Totally recognisable world that I grew up in, the only thing I would add would be the influence on us of the generation who fought and lived through WWII. For UK Callaghan/Thatcher marked the end of the Post War consensus that oversaw Governance and administered the world you describe. Having Blair follow on from the Thatcher Governments sealed the tomb on that past world.
There are signs that this current younger generation is starting to revolt against where they find themselves and are demanding change. What change is possible in our increasingly dystopian world remains to be seen. I live in Hope.
I recognise a lot of this. I was born in 1940 and raised in Australia and my Dad fought in WW2 and my brother was born in 1948, my mother returning to work as a teacher after his unexpected but welcome arrival. US influence was huge and admired in those years but the hatred of Russia and the wish for constant "security" fortunately were not obvious. Now I live in France and the "trente glorieuses) (the 30 years from 1945 to 1975) are looked back upon with nostalgia, as everything has worsened ever since the 1970s!!!!!! Enemies, fighting,weapons and hatred seem to be essential!!!
this essay brings to mind many different strands of thought.
The first one is the Hindu concept of Karma (Action), which some sociologist may call "unintended consequences": we are enjoying, so to speak, the fruits of the seeds we planted. As it is natural, once we realize this, we start asking how the next iteration is going to look like, how the story is going to pan out - and I suspect that your spine-chilling dark-storm-is-coming view is shared by most of the leftover inquiring minds in the west (I would be curious to gauge the corresponding "vibe" of, say, the Chinese or Indians though). In the Hindu tradition, Karma always works like you describe, bringing society on a progressive and increasing decadence. Entropy always and inevitably increases. Omnia ruunt. We are indeed living our Kali Yuga (and a big part of this is that I am getting old, and inexorably so). The Age of Lies however will cure itself: by ultimately burning the entire universe, and starting from scratch in a new "golden era". So, your essay may in fact mark the long-awaited western learning of Circular Time (as opposed to linear). While waiting for Godot, it is a good idea to learn how to make a vegetable garden.
The second strand of thought is a series of questions, starting from: how did we get to this point? You point your finger to many different events and people (how NOT to quote "society doesn't exist, only individuals do"?), and each of us could add some more (I would add the American shock of Vietnam, and the idea that the war was lost on US campuses, hence the need to take real education away from the young and keep them busy with harmless endeavors), but then, behind all these interventions, isn't there some tectonic shift at play, some gravitational force (Cultural? Spiritual? Kondratieff's waves?) that is driving all of this? What would that be? Beyond an intellectual pursuit, the answers are important in a practical sense, because they affect how we should individually act in such rotting times - beyond assuming the Brace position, I mean. Clearly, hope is not an option anymore, though we can (and should) still rely on humour and irony and wit. But this is not a gasoline that takes us far (pun intended). For lack of a better solution, Understanding How the World Works seems a useful and wise pursuit, so thank you, and please keep it up.
It is a reference to the Hindu mythology of Kali Yuga (the Era of Lies) ending on the banks of the Ganges where the entire universe is burnt before starting anew. I do understand that it is harsh - not for anything Shiva is called the destructor. And maybe that is something that we, western Cartesians used to seeing things linearly (from minus to plus, from bad to good), can learn from Asians: accepting things even when we can't look forward to them...
The "field theory," promoted by our contemporary Gordon Wheeler, posits that we all function through the closure of gestalts. Moreover, there is a hierarchy of these "goal" images, at the top of which, apparently, resides the typical human life with its tragic ending. It follows that we would automatically want to destroy the universe and do so. Such is the nature of the species Homo. (Incidentally, by this logic, we can even generate other worlds before our death)
This, of course, is a scientific hypothesis, but Gestaltists are rarely wrong.
Thus, Hindu mythology likely anticipated the future of school textbooks.
Congratulations on another excellent essay, this time comparing the (apparently) solid world of 1945-80 to today's dystopic, pre-apocalyptic times. It reminded me of Stefan Zweig's posthumous masterpiece, "Le monde d'hier", completed in 1942, about the world of 1870-1914.
Every 4th or 5th essay or so you seem inspired to rise above the procedural criticisms and deliver a resounding blow against general historic trends.
I am just responding immediately after reading this and have no detailed responses.
Except to say that I recognise all this, all your retrospective stories. Memories.
