I Am What I Like

It's easy to look down at the people of twenty first century England and its young people,  brainwashed to cheap slavery, debt and self-indulgence, unable to forge an identity as mothers and fathers, wives and husbands, as workers both paid and free, scratting around for purpose as artists, writers, Thespians of endless mediocrity and engineered radicalism, unable to see form, harmony and meaning beyond appetite and the morality of appetite.
But the nightmare world inhabited by these lost souls is one created by their parents, people who were growing up in the 1960s and 1970s.
Whereas the material comfort that the ordinary English peasant enjoyed back in those  days was not only miraculous, but also welcome, the profusion of goodies profoundly changed the way people thought. Instead of 'make do and mend' the young people of those days simply bought 'off the peg'.
A sexual revolution came about with the invention of the Pill and other effective measures of contraception, in the absence of Aids and with venereal disease being easily cured, people could now consume each other, consumer and consumed.
The whole way of thinking changed from duties and responsibilities to self centred feelings and appetites.
When exchanging personal information young people of those days rarely spoke about what they believed or what they did, but of what they liked.
For the first time there was passively received popular music on a massive scale. Most people stopped playing music and singing and just listened. Yes, there was some great music around, but back in my day, in the fourteenth century, everybody - and I mean everybody - could play music, sing, recite verse. But the young people of the 1960s and 1970s could do none of this.
It was the golden age of television. Every evening half the population would watch the television - either BBC or ITV. Nobody could tell a story anymore, nobody could discuss an idea. They simply picked a story from the television or chose an opinion which they liked (though they certainly hadn't investigated the idea or thought about it).
Ready made meals became readily available. People didn't have to make their own entertainment anymore  -they didn't have to make anything.
The nightmare world of childlessness and isolation that we are living in now, a world only made bearable to many by the massive consumption of drugs, both legal and illegal, is the creation of the first consumer generation, those brought up in the 1960s and 1970s, the first generation whose primary experience was not as a Person, but as a Life, a consumer item to be watched and felt.
It was back then that it began forty or fifty years ago, when the young separated from their parents and learnt to think, 'I am what I like.'