This is a long, rambling speech given to a Seminar on Humanism in Education on September 6th, 2005. It does meander to a conclusion, if you can wait that long. Feel free to lift any part you like for your own purposes but please attribute.


Let’s start with Credit


Everything is on credit – the home, car, refrigerator and mobile phone. Even petrol is paid for on credit. Almost all people are deep into credit debt and the whole of society has been restructured and geared to a ‘debt economy’ in the relatively short space of forty years.


This is a game where, as long as you have a steady job, a good income and you don’t divorce – you can survive, as long as you can keep your spending impulses under tight control. Trouble is – people can’t and that’s another story in itself.


The instant the income drops, you get sick or someone in the family starts spending big – you suddenly find yourself with overwhelming debt, followed by bankruptcy and then you, your wife and your children find you have become criminals.


Britain


• credit card debt up to 1,140 pounds per person [monthly income 833 pounds]


• bankruptcies soaring [Feb 2005]


USA


• debt doubled in last 10 years - $85 000 per household, including mortgage debt


• $12,000 card debt alone


• $6,700 car loan debt


• American Banks’ income from people’s debts 40% of total income


• consumers now borrowing during depressions


• household debt 22.6 percent of all household assets


• personal savings only 2%


• debt burden unmanageable for most families and individuals on low income


• fastest-growing debtor group 65 and older - grossly inadequate Social Security


• people dangerously close to the edge - any minor setback pushes them over


• more Americans say debt reduction is higher priority than losing weight or exercising


Iceland


• debt grew by 12 per cent from early 2004 to early 2005


• wave of mortgage re-financing - many spend months of salary before receiving it


Australia


Australians now owe so much money that the Reserve Bank only needs to lift interest rates by 1 percent point to plunge families into bankruptcy and criminalization. The problem is not so much the ‘theory of credit’ – theoretically it works fine. The problem is the psychology and financial position of the people who use it.


Credit plays on some very deep seated psychological needs in the human psyche.If we’re asked today what we are looking for, what would we answer - a better life?


If we’re asked what is important to us personally, we might answer, ‘To live comfortably, surrounded by beautiful things. Beautiful things make us feel good.’


If you were to ask a man why Paco Rabanne, Hugo Boss, Christian Dior, Fendi, Armani and Ecco labels adorn his cupboards and shelves and why not, say, Good Value Clothing and Market Style, he’d answer straight away, ‘Quality. You get what you pay for.’


The Italians pursue ‘La Dolce Vita’ and doesn’t everyone, even the poorest peasant, want a piece of the action? Eager eyes see what the rich and famous have and we too want some of it for ourselves. When we sample it, we see how good it feels. Trouble is, we simply can’t afford it.


We like to think of ourselves as ‘discerning’. It’s so important that those around us recognize our exquisite taste. By paying $2000 in Paris for a Hermes scarf – a piece of died silk cloth half a metre square – what are we trying to prove?


Truth is that the close circle of people we wish to be associated with back home know all the labels and instantly recognize that we are also people of high taste and financially successful.


It’s a small, select club, far above the mass of mundane people running around in their polyester print scarves and ersatz Chinese clothing. ’ It’s the fabric, the texture, the colours – the … the style!’ we explain.


The retail world is happy to play on two obsessions - ‘good taste’ and ‘something new’. With each new announcement of a new collection, presented for our personal consideration, the cogniscenti stampede the store to critically evaluate whatever’s on offer.


No crime in looking. The problems start once we start buying. Either we’ve a rich partner or we must resort to credit. To enter a credit agreement, someone in our family MUST have a guaranteed and steady income over the period of the debt. With credit, this means forever because once we’re in; we almost never come out again.


There is one sort of person who should NEVER, EVER be given credit - it’s giving dynamite to a child to play with. This person:


• is low income, young and trying to live a high speed lifestyle on little money


• has spent most of his/her life not having things and suddenly sees the chance to have things without limit


• is material and ambitious – money related matters come into conversation quite often


• knows all the quality labels or marques but can’t afford them


• is in a situation where total debt each month exceeds total income


• is a spender rather than a saver


• hates delayed gratification – must have things immediately


• has very little experience of credit – doesn’t know its dangers


Young people are especially vulnerable because most are naïve and spend in binges, without counting the cost.