It seems like I may be 10 years or so younger than you, brought up in NE London on the edge of Epping Forest. I remember all those postmen, milkmen, grocery delivery drivers (being reinvented now!), coal men, local shops (no supermarkets), green shield stamps!
Progress came and surprised us with its unexpected destructive effects didn’t it?
Difficult to see how we could have prevented it. Especially when the “Conservatives” were the most most radically revolutionary party in the 1970s-80s. They conserved nothing, and nor did their Blairite heirs.
Neoliberals all. The importance of philosophy and ideas is illuminated by their rise.
I hate all of them. The England I remember (and you) was destroyed by them without asking anyone’s permission.
Oh how dreadfully true Aurelien! I have anguished over this tide of rot for years. I am certainly of the generation who remembers the milkman, coalman, the rag-bone man with his patient horse, post on Christmas morning. We played in the woods and rambled afar: climbed trees and fell…. but strangely there were no terrible injuries or abductions.
After attending a Grammar school and then 1 year at University I got a job with the Gas Board and learned real hands-on practical skills. My role model was the head of department who was a Chartered Engineer. He sponsored me to take a part-time degree which I passed now that I saw a reason for learning: I wanted to become such as he. And indeed I did achieve that.
*But* the opportunities for a Professional Engineer in the UK were dwindling post Maggie. I recall with sadness the offshoring of Lucas Industries’ manufacturing in Birmingham to Malaysia: the stacks of drawing boards on the pavement were the tombstone.
There were some major projects still: Heathrow T5 and T2 but then came the working abroad: Qatar, Oman.
Now, thankfully I am retired, but I worry for my children and grandchildren as they variously navigate the exigencies of corporate restructuring in the UK or the expat teacher doing evacuation drills in the UAE.
BUT I rejoice that my grandchildren now want to *read* The Faraway Tree (before it came to the screen)! There is still hope. The youngest (3 years) absolutely wailed when the film ended: she was so captivated!
Another tour de force. This is my own life and the reflections that dominate my old age and make me want solitary confinement and books so as to find out how on earth we have gotton here, trying to understand the world. Did John Milton and Emporor Constantine feel like this? Or is it something new?
'...western societies became more and more distanced from the actual production and even support of those things on which everyday life depended, and any sense of a geographical or even causal link with everyday life was lost.'
Geographical communities have weakened and communities of interest have morphed into virtual communities and 'identity politics' and actually destroyed the very basis for traditional politics. Did Mrs Thatcher create this or was she just a symptom of the material forces that were unleashed by Nixon going off the gold standard and creating a fiat economy and the financialisation of the economy that INEVITABLY led to people wanting to make money focussing on financial speculation rather than producing things?
China reaped the benefit and devised plans to become - like Britain in the 19th century - the workshop of the world. And they had a plan....and it is working, no matter what drivel western 'economists' postulate. If I was in my twenties again with all that I've learned about the world that is where I would go BECAUSE they have a vision for the future. All we have is a past that we are struggling to try and understand - rather like doctors undertaking a post mortem on the corpse of a dead empire. I know the corpse is dead and I want to know why it died and what killed it. It may have simply been old age. It may have been something that could have been avoided - like drug addiction, or alcoholism - or mindless parasitic consumption.
'...until this point, university education had conformed to one of two types. It was vocational (science, law, medicine, even theology) and was the first step in a professional qualification, or it was a general degree, often in the humanities, which gave you the intellectual basis and training for a more general type of work. (Famously, the British government sector recruited people with the most extraordinary range of degrees, and on the whole it worked well.)'
I became a 'vocational professional' with real skills demanded by a real employer. Traditional elite universities were about these but also (in the humanities and classics), about teaching people to think critically. That's what their history was - preparing people to work in senior jobs in the state and industry and 'the professions'. They were emulated by the new red-brick universites which seemed to be unaware that the possibilities for employment were strictly limited by social reality.
There is one hope I see from this 'overproduction' and the debt laden tribe it has produced - and that is they provide the revolutionary cadre force that can overthrow the residual confused elite that now 'govern' Europe. (Am I alone in having stomach ache caused by people like Ursula Van Der Leyen and Kaja Kallas and Emanual Macron and Kier Starmer - not only because their policies are warmongering but because they are fatuous bullies that threaten a muscular 'enemy' with an army that hardly exists and possesses few weapons? I do take exception to being dragged into a punch up in which we are likely to be defeated and in which I and my progeny suffer personal injury.)
