In that period, we had the Cold War mentality imbued through us - the Post-war [environment] and the Cold War. I think we were reflecting some of that. This was before the Wall collapsed, etc.
The kind of group mentality that we had lived under since the Second World War is starting to erupt, and the craving for individualism is now much stronger. It's not as taboo anymore, as it was when I was younger.
I come out of a Cold War sensibility, a Cold War mentality, and during those Cold War years, I used to know, I thought, the answers to everything. And since the end of the Cold War, I'm just a dumb as everyone else.
We may say, in a broad way, that Greek philosophy down to Aristotle expresses the mentality appropriate to the City State; that Stoicism is appropriate to a cosmopolitan despotism; that stochastic philosophy is an intellectual expression of the Church as an organization; that philosophy since Descartes, or at any rate since Locke, tends to embody the prejudices of the commercial middle class; and that Marxism and Fascism are the philosophies appropriate to the modern industrial state.
The happiness that is genuinely satisfying is accompanied by the fullest exercise of our faculties and the fullest realization of the world in which we live.