Sunday 10 February 2008

Stuck In The Groovy

The death of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi brings to mind William Hague’s interest in Transcendental Meditation. The Swinging Sixties, Thatcherism and Blairism were entirely of a piece. The second was in no sense a reaction against the first, nor was the third in any sense a reaction against the second. Rather, they were logically continuous, and supported by exactly the same individuals.

Well within living memory, through pop music and through the advertising industry’s cult of consumer gratification, mass culture has been re-fashioned to an extent not seen since the Reformation, and again in conformity to movements entirely detached from and inimical to popular opinion or taste.

The ideology and practice of Marxist factions often (though by no means always) very far removed from Marx himself; Freud, and then R D Laing; the cult of the Bloomsbury set; that of Hermann Hesse; the hippies and “flower power”, not least including the permanent brain damage done by drugs; radical feminism, and then also the pederast-inspired and pederast-led homosexualist movement from the early 1970s onwards; and, yes, the influence of bite-sized samplings of various Eastern religions: this concoction has been prescribed socially in and from the 1960s, economically in and from the 1980s, and constitutionally, as well as in unprecedented doses both economically and socially, from 1997 onwards.

But it is always the same toxic brew.

1 comment:

  1. No sign of break dancing jesus or his alter egoes for a while. I think you've defeated him with R D Laing, Hermann Hesse and the stuff in the Ashes To Ashes post. Keep up the good work.

    ReplyDelete