The greatest hope lies on the streets among those who march in objection to the destruction rained down on the world by 'the west'. It is much worse than Vietnam because we have a minute by minute real-time record of what is happening. We haven't the insulation of time anymore that at least allowed you to retain some emotional distance from the horrendous slaughter. Perhaps this is why people wrap themselves in the comforting blanket of ignorance. I know from personal experience that when the mind concentrates as a result of being on the receiving end of a police batton that the capacity to learn accelerates enormously. This is another and more instructive university.
'It was already clear in their reactions to Ukraine that the western ruling class had completely forgotten that money cannot buy what is not available. “Rearmament” cannot be done virtually: it requires actual raw materials, actual factories and actual workforces, all of which have long been abstracted away. The accompanying delusion, that total GDP including the finance sector is some sort of weapon against nations that have retained manufacturing industry and hold raw materials would be tragic if it were not so funny. And even now, the media and the ruling class are reacting to the shortages and supply-chain ruptures of the Iran crisis at one remove, through computer screens, as though abstract financial movements were all that mattered. We are so far distant from the days when coal was dug from the ground and used to make the iron and steel to make real things, that I think our current generation of leaders simply can’t grasp intellectually what is likely to happen.'..........'We now offer young people only a facsimile of life, in which they are not valued as people but only as consumers.'
Truth is the whole. Objective reality is dismissed as ideological perversion and then political heresy. No-one is in control of 'the west' anymore - they were only tenuously in control in the past but at least they had a vision of where they were going even though it was about ensuring ongoing dominance rather then the advancement of humanity as a whole. At least it could be challenged.
I come from a northern mining village. We had very little - but we were a community and had a quality and strength borne in a shared reality. We had an identity and a political fist. Now we have a politics that is irrelevant and ineffective. The fist punches into thin air. The target has moved somewhere else and we have no influence anymore... it has happened throughout 'the west'......... 'And having carefully destroyed real economies, real social relations and institutions and replaced everything with facsimiles, they have also ensured that an angry population, perhaps cold and hungry, is going to demand furiously that they do something. Really, this time.'
Amen to that. But where is the political force capable of embracing and shaping it?
I still hope in the young generation. I teach at the university, and have two children studying at university. I find that many students are still capable of really studying and learning how to think with their own brains. Jobs have changed, although I don’t remember the milkman, but, having lived in Rome my whole life, the milkman probably didn’t even exist! My point is that despite all the changes that you and Aurelien in his excellent essay point out, young people or at least some of them, are still eager to read and understand the world, they are capable of rebellion for the causes they feel are important, a few of them, like my daughter, still study classics and spend long hours on ancient Greek tragedies, and find how close to us those early writers are. We must not lose contact with culture. I always say this to my students: read as much as possible, criticize if needed, but in order to be able to criticize you must know and be aware. I teach EU law and human rights and international law and you can imagine how frustrated I have been these last years, but I’m not afraid to share this frustration with the students, explaining my thoughts and inviting them to think and elaborate their own ideas. I hope that they will be able to really change this world, they have heart and brains in the right place
What if the root of the problem lies in the authority of the ancient Greeks, represented by Plato? After all, it was he who built the prison of individualism in which our self still resides.
1. We keep hearing that the the War On Russia is over and Russia has won, but Ukraine keep supplying warm live bodies.
Cynical? Yes. And it works,
2. "...I think that the dystopic reign of Margaret Thatcher had a lot to do with our current western decline. In many ways she was a typical product of the era: a greengrocer’s daughter who went on to study science and worked in food technology. But then she went through what was to become a typical moment of financial revelation: I am clever, I want to be rich. So she retrained as a lawyer, went into politics, and became the darling of a certain type of voter and parliamentarian who wanted to be rich as well, and without this tedious business of studying stuff and acquiring experience and qualifications. She profited from, and contributed to, the takeover of the Tory Party by a new generation of estate-agents and second-hand car salesmen, whose wealth was based not on the traditional family and land, still less on education and training, but on an eye for the quick opportunity, and the use of a glib tongue."
