" What changed? The mainstreaming of nihilism. >>Cultural decay. Chemicals. The deliberate destruction of moral backstops in the culture. A lost commonality of shared societal pressures to enforce right and wrong. And above all, simple, pure, evil.
>>Before you retort that we can’t account for the mentally ill, they existed forever.
>>Paranoid schizophrenics existed in 1888 and 2018. Mentally ill students weren’t showing up in schools with guns even three decades ago.
>>So it must be something else."
The list of things which have changed is a lot longer than that, but I agree 100% with your thinking. Remember the late 1960's best seller "Future Shock"?
It predicted vast mental illness, depression, and general social problems of vast and ongoing scope due to the inability of people to make sense of things in a world such as the world we have built. THIS WORLD IS A DYSTOPIA.
Yes, it has tech -- but it has no humanity, no values, no stability, and really no social support institutions. So the churches, civic clubs, close neighbors, extended families, etc. were traded in for trashy plastic toys and sex change operations and "Made in China".
Meantime, the federal government ceased concerning itself with consent of the governed, and now only serves itself and the oligarchs. You didn't see mentally ill & homeless people wandering all over the place in the early 1970s. The government has $60 Billion to ship off to Zalenski and his corrupt buddies in Ukraine but afford to fill the potholes in the street nor the holes in peoples brains and spirits.
This world is a DYSTOPIA. There is no doubt if someone in 1960 had written a book about modern "civilization" it would have been recognized as a nightmare. A dystopia on its way to becoming a nightmare to end all nightmares.
Mental illness, vast depression, and pointless existence is the new normal.
I have come to realize that men are not born to be free. Liberty is a need felt by a small class of people whom nature has endowed with nobler minds than the mass of men. -Napoleon
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