Paradise Lost

I only have my own life experience to reflect on, and while it does seem like society was freer in my youth (pre-9/11 U.S.), I was also a freer and wilder person back then. I see how the younger generations live, and how society has changed - and I get the feeling personal freedom and even cultural values are getting lost. But maybe it's just me, I'm getting older and don't have the youthful need to push the limits and experience that wild freedom so much anymore. Even if I had the drive, I think society is no longer as tolerant of the particular kind of wildness that I enjoyed as a youth.

It's not easy to separate personal experience from observations of social changes. I bet there is some truth in the author's feeling of that pre-collapse Soviet society, there was something special there that only existed at that time.

I think it's both.

You can see it with smoking. Only 20 years ago (I'll take France as the example), you could smoke indoors in restaurants and many public places and, a few years before that, even in classrooms.

Recently, it was forbidden in public parks and similar places. A perhaps still minoritary segment of the population would like it outlawed even in e.g. restaurant and bar terraces.

Since France remains behind on this compared to the US, you can get a time-traveling experience regarding this right now, by boarding a plane from Paris to e.g. Boston or back. You won't find a terrace where you're allowed to smoke (or even vape) in Boston (at least I didn't) or, if you're American, you might find the French very comfortable smoking right under your nose.

There is no doubt these are good policies as far as public health is concerned. But they outline how, in the tug-of-war between personal freedom and safety, there has been a tendency lately for safety to win.

Other examples, as far as I'm aware, there weren't even speed limits on non-agglo roads before the 70s (France, again). Drinking (under the limit of manifest ebriety, and the tolerance must have been pretty lenient) and driving was not illegal until 1970. You could drive a motor scooter/moped including on high speed roads (though they wouldn't break 40km/h unless unbridled) from the age of 14 without any paperwork, nowadays it requires a minimal license. I'm very doubtful people didn't know this was a dangerous situation, or that they didn't care, I think they simply prioritized freedom and simplicity over living in a zero-risk society.

I point to these safety regulations because they're where the compromise between social order and personal freedom is most evident, but they're only manifestations of a broader change of the Zeitgeist, in my mind.

Another clear tendency seems to be an obsession with so-called insecurity which, according to politicians and a worryingly large portion of the French (judging by election results), is at an unbearable all time high; in fact, violent crimes have never been so rare (for comparison, murder rate is 1/5th that of the US).

Everyone seems obsessed with risk and danger, be it the right of being mugged, or the left of precarity (which I can better sympathize with). It seems one half of the population wants to live in a police state with no personal freedom, and the other wants to live in an absolute socialist state with no financial freedom.

Just to conclude, it also seems the newer generation has been found less promiscuous, which, to me, is not a very adventurous attitude.