I believe that The Kinks wrote "Second Hand Car Spiv" well before the rise of Thatcher. It captures the type well.
3. "In my grubby working-class area with indifferent schools, virtually everybody learned to read and write....Yet what I recall most clearly from the books I read as a small child was the solid and almost tactile nature of the world they portrayed."
There was a set of old set of children's encyclopedias stored in the barn that I grew up in. "The Little Golden Encyclopedia".
I am not usually sentimental, but those books changed my life. It must have been a labor of love for Golden Books, if you read the list of contributors, Golden Books up and hired the finest and most learned educational experts, scientists, historians, theologians, artists, mathematicians, writers, etc. available in 1948. They even retained Walt Disney as a consultant.
And their work reflected that. It showed me, in words and pictures that even a young cat could read, that there was a world beyond my little barn, and that you could learn about it, you could conquer it, you could have it and you could make it better. Things were possible. They could be known, the terrors of ignorance and want. could be confronted and defeated, or at least driven off.
I had to leave the barn, cold, frightened and starving, still basically a kitten, but at least I was armed with that.
Knowledge was the key, and I never stopped wanting to know.
Yes. All too true, sadly. It was Thatcher who identified her problem and solved it. It was Sociology. Social Anthropology. The Universities were forced to stop teaching the important subjects and start teaching Business Studies. The latter subject is essentially about how to knock old ladies on the head and take their money. Legally. What else is the Entrepreneur? Who cares about what humans are, essentially? Just steal and lie. Well the chickens are coming home to roost.
Well reasoned, but still pulling the punch. No one wants to be a Cassandra, or if one is forced to articulate justified pessimism, at least let us forbear from going into gory detail. I suppose we shall all find out soon enough
How do we remove computers and smartphones and now LLMs and Data Centers from our existence? Or at least move them back to their abilities to prior 1980. The pros are outweighed by the cons and it's going to get a lot worse.
I fully subscribe to this clinical dissection of our 'facsimile era'. To enrich the debate, I would suggest a further analytical layer regarding the 'survival instinct' of modern institutions.
While these entities maintain their formal shells, their primary objective has undergone a radical shift: the goal is no longer the 'product' (education, health, security), but the sheer energy consumption required to keep the structure from collapsing. From a systemic perspective, when a machine becomes old and inefficient, it stops producing work to redirect all its fuel toward simply preventing its own parts from breaking down.
This explains the obsessive focus on 'process' over 'result': the process is the internal scaffolding that keeps the house standing even if it’s no longer habitable. In this stage, the institution doesn't serve the citizen; it serves its own persistence as a ghost-structure that has lost its functional purpose.
I do not remember learning to read. It may have been before I began school; it was certainly soon after. It was enormously exciting. When I reached my seventh birthday, I got my own library card. Thereafter I read everything I was able to comprehend and tried books that were beyond me as well. I became a teacher and watched standards dilute and fall through a long career. Former colleagues speak of a collapse of standards in the schools and an increasingly indifferent to hostilely reluctant student body. But I am simply repeating what you said. I have two grandchildren with facsimile university degrees. My grandson makes his living as a tennis pro. he does not have a degree in tennis, but he does have the skill and the amiable personality to make a go of it. My granddaughter received her degree last May. I assume and hope that what she is doing now is filling the gap and giving her some income before better days. . The problem is that however she sees the world around her, I have little faith in the coming of better days. Climate change, surprisingly stupid wars, an inept and increasingly incompetent political class, a rapacious economic climate combine to destroy the foundations of society.
Each week I read your essay then go and strive to approach its quality.
If no one begrudged Branson his success in those days, perhaps it was only because they didn't know how it had been gained. I read his (first?) autobiography some years ago, hoping to discover what was necessary to become rich. What I found was that (by his own admission!) he lied all the time and took advantage of people quite a lot. This was hammered home even more effectively (and with more self awareness) by Felix Dennis in How to Get Rich. It was then that I realized I would almost certainly never be rich, a prognostication borne out to this day...
Totally recognisable world that I grew up in, the only thing I would add would be the influence on us of the generation who fought and lived through WWII. For UK Callaghan/Thatcher marked the end of the Post War consensus that oversaw Governance and administered the world you describe. Having Blair follow on from the Thatcher Governments sealed the tomb on that past world.
