Madam, – I have long and patiently waited for someone of Garret FitzGerald’s standing to point the finger at the basic ills underlying the present crisis. Although his article “Apocalypse may yet spark the rebirth of civic morality” (Opinion, October 16th) is historically broader and more specific to the Republic, I nevertheless welcome it as the first indication of blame not being narrowly focused on “bankers”, “developers” and “government”. My own view has taken many years to mature.
What I have long called “The Great Sixties Neanderthal Regression” has, of course, never been recognised as such, because the psychedelic youngsters involved are now the people at the top. That was when an entire generation was conned, and deliberately and with malice aforethought conned by the sex, drugs and entertainments industry into believing that the whole world could be changed, to quote from a famous verse of alternative scripture, into a Marxist utopia by an orgy of self-indulgence. They endured none of the blood, sweat, toil and tears that so many generations of the Russian people had to face in the name of the great experiment.
The direct result was the famous splitting apart of the generations, leaving behind all notions of frugality and the possibility of a “rainy day”.
The indirect results we are all familiar with: the so-called sexual revolution, an accident waiting to happen after the development of the pill, the consequent trivialisation of marriage and the blurring of relationships.
Above all, in the whole area of money, where the key to all personal finance is “surplus income”, increasing amounts of such surplus led to what I nicknamed the “Jacob’s Ladder Syndrome” becoming universally accepted. That is, the notion that everyone could climb a financial ladder based if necessary on unsecured credit that would ascend higher and higher until it reached financial heaven.
The tragedy, of course, was that the “Jacob’s Ladder” concept seduced not only those at the bottom of the sub-prime mortgage ladder, but all the way up to those in banks and financial institutions and even government, which should have known better. There were very few exceptions to the entire feckless generation. – Yours, etc,