Years ago, one of my college friends bankrupted his father, who then lost everything. The great lie is that the west lives ‘normally’. The slick advertisements and glossy films disguise the reality and the reality is in the statistics quoted above. No one owns anything.


People are now trying to finance a lifestyle which only the rich can afford and in doing so, they are often working two jobs and losing their grip on reality.


While plunging themselves into debt and getting new credit cards to pay off the old ones, their children find themselves in a moral vacuum and are going out and bingeing on booze, drugs and clubs.


History, surprisingly, would say there’s nothing new in this. The Ancient Greeks were writing criticisms of their decadent society over 2000 years ago. The Ancient Romans put new meaning into the words.


Society has been forever sliding into degeneracy and each new generation finds a new variation on the same old theme. A recent article on BBC News stated bluntly:


“The Muslims accuse us of decadence and claim they are the only religion offering a strong moral code today and the truth is - they have a point. Decadence has set in. It happens to all developed societies eventually.”


So is there anything new happening today which would suggest this is more than just another passing phase? Well, yes – there are definitely some new and very worrying variations on the old theme, like mutations of an old virus.


Civic tone


In one web newspaper, these were the most viewed articles on one day in September:


1. Worst sex scenes - ever


2. Nine die in freak cable car accident


3. Microsoft CEO: 'I'm going to f---ing kill Google'


4. Murder and rape at the Superdome


5. Brogden sex claim branded a lie


This requires no comment. The front page three weeks ago ran the headline ‘Canada approves gay marriage’. Below this was a 10cm by 5cm photo of two naked men in the middle of ‘the act’. This is really so - it was on the front page.


BBC News is constantly the subject of complaints about its editorial policy and sloppy sub-editing; so much so that the Editor-In-Chief was forced to run an article in July answering his critics.


The concentration on ‘tat’, the general sloppiness and failure to address the issues which really matter is symptomatic of a wider community malaise.


Minette Marrin, of the Sunday Telegraph, put it this way:


“What connects all these things is an unwillingness, which has developed since the Sixties, to stand up for things which matter. I think it began with an unwillingness to reprimand our own children. Some of my parents’ generation were very lax with their children; people began to speak of the permissive society, instead of doing anything about it.


And since then, parents (including me) have seemed less able or willing to discipline their children. Yet without proper discipline from parents, children can never develop self-discipline and it is on self-discipline and self-restraint that a civilised society rests. With a loss of self-discipline goes a loss of standards of behaviour and a loss of the sense of what matters most in the world.”


A great example of this is a business client I have who for years ran wild and never developed internal self-discipline. Now he suddenly needs English – something requiring great self-discipline, planning and scheduling ability and painstaking perseverance and he’s finding it incredibly difficult to do.


Children are now unprotected in a way never seen before and they’ve learnt to play the three-card trick on their parents to get what they want.


And what they want is freedom – an empty flat, no supervision but with a clothes-washing and food service. This is exactly what a family I have known for ten years has recently done. The parents have left the flat to the late teenage children and gone to the forest to live. They consider this wise.


Parents either believe what their children tell them or else they know the truth and choose to ignore it, reasoning that ‘you’re only young once’ and ‘better to give them what they want’. What is going through parents’ brains?


Parents complain that they must give in to their children – the new world youth culture places enormous pressure on them and demands that they comply with their children’s wishes.This was exactly what Ms Marrin was referring to.


Until two years ago, my circle of friends were young and I was caught up in what they were doing. Maybe I was accepted because I was foreign and interesting, I don’t know. From what I saw, there were things they obviously wouldn’t like their parents to know but not much worse than we once did – except in one different way:


There really is a new hard edge creeping into the ‘group dynamic’ now and increasingly you can see it, if you know what to look for. For a start, it’s in the eyes - a sort of blank, cold, experienced, sardonic look which always comes from an excessive lifestyle and insatiable, avaricious ambition for more and more.


