Jenny, Jenny, Jenny

Yet another book from yet another Boomer about the 60s. Fine with me. It's a big subject. This time it's Jenny Diski, who saw the decade from across the pond, over in England.

She seems to have had a good time, but is worried about the after-effects:

The biggest of Diski’s big ideas is that “liberation and libertarianism were not at all one and the same thing,” that “perhaps our own careless thinking” gave a “rhetorical foothold” to the “new world of rabid individualism and the sanctity of profit” of the 1980s. [...]

You see what she’s after: “freedom,” a crucial term in both eras, changes meaning from “unconstrained exploration of possibility” to “unfettered capitalism.”

I'm not seeing the problem. If you truly believe in individualism, that means you let people discover their own world--does Diski believe individualism is only okay for those who follow the path she supports? Which then means government should rein in all those nasty individualists with improperly performed personal exploration--i.e., those that lead to something as evil as profit?

There's no contradiction between freedom and unfettered capitalism. None, unless you think that freedom is supposed to be found on someone else's tab.