Saturday, March 31, 2001

The Collective - March 01

Anyone who thinks that humans are innately selfish beings should ask responsible parents whether this is the case. Society in Britain throughout the late 1980s, and the whole 1990s has trained individuals to be selfish and single-minded in pursuit of their goals. The conservative government at that time welcomed the materialism and the ‘Yuppie’ culture and nurtured the idea that the only way for the individual to succeed was at the expense of those around him. They were able to use business as a principle exponent of this in that for one business to thrive it must compete with and preferably conquer its rivals in the field. We were told that collectives did not work as human nature is to be selfish, thus there was supposedly nothing we could do about it, ‘…go with the flow, it’s the genetic choice.’ This of course does not take into consideration many factors, history, anthropology, nature and genetics. Humans may not be herd animals but they are also not solitary beings, natural instinct draws us toward small close-knit collective groups within larger but looser community structures. This makes sense for the protection and advancement of the species, it is easier to gather food and carry out reconnaissance when there are still those left to look after the old, infirm and the young. Humans also nurture their young far longer than most animals, it is true that the home-leaving age of 18 is a state –defined and arbitrary one, but most parents are happy to look after their children, provided they have the means to do so, until a mutually defined time where the child wishes to leave and the parents believe s/he can survive on his/her own. There are exceptions but many of these may be the result of external forces such as lack of facilities or peer pressure.

The lack of financial stability can pose a great threat to a family unit, ultimately resulting in its demise this may well not be the fault of either parents or children. It is however within the family that such pressures may best be combated and hence children in the late 20th and early 21st centuries are tending to stay within the family home for longer. This is something that the state must look very carefully at, it is a bad thing for children to be forced from the home because parents cannot afford to keep them, however it is also detrimental for children to be molly coddled and never to learn the value of things around them. It is beneficial for teenagers and early 20s to start to strike out on their own, knowing that they have the parental safety net behind them, this enables them to take risks that as individuals they would not necessarily be able to do. Traditionally University has been the ideal opportunity for youngsters to make their initial forays into the world at large, a gap year has been taken between secondary and tertiary education leaving time for travel or employment. Unfortunately a large section of society has now been denied this opportunity due to the current prohibitive financial demands of tertiary education. It cannot be stressed enough what damage this is doing to the fabric of society, as well as creating an educational elite from the existing financial one it is forcing many of the already under-privileged into employment, purely for financial survival, at an age when few can have had much of a chance to develop ideas and dreams of their prospective futures.