The View from Afar

Individuals, Lies, and the Lessons of Woodstock ’99

By Stephen B. Waters August 7, 2024

[Editor’s Note: Stephen shot ten hours of video at Woodstock ’99, releasing a VHS news report in August, 1999.]

The lesson of Woodstock ’99 is how much principle and character went missing among concert goers. Festival organizers purposely kept police authorities at a distance to avoid issues over recreational drugs and such. That gave some hoodlums, with defective principles, character, and no internal brakes who saw nothing wrong, the opening to crumble culture.

Reporter’s Notebook: Woodstock ’99 filmed unthinking ruffians repeatedly bullying individuals as if lives were a game. Political Economist John Stuart Mill taught that the worth of the State is the worth of the individuals that compose it.

Today’s parallel is that when people selfishly devalue individuals by lying, they misuse power. Political lies bully people out of their own individuality. Few learn where society really comes from. It’s not from the past or from above. Society is created when individual experience reveals humility and the need for others. Those who recognize human flaws create society afresh every time they meet similarly humble individuals and groups.

Consider how insidious lies are to society. You, along with every other individual, make decisions based not on reality, but on a personal mental map of reality. If your mental map has been poisoned with lies, you cannot make sound decisions. Liars disrespect you, others, and themselves. Liars selfishly steal individuality as surely as if they ruled, claiming it was for the good of all.

The problem is worse today than in 1990. Hollowed out schools seldom teach why frameworks of integrity matter. Their Social Studies aren’t social, History is mostly event-driven, and their Philosophy has turned inward. National media, ignoring useful information offered by a newly-liberated Twitter/X, has warped to the point you lack the information to evaluate news for yourself. Media, wire services, politicians, and pundits insincerely dissemble, omit, and misdirect without consequence. Too few seem outraged at the unchallenged lies and bullying. Liars care so little of your understanding that they fabricate and tolerate others who do. Whether people cannot see, or will not see, the result is the same. This is about not just politics, but life — about how you let others treat you and about how you respond to the incomplete people you deal with.

Between Woodstock ’99 and now, J.K. Rowling warned in Harry Potter that that which one does not value he does not take the trouble to comprehend. Rowling described individuals, cultures, and institutions that forgot to be social because they never learned why they should. They did not recognize principles or revalidate them, develop character or teach it, or even see that something was missing.

Her characters are seriously real: Gilderoy Lockhart fraudulently taught. Minister Cornelius Fudge gaslit for the administration. Reporter Rita Skeeter replaced news with sensationalized tabloid gossip. Headmaster Dolores Umbridge indoctrinated rather than educated. Credentialed and official, they selfishly destroyed individuals because they could not value what they could not see.

My book Individuals, Journalism, and Society, available on Amazon, asked the question, “Why didn’t the 20th century live up to expectations?” The answer is that society is based on individuals. Where individual integrity is not valued, rot sets in. Society is jeopardized where top-down rule replaces bottom-up governance and where bullying increasingly perverts our institutions.

Malicious manipulative unchecked lies overwhelm the media. Liars who accuse others of lying dare individuals to identify and resist word games bent on replacing a republic with 235 years of bottom-up governance with historically unstable top-down rule. Don’t complacently coast with outdated expectations for media, political parties, and government when only months remain to reaffirm constitutional limited government that works better than the unrealistic alternative.