In the 70s, an academic by the name of Stanley Cohen came up with this theory of “Moral Panic” in his book Folk Devils & Moral Panics.
The gist of it was basically that people love to overreact about one thing at a time, usually something that the children everyone is thinking about happen to be doing at the time. Back then it was violence between ‘Mods’ and ‘Rockers’, two different youth subcultures. in the 80s, it was Punks ‘n’ Preppies. Nowadays the violence is generally within the social groups. Kids playing Gangstaaaa getting into brawls, Jocks battling it out as they have for the last 50 years,and Emos committing violence against themselves… It’s a good thing us Goths are normal and well adjusted by comparison (the sad thing is I’m not even being sarcatic when I say that).

This got me thinking about a number of the hysterias that are affecting us today. Chief among these are the current Federal Government’s plans to censor the internet, and chucking up a whole mess of sites on its black list.

That particular list got leaked to Wikileaks the other day, and it was hit up so hard by various news agencies around the world that Wikileaks, which is supported by Wikimedia, the company that runs Wikipedia, that it was down for several hours. After all, state secrets about freedom of speech tend to be big news everywhere that isn’t the P.R.C. or North Korea.

It did get me thinking about a few things along the lines of “Why won’t someone think of the children!?” though, and perhaps all those moral campaigners actually have something.

I was driving Trey home last night and we were talking about how things have been getting worse and worse, socially speaking, little by little. There’s this sort of natural entropy going on lately, and by it’s very nature, people aren’t really noticing it. Each individual part of it is a tiny little thing, so no one really cares or bothers about it much… But you take a step back and look at the big picture and woah! Holy fuck! What has happened over the last 10-15 years!?

We’re pretty much back at square 1, the recession we had to have, low quality and poorly-cut drugs flooding the market and killing folks instead of people having a good time, record personal debt levels and we’re still buying our way into more shit that we think will make us happy, which it won’t. We’re all chasing money that others have, so that we can have it, so that we can spend it and not have it once again, and what do we spend it on? Shit that’ll get us laid? STDs are at levels unseen since the 50s! The general health of the population is higher than it’s ever been throught out history thanks to decent medications, but we manage to be more obese, more prone to heart diseases, more risk averse than ever before… And breathing for a day in downtown Beijing has the same effect on your lungs as a packet of delicious Marlboro’s. They’re flavour country, you know.

While all this is falling down around us like Sampson in the temple, the soundtrack to my life progressively sounds more and more like an automatic calliops as the thoughts in my head simply scream ”Are we having fun yet?” and all I can answer is “No. The party keeps getting worse, and no one really wants to change the music or throw out the rancid punch.”

Getting back to Cohen, I can’t help but think that this really is the fault of the “youth” in each generation.

 

Wait! Hear me out before you get all indignant about me joining the “get off my lawn!” patrol.

Every generation since the post War period has basically been idealistic young prats. Idealism would be fine if it wasn’t that it’s constantly being crushed by the current crop of 40 somethings, and then being coopted by the same bastards to be resold to us as a consumable product, lifestyle or ideology. Each generation, a little more of life becomes a little less sacred, and this cycle is basically a big feedback loop. Because some of our dreams and hopes for the future were sold out as kids, we become cynical, and do the same thing to the next generation. I can already see it happening with the Internet, of all things. The unlimited freedoms promised by it 10-15 years ago have become coopted by big business. MySpace is owned by Rupert Murdoch for fucks sake!

And as each little bit of decency, in every sense of the word, gets chipped away or slowly decays, most of us don’t really notice or care. But there are some people out there crying hysterically, and no one listens to them… They’re just experience a “moral panic”. 

I’m not saying that things like “youth violence” or “youth sexual culture” or some bullshit like that is anyway worse than it’s always been. It’s always been as bad as it is now… It’s just more in your face nowadays.

But that honestly doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be trying to fix this shit up.

 

 

… Fuck it. What do I know? Enjoy the ride, folks.

 

P.S. This is going to be my last actual post for a while, other than maybe a comment or two about Jhonen Vasquez’s appearance at SupaNova. I’m just having a really shitty time in general and need to get my head sorted. I’ll schedule a months worth of drinks posts, because according to the traffic stats, that’s what people come to this blog for predominantly anyway, but I probably won’t be posting anything witty or insightful for a few weeks.

Why not go and jerk off to some hot cosplay girls? 

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