Tuesday, April 29, 2008

[reformation] just around the corner

First let's get the bad news out of the way:

Property repossessions are expected to jump almost a quarter this year. The prediction, from the Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR), comes as borrowers increasingly feel the pinch from higher mortgage costs and a tightening of lending criteria. At the same time, Britons have record personal unsecured debts and the cost of living is rising, stoked by soaring fuel and food prices.

... and some of its predictable fallout is stress. But stress does not completely explain this:

Two teenagers who kicked a woman to death in a park because she was dressed as a "Goth" were jailed for life on Monday, police said. They set upon the 20-year-old gap year student when she tried to stop a group of youths from attacking her boyfriend, Robert Maltby, 21. The pair were left unconscious.

This stems from something far deeper. Britain and the U.S. have always been fairly violent societies at one level - Doug & Dinsdale and Snatch illustrate that on the one hand and al Capone and multiple shootings on the other so how worse it is today is speculation.

While parents of the post-war generation espoused Christian charity, love thy neighbour and so on, as part of a new post-war package of idealistic hope to increasingly irritable sets of young Boomer ears, nevertheless the social blueprint existed and people could still quote from it.

The later Boomers and Gen X crossed the threshold which reacted against "the old values" and the baby was thrown out with the bathwater, e.g. in "open plan" education. What was seen then as new and fresh and self-empowering was actually a con trick but they weren't to know that at the time.

So while the old values were supplanted by the new materialistic hedonism and no one could foresee the catastrophe in an initially prosperous, technologically adept western society of the mid-80s, in fact the seeds of doom had been planted.

And here it is now - a whole third generation growing up unprotected by the societal values which once acted as a mild deterrent to the average person and subscribing to a bankrupt materialism increasingly out of place in a global scenario entirely at odds with the new social code. In other words, no one is equipped to cope because they have either renounced the mechanism for coping or have never learnt of it at all, except in the disparaging and scathing remarks of older people.

Two boys in the park don't like a goth - what's to stop them when their music subscribes to the "if it's female, f--k it, if you don't like it, beat it up" mentality, when they're alienated from an older society and when the only rule is the satanist "do as thy will".

Where once only a girl of a certain type would have screwed around, now two thirds have had more than one partner before marriage. Where once the exhortation not to seek one's own revenge was preached from the pulpit to sleepy congregations across the west, now the young unwashed know of no constraints - this has never been instilled in them. Nobody cares about it.

And the ones in the middle, the washed, are starting to come round to the notion that the shopping god is not all it's cracked up to be and there is no brave new world of peace, love and prosperity ahead. It was all a con.

How to come back from here?

A return to the old values will follow a global conflagration and the next generation will do it for themselves. Irrelevant whether you and I believe this or not - it's out of our hands now. Most of those reading this post will not be part of that process of picking up the pieces and forging a new society of old values.

That's for the next betrayed generation.

8 comments:

  1. These things tend to come in generational cycles, it remains to be see whether the rejection of past generation values will lead towards a more or indeed less selfish society.

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  2. Where once only a girl of a certain type would have screwed around, now two thirds have had more than one partner before marriage.

    And is it unacceptable that a female has had more than one partner before marriage as opposed to males? Takes two to tango and maybe if there was more morals in place this wouldnt happen by females who have had more than one partner and males out to just get laid.

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  3. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  4. I was going to comment on the same as Nunyaa, but since she's all ready done it I won't. Except to say that that having had more than one sexual partner myself with marriage no where near in sight *gasp* does not make me morally inferior to anyone. So very often sex is used as a weapon against women, whether its through exploitation or this rather sexist dated attitude. Men have been whoring themselves out for years and receive nothing but a pat on the back for it. How can you mourn the moral 'degradation' of one sex, yet celebrate it in the other?

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  5. Just wanted to drop a quick "giggity" around the corner ;)

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  6. I think you need to be inside education, and to have been inside it 20 years ago, to see how fast the situation has declined. Even in mainstream, there's not many I'd employ, however techno-smart they might be. It'll take hard times to teach the value of manners and morals - and I don't mean to be preachy, I'm merely thinking of survival traits. How badly have the young been betrayed by modern vague vogues.

