Even after 34 years, this film still speaks volumes about our current culture, which many ideals are ringing true today. The younger generations are out of control due to lack of parental control, junk culture is becoming commonplace, violence is desensitizing the masses, and we all seem to be enjoying the ride on the way down. It's very difficult to find movies which can make such startling commentary, yet hold on to such accusations for an extended period of time. Nowadays, films are focused-grouped to death, conformity is more powerful than artistry, and money is far more important than quality. Kubrick took a huge leap with this film, challenging society to take a hard look at itself. Unfortunately, society wasn't ready for this film, which is why it is revered now more than ever.
Tolerance über alles and the death of British civilization
Just as Britain seems to be far beyond us in the tolerance and embrace of Muslims and other cultural aliens (though we are pretty far gone ourselves in that department), Britain is also far beyond us in anarcho-tyranny. Coined by Samuel Francis, anarcho-tyranny is the systematic refusal to enforce the law in the most serious and essential matters, such as the protection of citizens from physical violence, combined with the assiduous enforcement of intrusive regulations in the most trivial and specious matters, such as the policing of people’s thoughts and feelings about minorities. An extremely disturbing article by Theodore Dalrymple in City Journal re-tells shocking, gratuitous crimes of violence performed by British “youth” that have permanently ruined the lives of the respective victims and blighted those of their families, and yet were punished by a few months in jail. At the same time, violations of political correctness, such as a harmless “homophobic” joke made to a police officer, are treated with the utmost dispatch and severity. Unfortunately, the article is very lengthy in the recounting of newspaper stories that Dalrymple has read (the piece is 3,500 words long), and very short on any real analysis. (I can’t help but wonder how much Dalrymple is paid by the prestigious and well-endowed City Journal for a 3,500 word article that consists mainly in the elegant regurgitation of several newspaper articles.) The closest Dalrymple gets to general conclusions is in this passage:
[T]he zeitgeist of the country is now one of sentimental moralizing combined with the utmost cynicism, where the government’s pretended concern for the public welfare coexists with the most elementary dereliction of duty. There is an absence of any kind of idealism that is a necessary precondition of probity, so that bad faith prevails almost everywhere.
http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/005489.html
Returning briefly to England from France for a speaking engagement, I bought three of the major dailies to catch up on the latest developments in my native land. The impression they gave was of a country in the grip of a thoroughgoing moral frivolity. In a strange inversion of proper priorities, important matters are taken lightly and trivial ones taken seriously.
This is not the charming or uplifting frivolity of Feydeau’s farces or Oscar Wilde’s comedies; it is the frivolity of real decadence, bespeaking a profound failure of nerve bound to have disastrous consequences for the country’s quality of life. The newspapers portrayed frivolity without gaiety and earnestness without seriousness—a most unattractive combination.
Of the two instances of serious matters taken with levity, the first concerned a 42-year-old barrister, Peter Wareing, attacked in the street while walking home from a barbecue with two friends, a man and a woman. They passed a group of seven teenagers who had been drinking heavily, one of whom, a girl, complained that the barrister and his friends were “staring” at them. Nowadays, English youth of aggressive disposition and porcelain-fragile ego regard such alleged staring as a justified casus belli.
http://www.city-journal.org/html/16_2_oh_to_be.html
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