It’s also in the voice – difficult to put into words but you’d know if you heard it – with girls it’s that hard tone, coming from the back of the throat; it snaps rather than floats smoothly to the listener’s ear; it’s loaded with self-concern and is heavily sardonic. Sometimes it becomes hysterical shrieking.


With the guys, it’s the permanent half grin and charm loaded voice disguising the emptiness behind it. Of course I’m not writing of the majority and tarring everyone with the same brush – I’m writing of the trend and that’s the way it’s going.


There is a definite predatory and deviant influence insinuating itself into everything we’re exposed to today – music, film, conversation, parties, even simple socializing.


Listen to the lyrics of any rap song and compare it with the ‘bad boy’ songs of the 70s. The 70s songs are laughably naïve. A young person can go to any nightclub in any part of the world – Limmasol, London, Sydney, Durban - take your pick – and the scene is the same, the values are the same, the social groupings are the same.


Fun is the highest good – doesn’t matter from where it comes. Money is the chief necessity - doesn’t matter from where it comes. Street cred is the highest accolade - doesn’t matter on what it’s based.


Then there is ego – the implicit belief that we have it all ‘together’, that we are in control of our own lives. The used needles in the corners next morning say otherwise. When people firmly believe they’re ‘in control’, which the young certainly do, that’s an amazingly effective portal for truly nasty values to get through- slowly, subtly but surely.


The trouble is that the educated moralists like Ms Marrin – well brought up, articulate and basically correct - see things from a distance. No kid would let her close enough to be influenced by what she says. Then there are those ‘on the inside’ and they ‘ain’t talkin’.


Then there are those rare creatures who were once part of the scene and then saw the light. But the mythical lemmings, with glazed eyes fixed firmly ahead, only ever marginally heed warnings from such people.


Just forty years ago, the west did have a moral code – a very powerful code called the Gospel and though none of us really abided by it, nevertheless it was there and it had a constraining effect on how people related to each other and on what they saw as important in life.


There were four gathering places – the pub, the home, the football and church on Sunday. True - the code was always being broken and yet there it sat, benignly smiling down on us, a code of old fashioned ideas like charity towards other people, kindness and altruism towards all around us, self-restraint, decency in all our dealings with other people and personal integrity in the topics we talk about and the language we use.


It put family first and treated marriage as a sacred institution in the sight of G-d. It revered the contributions of the armed men and women who defended their countries. It believed in simple pleasures, such as walks in the forest, holidays by the beach and the conversation and laughter of friends.


It maintained some sense of ‘proportion’ in life and protected children from all sorts of experiences too early. It was universally agreed by parents and educators and was just accepted as ‘there’ by young people.


It simply ‘was’.


Now it has been replaced by the high sounding spirit of tolerance and broadminded tolerance. Good qualities? Depends on what we are tolerating. Narcotica? Homosexuality?


In western schools, the old guard has now almost faded away and the Generation X teacher, minus tie, minus complexes, popular with the kids, embraces the ‘toleration’ mentality, tuned in to kids’ own natural sense of fairmindedness.


Individual parents and grandparents once tried to re-apply the old precepts but it was a losing battle and were so out of touch with their sledgehammer approach.


The most recent attempt to return to the old values was the move to teach Intelligent Design alongside Evolution in schools. [The interesting thing is how it ever came to be replaced by Evolution in the first place.] It’s not the Gospel but it is all that’s left.


Voodoo chic


Historically, there are two fascinating trends in a society when it becomes decadent and soft – such as the Ancient Romans, Ancient Greece and the west today.


The first trend is that we truly believe we are heading ever upwards towards the light – a higher standard of living, greater economic power, a more sophisticated lifestyle, more fashion consciousness, more in control of our own destinies.


At the same time, the ‘chic’ begins to adopt more and more primitive elements – body tattooing, grotesque piercing of body parts, subordination of one-on-one relationships to group behaviour, swapping from partner to partner, more repetitive and zombie-like dance forms.


All dying societies go through this phenomenon – the higher and higher they aspire, the lower and lower they sink.


Chic becomes blended with a new sort of voodooism and the result is bizarre. A girl in sleek hipster jeans and incredibly expensive designer top, her perfect hair tossed over her shoulders, also sports tastefully hideous tattoos.


