An Enemy of the People

I have done something peculiar with my life, half-submitted to it and half-opposed it. I could quite easily become "an enemy of the people".
So much of mankind's energies go to opposing one another. This seems to be his nature. So much strife occurring on the globe seems to be unnecessary, petty, when viewed from a distance. What is needed then, obviously, is to put aside differences and unite.
Nowadays though, there is no solid basis for this. People have lost faith in socialism. The old socialist ideas just cannot flourish in today's world. The old figure of "the industrial proletariat" is nowhere to be seen. He's as much an anachronism or ghost as the old top-hatted capitalist who formerly was such an obvious target.
We have settled for an easy option. We have drifted into loose consumer capitalism. The public loves celebrities more than anything. Our culture is attuned toward shallowness, artificiality. This kind of atmosphere can sustain nothing but a wretched cynicism. (Special pleading?)
Our culture is dead for me because on the one hand it supports elitism and on the other artifice. Consumerism has taken over our ideas. It has lost even its old vitality... there is torpor in many people's ideas. This torpor comes from the dead weight of an inherited popular culture which is characterised by the fact that it is over,  that it perished some time ago. The eternal rehashing of the past is ghoulish, and bespeaks nothing so much as spiritual poverty. Rosy nostalgia is often close to impotence.