What Do the Old Think?

Whenever I contemplate how much the world has changed over the course of my life, it seems quite incredible. Let us compare forty years - 2023 and 1983. Daily life in 1983 would have been very different from daily life in 2023 - so much so that a person flung back to that year would be a fish out of water.

The most obvious difference would be the absence of the Internet. This alone would be very difficult for our time traveler to get to grips with, as he would constantly default to thinking that some or other task could be done online, or that factoid could be found online, or that person could be contacted online. Away from the Internet itself, he would constantly run into the absence of technology more broadly: he would have no mobile phone, no home computer, no mp3s, no digital TV, only three channels on an analogue reception, probably not even a VCR.

The absence of the Internet and other technologies would mean that many things which in 2023 are done privately would instead be done publicly, either in the presence or with the cooperation of other people. Socialising (in the broadest sense of the word) would be much more predominant in a person’s daily life. It would happen so much, by necessity, that many of the little problems which in 2023 plague social interactions (and, resultantly, people’s private lives) would simply not be able to develop in the first place. Other people would so often just “be there”, that the many techniques to get along with them would also just “be there”, and the various attitudes to accommodate them and expect them would be the defaults of daily life. The psychological and behavioural dangers of spending too much time alone, dangers that we know all too well in 2023, would be almost unheard of in 1983.

That aside, there would be other differences in behaviour, attitudes and beliefs among the people one encountered in 1983.

People would be more deferential in general, more respectful and considerate towards the elderly, more commanding towards children (including other people's children), and much more open-minded about the opinions they heard, wherever they heard them. Men would be more assertive and dominant, with clearly defined boundaries between them, and they would have contempt for feminine men and would not be shy about showing it. Women would be more submissive and obedient, and very much preoccupied with family life and, before that, the things involved in attracting a husband so as to begin a family. That, in turn, would influence the behaviour of young men, for whom “having a family” would be a default expectation, both of themselves and their peers.

Social class would be a much more prevalent part of everyday interactions, with people showing some degree of deference to those who spoke better than them (although this would be far less of a thing among young people). Social class would also be much more sharply defined, in terms of clothing, speech patterns, accent, habits, tastes, and even body language. Sharply defined, but also believed in and adhered to. For example, you would not find middle-class people watching trash TV - not even with self-deprecating remarks to “explain it away” with some humour. They simply would not do it, because they would know that, if they did, other people would consider them intellectual morons, or else, moral failures.

Attitudes taken for granted, nay, required in 2023 would be anathema to ordinary people of 1983. This is especially true of attitudes surrounding sex and sexual activity. To say that two men should be able to get married, or that they should be allowed (even encouraged) to adopt and raise children, or that a primary school should invite drag queens to speak to the children about gender, or that slut-shaming is bad... none of these attitudes would win you any friends in 1983. Even the young guy who jokingly agreed with you that women should be allowed to be sluts, because he likes to have casual sex, would be quietly thinking that there might be something wrong with you, because clearly women should be thinking about marriage, not casual sex, even if he happens to enjoy participating in their misadventures. (Incidentally, that in itself is an interesting difference: people would have an understanding that something can be enjoyable yet still be a misadventure. Today, we seem to have the incredibly puerile attitude that anything that feels good, is good.)

Still more absurd to 1983 people would be, for example, the idea that the original inhabitants of England were not white, or that race doesn’t exist, or that pride can only be derived from victimhood, or that hierarchy (in class, age, ability) is an illusion, or that the real victim of a crime is (or could ever be) the perpetrator. If you said these things to them, they would think, at best, that you must have been brainwashed by the loopiest of the lecturers at the nearby polytechnic college, and at worst, that you had some kind of mental disturbance which, if not a mental illness as such, was certainly distorting your thinking and causing you to embrace bizarre ideas, and that you are a poor soul who deserves to be pitied. To underline: if you espoused the beliefs of 2023 in 1983, people would think there was something wrong with you. They would hesitate to leave you alone with children, pets, or heavy machinery.

Were you to ask them “what is a woman?” not only would they be able to answer the question immediately and without any effort or confusion whatsoever, the answer would be so obvious to them that they would assume you were either a) playing some sort of trick on them, or b) insane. (Of course, people of 2023 secretly have exactly the same thoughts. The difference is that, when asked the question, they know a trick is being played on them, and they know how to go along with it and get away unscathed.)

But I cannot remember life in 1983. My memories of the 1980s are just scattered, isolated images. Cogency arrives for me around 1990. From then on, I can begin comparing life with how it is now.

But there are people alive today who can cogently remember not only 1983, but also 1973, 1963, 1953 and even 1943.

Regent Street, London, in 1945

There are people alive today who have lived and been aware for much longer than I have. If I am startled by how much the world has changed in the time I have been observing it... what on Earth must these older people be thinking? How can they be okay with it? How can they not find it monstrous? How can they honestly say that life makes more sense today than in now-distant eras which they lived through and can vividly remember? They witnessed attitudes and almost certainly held beliefs that would now lose you your job. Consider a Boomer rock star who was big in the 1970s and is now an old man, showing up occasionally at awards ceremonies. Back in his heyday, that man almost certainly laughed at jokes that he would now gladly watch somebody being imprisoned for telling.

What baffles me is that elderly celebrities seem perfectly okay with the drastic social changes they have seen, over their lifetimes but especially over the last 10 years. You’d think they would sometimes complain about it. That is what old people are supposed to do, for God’s sake.

Perhaps the most disturbing thing here is that, while young people are troubled by their disconnection from a past that they instinctively feel was (in many ways) better than today, those old enough to remember that past treat it as something dirty, disgusting and shameful, or at best embarrassing. The obvious answer here is that those older people are correct, while the young, who weren’t around back then and so don’t really know what they’re talking about, are simply wrong.

But that seems unlikely when we are talking about, for example, children being encouraged into transgenderism, or a nation being destroyed, or a people being erased from history, or the very idea of male and female being dismantled. I am simply not going to believe that these are good things, or that the changes which brought them about were good changes, or that the situation beforehand was inferior. No. The old people must be wrong.

I wish they would behave like old people are supposed to, and complain about the present, and assert - for the edification of anyone who doesn’t know - that the past was indeed better. Instead, they take part in upholding this circus of insanity.

What makes it even worse is that they have the least to lose by straying from fashionable nonsense, yet they seem determined to play their part in sustaining, and even celebrating, the nonsense.

As young people, they failed to stop the changes. As old people, they fail to admit that things were better before the changes. They fail even to appreciate the thing they have denied to their successors.

They should, of course, be ashamed.

But I think it is worth showing them some mercy. After all, if young people today are conditioned to accept and believe the demonstrably false (and they very obviously are), then of course the old people of today were similarly tricked when they were young.

I think an additional factor that needs to be borne in mind is the increase in the machine’s speed and efficiency. At each stage, the narratives have evolved, the justifications for past actions have been revised, and always “the next logical step” was touted as both desirable and inevitable. The machine was far ahead of the people, always. At this stage, ordinary people are overwhelmed and bewildered. I don’t think anyone - in terms of “normies” - really understands a damned thing that they are asked to go along with. (But that doesn’t mean they have to enthusiastically celebrate it!)

Then there is the pressure of “being old”: the weary assumption that you just don’t understand the world any more, that there is no point in trying to judge it since you simply don’t have the mental or experiential furniture that would enable you to do so fairly, so anything you said would be mistaken. I could understand elderly celebrities checking out of making any comment on current affairs and trendy ideas, using that as their (honest) excuse. The trouble is, they don’t ever do that.

It’s as if it’s not enough that they let us down. They have to compound their failure by casually pretending that it never even happened.