There are signs that this current younger generation is starting to revolt against where they find themselves and are demanding change. What change is possible in our increasingly dystopian world remains to be seen. I live in Hope.
I recognise a lot of this. I was born in 1940 and raised in Australia and my Dad fought in WW2 and my brother was born in 1948, my mother returning to work as a teacher after his unexpected but welcome arrival. US influence was huge and admired in those years but the hatred of Russia and the wish for constant "security" fortunately were not obvious. Now I live in France and the "trente glorieuses) (the 30 years from 1945 to 1975) are looked back upon with nostalgia, as everything has worsened ever since the 1970s!!!!!! Enemies, fighting,weapons and hatred seem to be essential!!!
Thanks Aurelien,
this essay brings to mind many different strands of thought.
The first one is the Hindu concept of Karma (Action), which some sociologist may call "unintended consequences": we are enjoying, so to speak, the fruits of the seeds we planted. As it is natural, once we realize this, we start asking how the next iteration is going to look like, how the story is going to pan out - and I suspect that your spine-chilling dark-storm-is-coming view is shared by most of the leftover inquiring minds in the west (I would be curious to gauge the corresponding "vibe" of, say, the Chinese or Indians though). In the Hindu tradition, Karma always works like you describe, bringing society on a progressive and increasing decadence. Entropy always and inevitably increases. Omnia ruunt. We are indeed living our Kali Yuga (and a big part of this is that I am getting old, and inexorably so). The Age of Lies however will cure itself: by ultimately burning the entire universe, and starting from scratch in a new "golden era". So, your essay may in fact mark the long-awaited western learning of Circular Time (as opposed to linear). While waiting for Godot, it is a good idea to learn how to make a vegetable garden.
The second strand of thought is a series of questions, starting from: how did we get to this point? You point your finger to many different events and people (how NOT to quote "society doesn't exist, only individuals do"?), and each of us could add some more (I would add the American shock of Vietnam, and the idea that the war was lost on US campuses, hence the need to take real education away from the young and keep them busy with harmless endeavors), but then, behind all these interventions, isn't there some tectonic shift at play, some gravitational force (Cultural? Spiritual? Kondratieff's waves?) that is driving all of this? What would that be? Beyond an intellectual pursuit, the answers are important in a practical sense, because they affect how we should individually act in such rotting times - beyond assuming the Brace position, I mean. Clearly, hope is not an option anymore, though we can (and should) still rely on humour and irony and wit. But this is not a gasoline that takes us far (pun intended). For lack of a better solution, Understanding How the World Works seems a useful and wise pursuit, so thank you, and please keep it up.
Thanks Angel of Rings, I like a lot of that but
“ The Age of Lies however will cure itself: by ultimately burning the entire universe”
Seems a little too harsh to swallow.
Crikey. Even if that is true it’s not something to look forward to.
It is a reference to the Hindu mythology of Kali Yuga (the Era of Lies) ending on the banks of the Ganges where the entire universe is burnt before starting anew. I do understand that it is harsh - not for anything Shiva is called the destructor. And maybe that is something that we, western Cartesians used to seeing things linearly (from minus to plus, from bad to good), can learn from Asians: accepting things even when we can't look forward to them...
The "field theory," promoted by our contemporary Gordon Wheeler, posits that we all function through the closure of gestalts. Moreover, there is a hierarchy of these "goal" images, at the top of which, apparently, resides the typical human life with its tragic ending. It follows that we would automatically want to destroy the universe and do so. Such is the nature of the species Homo. (Incidentally, by this logic, we can even generate other worlds before our death)
This, of course, is a scientific hypothesis, but Gestaltists are rarely wrong.
Thus, Hindu mythology likely anticipated the future of school textbooks.
Congratulations on another excellent essay, this time comparing the (apparently) solid world of 1945-80 to today's dystopic, pre-apocalyptic times. It reminded me of Stefan Zweig's posthumous masterpiece, "Le monde d'hier", completed in 1942, about the world of 1870-1914.
Aurelian, thank you very much for this one.
Every 4th or 5th essay or so you seem inspired to rise above the procedural criticisms and deliver a resounding blow against general historic trends.
I am just responding immediately after reading this and have no detailed responses.
Except to say that I recognise all this, all your retrospective stories. Memories.
