"In the past goodness was always a collective experience. Then goodness became privatised"
About this Quote
A bleak little diagnosis: modernity didn’t just change how we live, it changed where we store our moral life. Bond’s line frames “goodness” less as a personal trait than as a social practice, something enacted in public, reinforced by shared rituals, mutual obligations, and the everyday surveillance of community. When “goodness was always a collective experience,” it wasn’t necessarily purer; it was just structurally unavoidable. You were good with and for other people because life pressed you into proximity.
Then comes the pivot: “privatised.” Bond borrows the language of Thatcher-era economics and aims it at the soul. Privatisation suggests property, ownership, and enclosure: goodness converted into a private asset, curated like taste. Morality becomes something you feel about yourself, something you perform in controlled settings, something you purchase through ethical consumption or outsource to charities and institutions. The social safety net becomes a personal brand.
As a playwright shaped by postwar Britain and notorious for staging violence as the product of social arrangements, Bond isn’t mourning some village idyll. He’s indicting a system that makes cruelty easy by making responsibility optional. If goodness is collective, failure is everyone’s problem; if goodness is private, failure is a personal flaw, a secret shame, or someone else’s unlucky story.
The line works because it turns a comforting idea (“be a good person”) into a political question: who gets to define goodness, who gets access to it, and what happens when it stops being a shared public good.
Then comes the pivot: “privatised.” Bond borrows the language of Thatcher-era economics and aims it at the soul. Privatisation suggests property, ownership, and enclosure: goodness converted into a private asset, curated like taste. Morality becomes something you feel about yourself, something you perform in controlled settings, something you purchase through ethical consumption or outsource to charities and institutions. The social safety net becomes a personal brand.
As a playwright shaped by postwar Britain and notorious for staging violence as the product of social arrangements, Bond isn’t mourning some village idyll. He’s indicting a system that makes cruelty easy by making responsibility optional. If goodness is collective, failure is everyone’s problem; if goodness is private, failure is a personal flaw, a secret shame, or someone else’s unlucky story.
The line works because it turns a comforting idea (“be a good person”) into a political question: who gets to define goodness, who gets access to it, and what happens when it stops being a shared public good.
Quote Details
| Topic | Ethics & Morality |
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