Think Before You Speak
Jul. 17th, 2013 10:37 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
poliphiloAilz 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.
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.
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Date: 2013-07-17 05:23 pm (UTC)Many young people do not read much at all, much less would they read Dickens -- and they are proud of not reading. (The humanities are valued less and less.) In the USA, I think it's not so much conservatism as ignorance, though doubtless, the two are linked.
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Date: 2013-07-17 05:33 pm (UTC)