Tony Blair's 'flagship' Millennium Dome - expensive, ugly, boring, unpopular and late - perfect symbol of the new era
At the time of circa 2000, I would have said no, nothing much has changed; but I have since changed my mind.
Nothing happened at the exact time of the millennium (AD 2000 or 2001), and I am not a numerologist - so I see no special significance in the number of 2000 years...
But, as many people perceived in the previous century; that approximate time was indeed a qualitative transition, the millennium was indeed a threshold that we in The West were crossing.
The millennium was the threshold at which there was a generalised inversion of values. And this was apparent in the areas of life with which I was most involved over the years preceding and following the millennium.
For example, truth disappeared as an ideal. People were Not Even Trying to seeks the truth or to speak the truth, but instead truth became a rhetorical manipulation.
Truth was was replaced first by 'hype and spin' (to use the buzz words of that era) and then increasingly by virtuality - the 'real'-reality constructed by the mass media which was being amplified and extended vastly by the nascent social media.
Functionality was replaced by management, that is bureaucracy; i.e. totalitarianism - which is the attempt at complete surveillance and control at the micro level of individual ideas and behaviours in pursuit of universal damnation.
So, in the areas of my own public activity - medicine, scientific research, and teaching - there was at about this time a tipping point.
These all became - in parallel, but in the same way - dishonest, dysfunctional, and evil-motivated.
For the first time, increasingly and irrevocably, bureaucratic mechanisms (committees, protocols, management...) took over both power and responsibility is the actual clinical practice of medicine (face to between doctor and patient); the specific themes, methods and reporting of scientific research; and the details of in-the-classroom teaching.
All of these are now thoroughly brought into the single-bureaucracy, which has been extended nationally and indeed multi-nationally; to become minutely controlled by a linked managerial system...
A system motivated by an ideology of value-inversion - in pursuit of corruption, lies, disgust, self-hatred, slow-suicide, nihilism and despair... but all regarded as positives.
And this became first dominant and official, then ubiquitous and mandatory, with an inflexion point somewhere-around the millennium.
