The Real Mystery

[poliphilo]

There's no mystery about why the kids did what they did.

The young crave excitement, lack empathy (it's to do with brain chemistry), have a huge sense of entitlement, despise their elders. 

So they smash things up. Everything from bus shelters to social conventions. Some of which is good. 

We've all been there, but we forget- or we cast a retrospective glamour over our youthful shittiness. 

I didn't burn and loot high street shops, but I did things that were, morally speaking, just as bad. Bet you did too.

There's no need to bring poverty into the equation. The PM, the Chancellor and the Mayor of London used to be in a gang called the Bullingdon Club. Their schtick was to get very, very drunk, trash restaurants and assault passers-by.  None of them was poor.

Usually there are restraints in place to keep youthful mischief-making within bounds- to keep the outrages small-scale and local.  For some reason they just failed. 

Why? Why now? That's the real mystery.

Comments

[michaleen.livejournal.com]

It's only a mystery if you rule-out the obvious: economics.

The Bullington Club just makes Cameron look more like Cameron: an upper-class twit incapable of feeling empathy for anyone outside his own socio-economic circle. It makes him look like a mean-spirited and unreflective hypocrite, a selfish school boy with a monstrous sense of entitlement, and so on. Nothing we didn't already know about him personally, or about his class, but surely nothing on which to build a sound equivalence with what's been happening in Brixton.

I liked to smash things when I was a frustrated teen as well, and so did all my friends, but we also thought we had a future. I don't get that feeling from these British youth at all. In the case of that dweeb Cameron, he certainly had a bright and prosperous future ahead of him. I see no equivalence.

In this country, the Reagan Revolution set us on the path to ever greater economic disparity. In Britain, it was Thatcher, but I think both were expressions of the same political movement. When the neo-liberals succeeded them, there was no meaningful change of course, economically speaking, and today we see the rather predictable results. You have angry kids self-destructively smashing shop windows; we have angry Congressmen self-destructively smashing the full faith and credit of the United States. Both are symptomatic, I think. If things don't turn around, I expect to have angry mobs setting shit on fire in this country, too.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Yes. The gap between rich and poor continues to widen. Cameron has that "we're all in it together" when it comes to his austerity measures, but of course that's not true. People as wealthy as he is are untouched by cuts.

[michaleen.livejournal.com]

Same in this country. We lost our AAA credit rating largely due to Republican refusal to raise taxes on corporations and the wealthy elite. We all know this. Standard & Poors was very explicit about it and had even warned the Republicans, in advance, that their irresponsible behavior would have this result.

The Republicans of course say that it's Obama's fault, obviously, and last I looked the BBC, from its aristocratic perch high above, was still holding both sides responsible.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Why are the wealthy so averse to paying taxes? It's not as if hurts them. We're not planning to ruin them, just shave off a little of the excess.

[michaleen.livejournal.com]

The obvious answer, that at least some of the wealthy are just greedy and stupidly short-sighted, seems a bit too glib.

I'm tempted to think there is some sort of psychological dynamic at work. Maybe accumulating wealth excessively is just a species of compulsive hoarding? It also seems obvious that for some individuals his or her self-image is bound up with how much stuff they control and, when lesser people are chipping away at it, perhaps they take it personally.

In the case of my parents, they are not rich, but hate paying taxes because they deeply resent their money being wasted on blacks especially and the poor in general. I find this rather typical of Republican voters. My sister and her husband certainly feel that way. Combined, they make about $500K per year, so again not quite rich but they have more money than I can comfortably imagine.

Truth is, I don't know why. I might as well be trying to imagine what it would be like to have a second head and a third arm.