Speaking to Sophie Shevardnadze, Pink Floyd’s former frontman said that those who say he should “stick to music” were “sleepwalking” when it came to conflicts like the Syrian civil war and the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel.

“Because they’re asleep. Because they’re the victims of the neoliberalism that Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher brought to the world,” Waters said.

Neoliberalism’s pervasiveness through Western culture and politics, in Waters’ view, has left many people with the inability to see and accept anything critical of the mainstream narrative.

“Part of the way it works is to anaesthetise people and almost make it uncomfortable for people to see anything real.”

For Waters the root of this antipathy, in the US at least, lies in part from its poorly funded public education system. In Waters’ view the reason for this lies in the political establishment’s desire to keep an ignorant and compliant population.

“They want to keep the electorate ignorant, and mindless, and unthinking, and malleable, and pliable, and very open to the use of consumerism and propaganda to keep them under control, to maintain the Orwellian notion of the sheep and whatever.”

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