Hegemony of the Chickens

Hegemony [1] is the dominance of one group’s power, and the construction of consent from the powerless through cultural values.

The elderly need to be got rid of. There are practical reasons for this but my main concern is ideological.

The times are ready to change, faster, in fact, than Bob Dylan could have possibly imagined. Many things that could have confidently been called true fifty years ago are nothing but nonsense today. Marijuana leads to rape, nationalism leads to prosperity, sunburn is good for your skin, bacon is healthy, marriage is permanent, and so on, and on…

If anyone believed it then, then certainly only a very dogmatic bunch of chicken brains believe it today. The problem seems to be, however, that the dogmatic, chicken brained section of the community is passionate about legislation and feels the need for their own personal involvement in the political process.

Now, one can forgive the elderly for their attitudes. As my 70-something year old aunt explained to me recently; when she was young there was nothing you were allowed to do, or could do. When she was young, you could get married, that was it. And ideas die hard. It is generally believed that it takes one hundred years for a new idea to fully establish itself in the minds of the majority. Catching on within ten years in informed or intellectual circles, then moving across into the upper socio-economic tiers and then over the decades working its way down to the kind of people who sit in malls on the weekend and eat doughnuts. This means that what you call normal behaviour today looks archaic already to certain members of the community. It means that the quack-speak you hear in the pub or in the newspaper or on TV is contemporary to your grandmother.

The young folks believe they are cutting edge in $80 t-shirts, plugged into ipods, eyes pleadingly fixed on their handheld devices in hope of recognition and acceptance, but they are not. Their adaptability to new technology, and increased access to world travel is certainly changing them faster than previous generations, but they are still made up of aging nonsense. If they ever managed a thought that is more appropriate to the present reality they would soon shoo it away as too problematic, because it would be likely to put them in opposition to their community.

And it seems this is why Socrates was put to death. By teaching his method of inquiry to the youth of Athens he enabled the youth to successfully challenge the nonsensical notions of their elders. The Athenian elders responded to this, and Socrates was quite correctly convicted of corrupting the minds of the youth and was killed with poison. Socrates was eroding the nonsensical pillars of Athenian society. For that, he had to be disposed of. Pillars of nice firm unchallenged nonsense make perfectly solid foundations for society. Indeed all contemporary societies are made of exactly that, reinforced nonsense.

The problem is that some nonsense makes life unbearable, or impossible. Marriage will ruin more people than it saves in this generation. Inflated real-estate prices, created by “property investment”, will force most people into life-long servitude to the banks, and so the home becomes more a place of stress and anxiety than that of security and comfort (which it is obviously advertised as being). We could do with a complete change in ideology in both these departments. After all, extorting money out of almost everyone for the entire length of their lives, in exchange for one of the three basic necessities of life, shelter, would appear to be utterly inhumane. But since the two ideas combined, marriage and home ownership, lead to big profits for banks and anyone else with a vested interest, then these ideas will be perpetuated for as long as is inhumanly possible.

The old serve the purpose of slowing the young down, by means of laws and scary stories of what will happen to you if you do anything that threatens the practices that the old understand and are privileged by.

And what about drugs. Where have the world’s laws on drugs come from? Why the fuck would you prefer that a citizen get drunk and violent and virtually retarded on alcohol than warm and wonderful on ecstasy. Believe me this not an exaggeration of the facts, this is a fair and accurate description of what these two drugs do to you. Yet the former is not only legal but actively encouraged, while the latter will get you looked up in a cage with people tattooed with Australian flags.

Our ideas are elderly and decrepit, you can’t depend on them for anything because at crucial moments they are liable to croak on you. In a time when all the young social radicals are busy growing dreadlocks and being extreme conservatives (so conservative they would like to woosh life back even further than your grandparents, back to the stone ages, I believe), there is unlikely to be critical change in these departments. If you don’t want to wallow in the muck of alcohol, you’ll just have to keep sneaking around with your hideously evil chemicals hidden, my fresh minded friends, dodging marriage and home ownership and prison all at the same time. Serves you right for being corrosive, like Socrates.