Diary 123

Sunday, July 19th

I’ve been wondering recently about American culture – where people say that wearing surgical masks is an attack on their freedom; where carrying guns is regarded as an inviolable right; where policing peaceful protests with heavily armed military is regarded as reasonable. That culture. It reminds me very much of what Victorian colonial England was probably like. The men and women who went out to India, in fact, really did believe the normal rules of life didn’t apply to them at all. “Mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun.”  They did this because they thought they were right. This was something they felt was a line of praise.

So why did they behave like that? I suspect that this has anger as its base.

Why so much anger? Well, for one thing, if people grow up thinking the world is ghastly and it’s dog-eat-dog, then you’ll get this sort of behavior. That seems to be the story they believe. But this is not true of our world.  We have plenty — the trouble is that it’s concentrated in the hands of the 1%.

Our problem is not truly one of angry or self-righteous crowds: our problem is with the people who make them that way, and that is the 1%.