It seems like I may be 10 years or so younger than you, brought up in NE London on the edge of Epping Forest. I remember all those postmen, milkmen, grocery delivery drivers (being reinvented now!), coal men, local shops (no supermarkets), green shield stamps!
Progress came and surprised us with its unexpected destructive effects didn’t it?
Difficult to see how we could have prevented it. Especially when the “Conservatives” were the most most radically revolutionary party in the 1970s-80s. They conserved nothing, and nor did their Blairite heirs.
Neoliberals all. The importance of philosophy and ideas is illuminated by their rise.
I hate all of them. The England I remember (and you) was destroyed by them without asking anyone’s permission.
Thank you again.
Oh how dreadfully true Aurelien! I have anguished over this tide of rot for years. I am certainly of the generation who remembers the milkman, coalman, the rag-bone man with his patient horse, post on Christmas morning. We played in the woods and rambled afar: climbed trees and fell…. but strangely there were no terrible injuries or abductions.
After attending a Grammar school and then 1 year at University I got a job with the Gas Board and learned real hands-on practical skills. My role model was the head of department who was a Chartered Engineer. He sponsored me to take a part-time degree which I passed now that I saw a reason for learning: I wanted to become such as he. And indeed I did achieve that.
*But* the opportunities for a Professional Engineer in the UK were dwindling post Maggie. I recall with sadness the offshoring of Lucas Industries’ manufacturing in Birmingham to Malaysia: the stacks of drawing boards on the pavement were the tombstone.
There were some major projects still: Heathrow T5 and T2 but then came the working abroad: Qatar, Oman.
Now, thankfully I am retired, but I worry for my children and grandchildren as they variously navigate the exigencies of corporate restructuring in the UK or the expat teacher doing evacuation drills in the UAE.
BUT I rejoice that my grandchildren now want to *read* The Faraway Tree (before it came to the screen)! There is still hope. The youngest (3 years) absolutely wailed when the film ended: she was so captivated!
Another tour de force. This is my own life and the reflections that dominate my old age and make me want solitary confinement and books so as to find out how on earth we have gotton here, trying to understand the world. Did John Milton and Emporor Constantine feel like this? Or is it something new?
'...western societies became more and more distanced from the actual production and even support of those things on which everyday life depended, and any sense of a geographical or even causal link with everyday life was lost.'
Geographical communities have weakened and communities of interest have morphed into virtual communities and 'identity politics' and actually destroyed the very basis for traditional politics. Did Mrs Thatcher create this or was she just a symptom of the material forces that were unleashed by Nixon going off the gold standard and creating a fiat economy and the financialisation of the economy that INEVITABLY led to people wanting to make money focussing on financial speculation rather than producing things?
China reaped the benefit and devised plans to become - like Britain in the 19th century - the workshop of the world. And they had a plan....and it is working, no matter what drivel western 'economists' postulate. If I was in my twenties again with all that I've learned about the world that is where I would go BECAUSE they have a vision for the future. All we have is a past that we are struggling to try and understand - rather like doctors undertaking a post mortem on the corpse of a dead empire. I know the corpse is dead and I want to know why it died and what killed it. It may have simply been old age. It may have been something that could have been avoided - like drug addiction, or alcoholism - or mindless parasitic consumption.
'...until this point, university education had conformed to one of two types. It was vocational (science, law, medicine, even theology) and was the first step in a professional qualification, or it was a general degree, often in the humanities, which gave you the intellectual basis and training for a more general type of work. (Famously, the British government sector recruited people with the most extraordinary range of degrees, and on the whole it worked well.)'
I became a 'vocational professional' with real skills demanded by a real employer. Traditional elite universities were about these but also (in the humanities and classics), about teaching people to think critically. That's what their history was - preparing people to work in senior jobs in the state and industry and 'the professions'. They were emulated by the new red-brick universites which seemed to be unaware that the possibilities for employment were strictly limited by social reality.
There is one hope I see from this 'overproduction' and the debt laden tribe it has produced - and that is they provide the revolutionary cadre force that can overthrow the residual confused elite that now 'govern' Europe. (Am I alone in having stomach ache caused by people like Ursula Van Der Leyen and Kaja Kallas and Emanual Macron and Kier Starmer - not only because their policies are warmongering but because they are fatuous bullies that threaten a muscular 'enemy' with an army that hardly exists and possesses few weapons? I do take exception to being dragged into a punch up in which we are likely to be defeated and in which I and my progeny suffer personal injury.)
