Part of the trouble with this confused society took a leap forward in 1975 when the City of New York gave up control of the almost bankrupt city to bankers. This was to be the turning point at which finance began to govern politics.
The liberals of the 1960s who fought so hard against the financial institutions and who one would have expected to hear from rather massively, disappeared and took up residence in vacant buildings in Manhattan.
From then onwards, liberalism, fuelled by big business, has decimated society. The authentic liberals of the 60s did nothing about it. Today’s liberals are involved knee deep in the problem.
The singer Patti Smith later summarised the mood of disillusion that had come over the liberal movement at the time. She said: “I could not identify with the political movements any longer. All the manic activity in the streets. In trying to join them, I felt overwhelmed by yet another form of bureaucracy”. What she was describing was a new form of individualism that could not fit the idea of collective political action.
Instead, Patti and many other leaders of the freedom movement developed into a new species: the individual radical who watches a decaying city with a kind of sinister detachment. They did not try to change it. They simply sat back and experienced it.
Allowing for city after city, nation after nation to fall captive to big money corporations which followed the infamous Critical Theory model of Marxist philosopher Max Horkheimer and the Frankfurt school in the US.
We now have a culture that gives birth to nothing but rehashed versions of the same model. No new ideas, novel insights or philosophy
These new, radical hyper-individualists, instead of doing what they always did, that is, attempt to change society from the outside, set about trying to change it from the inside. They latched onto the entertainment industry, music and the arts, attempting to change what was inside people’s heads using self-expression and constructs such as freedom of expression.
Today’s so-called liberals knowingly accept this illusion. I believe that today we are not dealing with liberals at all but with an evolved species of inward focused, self-gratifying individuals whose only interest is not in understanding why the world has gone to pot but in protecting the illusion that they have helped create: a societal web which they helped spin and which trapped us all. The cultural transformation, backed by endless amounts of finance which owns much of the media and world governments, intentionally prevents the birth of alternatives out of self-preservation.
The old idea that was vanquished was that politics organised the world. The new order believed, like the Soviets, that they could reorder the world as a single stable system. We called it capitalism. The Soviet system had created a society of people who had no vision or dreams and who believed in nothing or anyone. Is this not an echo of how liberalism has created a society of lost persons today?
In our society, everyone, including governments, knows that nothing truly works. We all know that finances are unsustainable and those values that built greatness are being trashed.
As in the communist age, society today feels totally powerless to effect change.
All dissenters are branded as Nazis, homophobes or racists. They are forced, via publicly endorsed bullying, to remain silent on pain of shame. Laws are passed to prevent freedom of expression in the name of equality, when equality is actually also being trashed.
We carry on, indifferently living the illusion of a society that produces fake science, fake values, fake ethics and fake news; a society which struggles with the very contradictions that emerge from the very laws it itself engineers. Defenders of this new order are forced to dig up even more bizarre and inconsistent, often illogical, responses to very serious ethical and societal problems created by their own hand.
We now have a culture that gives birth to nothing but rehashed versions of the same model. No new ideas, novel insights or philosophy. Just the same empty, valueless dead-ends we have become used to shrugging our shoulders at.