John Bingham wrote: ↑Tue Feb 27, 2024 2:23 pm

Socrates wrote:The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.

It was crafted by a student, Kenneth John Freeman, for his Cambridge dissertation published in 1907. Freeman did not claim that the passage under analysis was a direct quotation of anyone; instead, he was presenting his own summary of the complaints directed against young people in ancient times.

xandreu wrote: ↑Tue Feb 27, 2024 9:06 pm TLDR: We do live in a crazier world now than we ever have before, but it's likely a distraction technique to bring us back into line with how everything has pretty much always worked before capitalism came along and handed too much power to ordinary people.

It's we'll known that as people get older, there is an element of looking at the past through rose-tinted glasses, forgetting about all the negatives of times-gone-by and only focusing on the positives. So we have to be careful when we compare the world today to the world of yesterday.

Of course there are many factors of life today which has made life much better than it was when I growing up. As the seventh largest economy on the world (debatable I know, it depends how you do the calculations) but people assume that the UK is, and always has always been one of the richer, powerful and influential nations of the world, but when I was growing up in the 70s and 80s, it was known as the poor man of Europe. People define poverty these days if you can't afford the latest Playstation, but compared to todays standards, almost everyone was in poverty in the UK when I was growing up.

There was no such thing as central heating. Most people had one coal burning fire in the main living room, and as for the rest of the house, you just had to wrap yourself in as many blankets as you could when going to bed. In the winter, you'd wake up in the morning literally being able to see your breath. Families often shared beds just to keep warm. There were frequent union strikes, which meant houses were without electricity for many hours during the night, and you never knew when they would happen. You would often wear hand-me-downs, which were clothes your older siblings had outgrown, and so were handed down to the next youngest, and the next youngest after that when they had outgrown them. Hot water was a luxury, with many children having to share the same bathwater - either by taking baths at the same time, or one after the other, but re-using water your sibling had just washed in. Many children qualified for free school meals because unemployment was at 50% or more in some parts of the country. I could go on, but this was normal life for many children growing up in the UK in the 70s and 80s. If you described this to someone now, they would assume you were talking about some third world banana republic somewhere.

So to that extent, yes, life has improved immeasurably for many people, especially in the UK. Whether you loved her or loathed her, it was Thatcher who transformed the UK from the sick man of Europe to the UK we see today.

However, despite all the negatives, it bought about values in society that simply don't exist anymore. Cambodia reminds me a lot of my childhood. I have often read that it's not necessarily poverty itself that makes people sad and depressed (although I'm not talking about extreme poverty of course). It's wealth inequality. When you live in a society where everyone is in the same boat, there is a lot more social cohesion. You are much more likely to know, and get on with your neighbours. There is a very strong 'you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours' mentality. People are much more willing to help their neighbours because they never know when they will need that favour repaid. For all of the problems that poverty brings, and I'm certainly not advocating that poverty is in any way a positive thing, but it does create strong bonds within societies. It's why you can go to some of the worst slums in the world, and yet people seem surprisingly happy. It's largely because everyone is in the same boat, and humans thrive on strong social bonds.

But when you live in a place where only some people are in the same boat as you, and it is clearly evident that others live a vastly different, more luxurious lifestyle than you, and it's something that you see every day which is all around you, it's that constant reminder that you really do live in poverty which gives society a very different feel.

If I were to talk about one thing which has changed society for the worse, and continues to do so, it would be wealth inequality. For most of human history, all the money, the power and the land was held by the few at the top, and everyone else was some kind of serf, working for their overlords, who were thrown a meagre pittance for their troubles. We overthrew that way of life with modern capitalism, but it seems that capitalism has now gone full circle and we are fast returning back to the way things had always been throughout much of human history. Wealth and power is becoming more and more concentrated into the hands of the few, and the rest of us are too busy struggling to survive to do anything about it.

I'm not much of a conspiracy theorist, but I often wonder if the craziness of the world we live in today, such as not knowing what a woman is, the distractive addictions of platforms like TikTok etc, mindless scrolling on Facebook, getting obsessed over online arguments with people (often bots) you don't know and never will know, are all tactics to keep us occupied and looking the other way, instead of focusing what's really going on in the world. If the fact one of the worlds richest men, Bill Gates, has bought up 270,000 acres of farmland, making him the largest private landowner in the country doesn't reek of a modern version of the Middle Ages, I really don't know what does.

Anyway, probably went a bit off point there but whatever...

LamarFreddie wrote: ↑Tue Feb 27, 2024 9:40 pm
Social media is the new opiate of the masses, a religious ritual that devolves into an orgy.