‘prestige’!!!! ‘Prestige’! I ask you!?
My favourite book from development studies is Amartya Sen’s ‘Development as Freedom’. I’d recommend it to anyone here. He makes the fundamental point that without health, education, security, and adequate income for starters, there is no freedom. It’s a list that reflects what is delivered by public services and government in civilised countries. Much the same as Beveridge’s ‘Evils’ or Minouche Shafik’s in What We Owe Each Other.
It’s time that the debates about freedom were reclaimed by progressives from the warped and debased version of freedom promoted by today’s Right. Interestingly Biden is starting to do that in the US.
Well, prestige and freedom in capitalism now Robin is buying the latest car, the best house, best holiday, brands and bugger the consequences.
It’s the freedom to spend.
If the way we travel was one of the first great market manipulations of exploitation, the second one will be where we get our money from – which will increasingly be debt and not self-derived sufficient income by the look of things.
Capitalist nirvana it will be.
I think that type of freedom might only be true if you are one of the lucky ones with a decent income, a secure job and good health. Otherwise it’s the ‘freedom’ to become debt slaves. As Richard and others point out, private debt is a far bigger problem than state debt. Most of those new cars are bought on leasing schemes.
For others it is the ‘freedom’ to blame your problems on which ever group are being targeted by the Right at the time. Immigrants, the woke, inhabitants of Islington etc..
My favourite book from development studies is Amartya Sen’s ‘Development as Freedom’. I’d recommend it to anyone here. He makes the fundamental point that without health, education, security, and adequate income for starters, there is no freedom. It’s a list that reflects what is delivered by public services and government in civilised countries. Much the same as Beveridge’s ‘Evils’ or Minouche Shafik’s in What We Owe Each Other.
It’s time that the debates about freedom were reclaimed by progressives from the warped and debased version of freedom promoted by today’s Right.
I have never read that, but have his work on justice, which is good
I never believed the lies!
PSR – you nailed it.
Oppression is built into civilisation.
I am nit sure I agree
Isn’t oppression one of the opposites of civilization?
I think the mistake the baby-boomers made was the mistake that humans nearly always make.
The belief that the world as it is when we first become adults is the way that the world will always be.
Such was the rate of improvement in the quality of life for most people in the UK that we assumed that was the natural way of things.
It seems bizarre now that by the 1960s a major concern was that having decided we had solved most of the problems of living, we thought a big problem with the future was what we were going to do with our ever increasing leisure time.
Michael Young, the highly influential Labour party thinker of the time was very concerned that with the UK social structure based on class, privilege and wealth rapidly dying, it would be replaced by an equally repressive new social structure based on Merit. As if.
Looking at it using Maslow’s pyramid of human needs we were no longer concerned about Basic needs or security, or even belonging, or respect and had become obsessed with self-actualization.
As Prem Sikka implied, by the 1970s we were wide open to a right-wing coup and fifty years of the promotion of misinformation, greed and hatred has had a terrible effect on most of the post-war generation
Agreed
Not sure if you were there in the 60’s/70’s but Im not sure that quite fits. The 60’s was an era of protest (Vietnam, Paris) and push back against the austerity and conservatism of the 1950’s (My Generation). Not to mention the very real overhanging threat of nuclear war. The 1970’s saw multiple recessions and inflation and interest rates well above what we’ve been experiencing, not to mention the Troubles and bombings. It was that which set the scene for Thatcher and neoliberalism. Great if you were a loads-a-money banker and maybe someone getting your council house at a knockdown price. Not so good if you worked in one of the industries trashed by Thatcher or one of the huge number of unemployed. They got away with it by flogging off state assets and growing income from the North Sea. Public services like health were trashed as is the Tory tradition.
If there was a good time to become an adult it was under New Labour when health, education and public services were by and large restored and the economy did pretty well. And yes I know, Iraq, PFI etc but they did not affect people at the time. Arguably that explains the relative political apathy of people coming of age at that time, which academics Ive spoken to have confirmed. It’s changed over the last 5 years as the consequences of austerity and a series of rotten Tory governments have become obvious. The last thing we need now is apathy and non voting.
I admit to having enjoyed the 70s, despite recessions
Well at least the music was good!
3 day week less so.
The only thing wrong with the seventies was that it was not a good as the sixties.
Compared with what has happened since it was almost incomparably better, Who would ever have thought that fifty years later we would have been driving around on roads of a pre-industrial quality.
Dont forget that the existence of the USSR provided something of a counterbalance to unfettered capitalism.
In addition the Russian Revolution had scared the living daylights out of several generations of Aristo’s who didnt want to end up hanging from a lamp post while a generation who had fought in a World War and who were the sons and daughters of the survivors of WW1 knew what could happen if th8ings went wrong.
Im not sure that an authoritarian state that colonised and oppressed all its near neighbours, shot or imprisoned any kind of opposition and ran a massive chain of forced labour camps is quite the desirable counterbalance you might want.
Have a read of someone like Timothy Snyder or talk to people from Poland or Baltic States.
@Robin Stafford, I am not saying that the USSR was a desirable counterbalance, just that it existed
You are quite correct – it was of such concern that there were the Kruschev Nixon debates, not well remembered but you can find out on tinterweb.