Crime on the rise / is society f*cked?

Bluemanc100 said:
You can see with your own eyes (surely) that we, as a nation, don’t give a fuck.. You can blame the tories but there’s no hope when somebody will go to a McDonalds, sit in the car then dump their shit out of all 4 windows when they are a few feet from a bin.. We’re a nation of fucking scrotes
Click to expand...

Pooing out of car windows is a red flag of epic proportions.
 
Kompany Car said:
The basis of any good society is strong local communities and neighbourhoods where everyone has an interest in the wellbeing of those living nearby.

Growing up in the late 70s and early 80s you knew almost everyone on your street, it was an extended family. If anyone was having a hard time the community offered some support.

Then sometime in the mid 80s there was a change, we started to follow the American model of money being everything. Rather than looking at our neighbours as an extension of our families we started to treat them as someone to compete with, who's got the nicest house, best car, can afford skiing holidays etc. Follow that through to now where instead of it being just in your local area, you have the world posting what they have got and how they are living celebrity lifestyles, albeit mostly a façade.

What effect does that have on kids ? The sense of community doesn't exist and everyone being measured by what they have. Now think about being from a poorer background, it leads to crime both low and high level, whether it be taking out their frustration by vandalism or stealing to have things they see, but cant afford.

Apart from a very small number, criminals aren't born, they are a product of the society they grow up in.
Click to expand...

There was definitely a sea change in the 80s where we swung increasingly towards a more individualistic approach and away from whatever bits of collectivist thinking had existed in the previous few decades.

Despite her 'no such thing as society' comment, I think Thatcher drove this predominantly from a purely economic ideological perspective (I say ideological because there was no evidence to support that her policies would work it was simply an act of faith) with actually very little thought about the broader societal and cultural impacts. She wasn't a deep thinker she was a doer and she thought she had a plan to fix stuff that needed to be fixed. However in becoming enthralled with the likes of Friedman and US thinking as a driver for fixing what she viewed as broke, she failed to recognise that though the US and UK were both predominantly individualistic societies there were some significant differences between the two.

Fast foward a few decades where generationally the consequences of that sea change has manifested itself and you have a country (mostly England in fairness) very ill at ease with itself.

The UKs brand of strong individualism is fairly specific to these islands, it's shot through with contradictory or balancing concepts of fairness and shared values and intolerance of certain behaviours (i.e the kind of group think more commonly found in more collectivist societies). In my opinion this slightly uneasy dualistic approach had served us well in recent history.

However we now have a couple of generations where the economic changes and attendant changes in the workplace have driven changed personal thinking too and that collectivist pull back at unfettered behaviour is dissolving.

The sad irony of this is that those of an older generation who retain some of these (imo) good values around what constitutes socially acceptable behaviour and shared living and who get upset by the apparent lack of shared values in younger people were the ones who enabled the dismantling of those values in their electoral choices.

For a while this country had it's cake and ate it but that has gone now. Now we are faced with two choices I think.

The simplest of which is continued journey down the path to a completely individualistic society along the lines of the US model.

The tougher choice is to try to reclaim that uncommon and often fraught mixture of the individual and the collective and to recognise that uneasy accommodation was actually the best of both worlds. There are many things that create barriers to that happening not least of which are policitians who would rather we took the first choice. Technology platforms whose business models work on polarisation and echo chambers don't help either.

Personally, I really hope we can find a way to get out of the trap of shouting at each other long enough to recognise what we have lost and to create a will to reclaim our dual identity.

Glad I got that off my chest, now for the dippers!
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Unread Posts

Don't have an account? Register now and see fewer ads!

SIGN UP
Back
Top
✖
  AdBlock Detected
Bluemoon relies on advertising to pay our hosting fees. Please support the site by disabling your ad blocking software to help keep the forum sustainable. Thanks.