The greatest hope lies on the streets among those who march in objection to the destruction rained down on the world by 'the west'. It is much worse than Vietnam because we have a minute by minute real-time record of what is happening. We haven't the insulation of time anymore that at least allowed you to retain some emotional distance from the horrendous slaughter. Perhaps this is why people wrap themselves in the comforting blanket of ignorance. I know from personal experience that when the mind concentrates as a result of being on the receiving end of a police batton that the capacity to learn accelerates enormously. This is another and more instructive university.
'It was already clear in their reactions to Ukraine that the western ruling class had completely forgotten that money cannot buy what is not available. “Rearmament” cannot be done virtually: it requires actual raw materials, actual factories and actual workforces, all of which have long been abstracted away. The accompanying delusion, that total GDP including the finance sector is some sort of weapon against nations that have retained manufacturing industry and hold raw materials would be tragic if it were not so funny. And even now, the media and the ruling class are reacting to the shortages and supply-chain ruptures of the Iran crisis at one remove, through computer screens, as though abstract financial movements were all that mattered. We are so far distant from the days when coal was dug from the ground and used to make the iron and steel to make real things, that I think our current generation of leaders simply can’t grasp intellectually what is likely to happen.'..........'We now offer young people only a facsimile of life, in which they are not valued as people but only as consumers.'
Truth is the whole. Objective reality is dismissed as ideological perversion and then political heresy. No-one is in control of 'the west' anymore - they were only tenuously in control in the past but at least they had a vision of where they were going even though it was about ensuring ongoing dominance rather then the advancement of humanity as a whole. At least it could be challenged.
I come from a northern mining village. We had very little - but we were a community and had a quality and strength borne in a shared reality. We had an identity and a political fist. Now we have a politics that is irrelevant and ineffective. The fist punches into thin air. The target has moved somewhere else and we have no influence anymore... it has happened throughout 'the west'......... 'And having carefully destroyed real economies, real social relations and institutions and replaced everything with facsimiles, they have also ensured that an angry population, perhaps cold and hungry, is going to demand furiously that they do something. Really, this time.'
Amen to that. But where is the political force capable of embracing and shaping it?
I still hope in the young generation. I teach at the university, and have two children studying at university. I find that many students are still capable of really studying and learning how to think with their own brains. Jobs have changed, although I don’t remember the milkman, but, having lived in Rome my whole life, the milkman probably didn’t even exist! My point is that despite all the changes that you and Aurelien in his excellent essay point out, young people or at least some of them, are still eager to read and understand the world, they are capable of rebellion for the causes they feel are important, a few of them, like my daughter, still study classics and spend long hours on ancient Greek tragedies, and find how close to us those early writers are. We must not lose contact with culture. I always say this to my students: read as much as possible, criticize if needed, but in order to be able to criticize you must know and be aware. I teach EU law and human rights and international law and you can imagine how frustrated I have been these last years, but I’m not afraid to share this frustration with the students, explaining my thoughts and inviting them to think and elaborate their own ideas. I hope that they will be able to really change this world, they have heart and brains in the right place
What if the root of the problem lies in the authority of the ancient Greeks, represented by Plato? After all, it was he who built the prison of individualism in which our self still resides.
1. We keep hearing that the the War On Russia is over and Russia has won, but Ukraine keep supplying warm live bodies.
Cynical? Yes. And it works,
2. "...I think that the dystopic reign of Margaret Thatcher had a lot to do with our current western decline. In many ways she was a typical product of the era: a greengrocer’s daughter who went on to study science and worked in food technology. But then she went through what was to become a typical moment of financial revelation: I am clever, I want to be rich. So she retrained as a lawyer, went into politics, and became the darling of a certain type of voter and parliamentarian who wanted to be rich as well, and without this tedious business of studying stuff and acquiring experience and qualifications. She profited from, and contributed to, the takeover of the Tory Party by a new generation of estate-agents and second-hand car salesmen, whose wealth was based not on the traditional family and land, still less on education and training, but on an eye for the quick opportunity, and the use of a glib tongue."
