Think Before You Speak

[poliphilo]

Ailz has quit Facebook because she was tired to getting into spats with feather-bedded young people who think the poor would stop being poor if only the State treated them harshly enough. Take away their child benefit and- hey presto- no more children living in poverty- that sort of thing. Is it just my neighbourhood or are today's young people a lot more right-wing than we were?

It so happens I ran across a quote from Marx this morning. Boiled down to its essentials it was saying that the morality that obtains in any society is the morality that serves the interests of the ruling class. So, for example, it isn't theft to enclose common land but it is theft to poach a rabbit or a deer from the land-encloser. It makes you want to spit, doesn't it? Or at least it does if you sit down and think about it.  Only people don't think. They just swim around in the murk gulping down the intellectual fish food that drifts down from above by way of the Mail, the Telegraph and the BBC.

I seem to have Dickens on the mind at the moment but it strikes me that if only the feather-bedded young people would read him (he's easier than Marx) they might stop believing it was so cool to be cruel.

Comments

[glitzfrau.livejournal.com]

I read a massively, massively depressing recent Graun article about conservatism among British young people. Basically, today's young people grew up post-Thatcher, with precious little support from the welfare state and are looking at a bleak future without guaranteed pensions, affordable higher education, secure housing or reliable healthcare; they have no reason to believe that the welfare state is in any way on their side. Instead, they buy the Tory line that the poor are their enemy, making things 'unfair' for the rest of us 'hardworking' people.

On the other hand, there's Occupy and plenty of leftie idealism among today's young (I know, I teach them). But the sour poor-hating attitudes seem to dominate.

Sigh. I don't blame Ailz.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Most of the youngsters Ailz has been debating with are relatives or sort of relatives of ours. It's dispiriting. They weren't raised to swallow the Tory party line but they have done.