Selfish, Whining Monkeys: How we ended up greedy, narcissistic and unhappy

by Rod Liddle (2014).


True to form, Rod continues to entertain and infuriate by turns.  Actually, if I'm honest, he never does manage to infuriate me, but regular headlines, including one today, demonstrate that he does successfully irritate a large number of people.  The thing is, unlike the likes of Katy Hopkins, I suspect that being vexatious isn't Rod's entire raison d'etre.  Instead he primarily wants to say it as it is even when what it is he has to say completely unsayable in this day and age.  You have to respect that, even on the few occasions when you suspect that he might also be wrong.   And of course on the entertainment front, he is quite often very funny, turning out perfectly pitched, humorous ridicule annoyingly easily, which is always admirable.

The stand out unsayable, the elephant that has occupied my particular room ever since I floundered around for most of my youth as my mother worked her socks off as a doctor, was the point that repeated longitudinal studies demonstrate that children of working mothers from the 70s don't do as well on all manner of metrics.  I could have told you that, except that I didn't on account of not wanting to be irritating.

Broadly speaking, I suspect that Rod has a point when it comes to trying to work out how we've turned out as we have.  We probably are a lot more snivellingly, self-regardingly pathetic than our parents' generation, and this might indeed have something to do with, amongst other things, the loss of religious faith combined with the twin prongs of anti-authoritarian, moral relativism of the sixties, and the laissez faire ethos of monetarism. 

All in all, you can end up feeling as if we are in a completely irredeemable mess, and that's quite apart from the other challenges, such as climate change, AI, asteroids, volcanoes, population explosions, food shortages, and all manner of different cosmic rays, and other stuff we know we don't know, which Rod doesn't touch upon at all.  Despite all this, I would recommend reading this book as it is great fun, covers a lot of the territory of Owen Jones's  "The Establishment" but far less earnestly and you never know, you might be able to put stuff right as a result of it.

Rating 8/10

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