Bits of metal hang off her navel and a nail skewers her eyebrow, as if she were in Africa. She calls it ‘fashion’. The latest example is the ring worn on the thumb.


This descent to the primitive and unrestrained was captured in the cult 60s film, lately re-released in a more modern form - Lord of the Flies.


To quote Apollo Film Reviews:“The story is familiar to senior students – a planeload of British schoolboys is being airlifted away from a war zone, when their plane crashes beside a deserted island. No adults live through the crash – just 30 little boys.


They organize themselves to survive and hopefully get rescued. What starts out as a democratic and organized enterprise, with a charismatic and protective leader, gradually disintegrates into brutal anarchy.


It doesn’t cost a lot to turn angelic children into crazed hunters, and the film-makers did so reasonably effectively. They had many problems with the boys on that island…”


As they all stand on the beautiful, untouched beach, with its swaying palm trees and unspoilt sand, looking smart and well fed in their immaculate white shirts and clean uniforms, the story unfolds:


One group, mainly the young and the weak, follow the lead character Ralph and believe that no matter what, they must keep law and order and some sort of spirituality, as their mamas and papas would want them to. The other group follow Jack, the largest and strongest boy, who has no moral scruples.


No prizes for guessing which one is the more popular and as Jack provides the food for both groups and descends into nakedness, body painting, piercing and savagery, boy after boy deserts Ralph for the other side. All of them are terrified by the presence of the Beast on the island. No one has seen this terror but one night the youngest boy has a surreal conversation with it.


Next morning his dead body is found washed up on the shore.


Ritualistic murders follow and at the end, Ralph finds himself alone, half savage himself, running wildly for his life along the once pure beach, with a mob of crazed savages chasing him, howling for his blood, to feed the Beast.


Ralph collapses on the sand, right at the feet of a naval officer, dressed in crisp white uniform, who has been sent out to rescue the boys. The last we see is the group of savages now guiltily realizing the exact horror of what they have done.


Question: Are you a lemming?


Try this simple test to find out:


• Could you completely stay away from shopping centres, boutiques, perfumeries and nightclubs for three months?


• Would you refuse credit to finance something you really wanted?


• Could you live without your mobile phone for just one week?


• Could you stay off alcohol, soft drink and junk food like chips, wrapped candy bars and soft drink for one week?


• Have you visited any Holy Place in the last month and prayed there?


• Do you completely rest from work on one day of the week?


• Do you turn your back on the fashion of piercing, tattoos or rings on your thumb? Do you keep the number of earrings down to one on each ear?


If you have to ask, ‘Why should I?’ then you’ve already answered the question.


Finally


I was recently out walking with a ‘noseboner’ [a girl with something pierced on her face] and she said, ‘I enjoy these things.’


Yes, she does. Her heroine is Angelina Jolie but what she doesn’t see is what eventually happens to the Angelina Jolies and Paris Hiltons –the less glamorous side of a lascivious lifestyle.


Both these ‘ladies’ desperate crave for happiness and fulfilment – it’s so obvious in their interviews - and their tired ennui is sad to see. They all seek it in the end – Madonna with her Kabbala, JLo, Britney.


And the guys never grow up and finish up like Jay Gatsby.I’m no guru but it seems to me that there are some logical things we should be doing, just to survive as a person and therefore, as a species:


• Start living within our economic means, and pay cash.


• Stay with the simple pleasures in life - forest and river, walks with friends, wine, conversation, song and wild passion with our one and only partner.


• Construct and create, rather than consume. Don’t be a user.


• Don’t ask ‘What’s in it for me?’ but rather, ‘How can I do something for someone else?’


• If we’re doing something we can’t tell the world about, then at least do it the way nature intended
Avoid ‘bingeing’ and resist the pressure to do things to excess.


• Practise deferring gratification – if we can’t have it immediately, learn to accept this until we can afford it.


What we get in return is inner strength, self-protection, continued, unstressed good health, sustained pleasure from life and real, not artificial and temporary happiness.And isn’t real happiness what we all want, after all?


posted by james higham at Thursday, July 27, 2006