Is Modern Life Shit? (2/2) By Scott Rorrison

(1/2), (2/2).

As I write this article my girlfriend's Shitzu Baxter is flying off the handle because someone has offended him by having the audacity to walk past our/or his living room window, and he never touches a drop; he's just a savage brute by nature, quite similar to his fellow chavs (we did buy him on Bransholme after all). Just like the present day government's attempt at brainwashing, Rousseau's totalitarian philosophies work on the theory that the populace should do not what is best for the individual, but what is best for the state; this is known as the general will.

Rousseau believes that if everybody adopts the general will then the freedom of the people will never be infringed. This works on the theory that if we act according to the general will then what the individual wants and what the state wants will be one and the same. Surely anyone can see that our minds are being controlled. I have picked out a passage from Rousseau's Declaration Of The Rights Of Man which proves this, which follows 'whoever refuses to obey the general will, will be forced to do so by the entire body. This means merely that he will be forced to be free.'(Rousseau, 1987, Bk 1, ch7, p150)

We are being raised in a state which has totally lost any sense of culture it may have had. Just look at the crap which decorates the covers of magazines and papers about celebrity gossip and benefit cheats, or 'reality' T.V and soap operas. We have become a nation of couch potatoes who are influenced by the likes of the God awful Trinny and Susannah and have lost any free will we may have had.

I think this is due to the 70's and 80's, I mean culturally they must have been the worst two decades in history. Maybe there was the odd good bit of music but most of it was a carry on from the 60's. When I think about this era I get visions of grey weather and greyer high rise cheap industrial buildings, crap food, strikes and football hooliganism, the thing just depresses me and it has taken until now for my generation to start a cultural revolution. It makes me happy to see a re-emergence of the 60's culture, I see people frequenting coffee shops discussing art and music, wearing arty clothes bought from privately owned vintage boutiques and the growing popularity of places like The Lamp and The Sesh. I think just like the original counter culture we've got a lot to be pissed off about.

I would like to finish by quoting Timothy Leary's interview with Playboy in 1966, which I believe has a lot of relevance in today's England. 'Turn on, Tune in, Drop out, detach yourself from the tribal game. Current models of social adjustment - mechanised, computerised, socialized, televised- make no sense to the new LSD generation, who see clearly that society is becoming an air conditioned ant hill.'

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