Second paradox

In my view most people in Britain that you hear from, or about, or where some deeper polling has taken place, see themselves at odds with the system. This is new. Popular views of what the system is, may be vague, from the way we all live today to more specific views about banks, the super-rich, parliament, parties, the police etc; about the people who run things. But a feeling that it is all wrong; that it is unjust and twisted away from important priorities; that the system is not working for the common good seems to be widely shared.

This feeling is not wrong. It is new(ish) and the paradox is that it is not underpinned, in Britain, to a coherent set of steps, experiences or thoughts, which lead to the measured conclusion that the system is wrong. Like the confidence of the coalition government, this unease with the system seems to rest on thin air. Fundamentally, of course, it is the molecular, osmotic process of a thousand details of daily life seeping through the membrane of the mind. But it is not the emergence of a critical view as such. This unease does not emerge from a sense of a class contest over redistribution of power and wealth (except within treasured morsels of the trade union movement.) It is not the emergence of a new, egalitarian vision of a future society. Yet it is much more profound than simply the day to day grumbling of subordinated classes.

The current discontent is the gathering alienation of a vast swath of the population from a style of civilisation and culture that seems without a future and without a moral centre and valid purpose. It is one emerging sign of the end of a certain stage of society. This way of living, we seem to be saying, is wrong and should not continue.