I believe that The Kinks wrote "Second Hand Car Spiv" well before the rise of Thatcher. It captures the type well.
3. "In my grubby working-class area with indifferent schools, virtually everybody learned to read and write....Yet what I recall most clearly from the books I read as a small child was the solid and almost tactile nature of the world they portrayed."
There was a set of old set of children's encyclopedias stored in the barn that I grew up in. "The Little Golden Encyclopedia".
I am not usually sentimental, but those books changed my life. It must have been a labor of love for Golden Books, if you read the list of contributors, Golden Books up and hired the finest and most learned educational experts, scientists, historians, theologians, artists, mathematicians, writers, etc. available in 1948. They even retained Walt Disney as a consultant.
And their work reflected that. It showed me, in words and pictures that even a young cat could read, that there was a world beyond my little barn, and that you could learn about it, you could conquer it, you could have it and you could make it better. Things were possible. They could be known, the terrors of ignorance and want. could be confronted and defeated, or at least driven off.
I had to leave the barn, cold, frightened and starving, still basically a kitten, but at least I was armed with that.
Knowledge was the key, and I never stopped wanting to know.
Yes. All too true, sadly. It was Thatcher who identified her problem and solved it. It was Sociology. Social Anthropology. The Universities were forced to stop teaching the important subjects and start teaching Business Studies. The latter subject is essentially about how to knock old ladies on the head and take their money. Legally. What else is the Entrepreneur? Who cares about what humans are, essentially? Just steal and lie. Well the chickens are coming home to roost.
Well reasoned, but still pulling the punch. No one wants to be a Cassandra, or if one is forced to articulate justified pessimism, at least let us forbear from going into gory detail. I suppose we shall all find out soon enough
How do we remove computers and smartphones and now LLMs and Data Centers from our existence? Or at least move them back to their abilities to prior 1980. The pros are outweighed by the cons and it's going to get a lot worse.
Five points deducted for sexistly not mentioning Lotte Haas, who was a much more attractive proposition than Hans.
I fully subscribe to this clinical dissection of our 'facsimile era'. To enrich the debate, I would suggest a further analytical layer regarding the 'survival instinct' of modern institutions.
While these entities maintain their formal shells, their primary objective has undergone a radical shift: the goal is no longer the 'product' (education, health, security), but the sheer energy consumption required to keep the structure from collapsing. From a systemic perspective, when a machine becomes old and inefficient, it stops producing work to redirect all its fuel toward simply preventing its own parts from breaking down.
This explains the obsessive focus on 'process' over 'result': the process is the internal scaffolding that keeps the house standing even if it’s no longer habitable. In this stage, the institution doesn't serve the citizen; it serves its own persistence as a ghost-structure that has lost its functional purpose.
I do not remember learning to read. It may have been before I began school; it was certainly soon after. It was enormously exciting. When I reached my seventh birthday, I got my own library card. Thereafter I read everything I was able to comprehend and tried books that were beyond me as well. I became a teacher and watched standards dilute and fall through a long career. Former colleagues speak of a collapse of standards in the schools and an increasingly indifferent to hostilely reluctant student body. But I am simply repeating what you said. I have two grandchildren with facsimile university degrees. My grandson makes his living as a tennis pro. he does not have a degree in tennis, but he does have the skill and the amiable personality to make a go of it. My granddaughter received her degree last May. I assume and hope that what she is doing now is filling the gap and giving her some income before better days. . The problem is that however she sees the world around her, I have little faith in the coming of better days. Climate change, surprisingly stupid wars, an inept and increasingly incompetent political class, a rapacious economic climate combine to destroy the foundations of society.
Each week I read your essay then go and strive to approach its quality.
If no one begrudged Branson his success in those days, perhaps it was only because they didn't know how it had been gained. I read his (first?) autobiography some years ago, hoping to discover what was necessary to become rich. What I found was that (by his own admission!) he lied all the time and took advantage of people quite a lot. This was hammered home even more effectively (and with more self awareness) by Felix Dennis in How to Get Rich. It was then that I realized I would almost certainly never be rich, a prognostication borne out to this day...
Yes. Branson was a parasite from the very beginning of his career, despite the trendy long hair and hippie trappings.
"Well, the world needs ditchdiggers too"