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  7. Forgive me - I couldn't resist putting this comment as a separate post in itself. Certain ladies took issue with the part about girls having multiple partners and suggested males were just as bad, if not worse.

    I'd say they are - far worse. There is no "no" in almost any guy's vocab.

    So therefore the morality is set by the female, the nature of what relations are to be. Recently I went out with a girl and it was clearly a cultural difference. Over here, the moment the girl goes with him alone - that's a clear signal it will end up in the cot because the thought the guy would not want to does not compute in her mind or anyone else's.

    Two generations ago it would be automatically assumed he'd taken only the first step and that it could either stay as a friendship or if he wanted to go the rest of the way, then it was tied in with going steady, at the very least and more usually getting engaged. There'd be no assumption she'd just "do it" there and then because there was a premium put on girls' final bargaining chip.

    Even a girl having successive boyfriends is a separate issue to just automatically assuming that if you party, you automatically screw.

    Take that girl [who is in the vast majority today, not knowing any other way 'cause no one's ever taught her otherwise] and put her back into the late 50s and she'd be looked at very strangely by the other girls.

    Which is better - today's "free for all" or the "guy has to work for it" of that generation? I'd say that today's girl feels "empowered" that she can mete it out to whomever she likes but the 50s female had more power in that it was not automatically expected and she was held in higher esteem. It's like anything which you have to fight for to get - it's worth far more than something readily available.

    The guy of that day was in her power, under her spell and if he wanted the final frontier, then he had to play her game. These days he need play no game - he gets it when he wants it with no strings. Females have effectively swallowed the feminist illusion and disempowered themselves.

    And what is "it"? For a guy it's mainly the cot. For her it's increasingly just the cot too but way back then it was the whole package she got. All that this oh-so-modern idea of "who wants to marry anyway" has done is give the guys the right to dip the wick without responsibility. Hell I'm not complaining - it favours the male but if she thinks it empowers her somehow or gains her more respect in society as her own person, she's kidding herself.

    How many times have I heard a single mum [my own goddaughter is a case in point] say she wouldn't want him anyway. Why not? Because he is useless. Why is he useless? Because he has no responsibility. Why not? 'Cause he's grown up without respect for girls as there has been no premium on that.

    It's a vicious circle. At least in the 50s she'd run a reasonable chance he'd not be like that in the first place although, to be fair, if she did cut the cord to him, she'd be an unmarried mother in the 50s - not a good place to be. Better for her today of course.

    All this dislocation would be minimized if women had had better Feminista to follow back then. Instead of the appalling bra-burners, if they'd listened to people like Dale O'Leary, Melissa Scowcroft, Christina Hoff-Sommers, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Camille Paglia, Judith Levine, Lillian Csernica, Diane Ravitch, Katha Pollitt or Nadine Strossen - true feminists in that they would have equally got women out from behind the Hoover but at the same time had them retain their "womanness".

    Instead many women chose to follow Steinem, Jagger, Callaghan, de Beauvoir, Greer, Stanton, Hanisch or Friedan who actually did enormous damage [and by the way - they were into bra-burning in the next wave]. They achieved no more than the lauded Feministi but instead got most men's backs up and half of the women today as well.

    Pollitt and Strossen are right in saying that women are simply people in the end, just as we males are people. These women want to work with the male rather than issuing ridiculous ultimata and harbouring deep hatreds.

    That's why it needs to get back to a position of sanity. That's why girls should probably follow the debate between more intelligent women, say, Katha Pollitt and Carol Gilligan instead of the Misandrists who are lost before they begin.

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  8. "The morality is set by the emale" - does that exonerate the male, then?? I'm with nunyaa.
    Of course the lack of control is terrible in incidents such as the one you mention - "if you don't like it, beat it up" mentality - but no onje couòld have foreseen the situation 20 years ago. I still say it was Thatcher's Britain that did the damage.

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