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That is indeed the subtext, if indeed "everybody sucks" is actually the point.
Personally, for me, the point is that human nature is an immutable thing, and part of it is that as a society / culture / whatever we manage to keep making the same mistakes. And we are doing that now, in a big way -- one might even say, several big ways at once. The net effect is one of constant, unending, multiple stressors on individuals and on society as a whole, and lots of people are breaking down under it. This is why "everyone" seems to be "off their rocker".
A thousand, or ten thousand years from now, I expect if I could go to the far future in a time machine, I could still recognize a dolphin, or a cat, or a mouse, because they have fixed natures. For the same reasons I'm sure I'd recognize humans. We flatter ourselves that we're different -- that we can use our big brains to transcend the human condition. Certainly some of us can do that to an extent, imperfectly. But in the main, most of us can't pull it off. And when confidence in our systems and institutions erodes enough, people collapse around it, and turn on each other -- and it becomes a race to the bottom.
I am relatively unaffected by this because I'm old and don't have 6 or 7 decades ahead of me, and I'm doing well enough that I don't have debt to worry about; if my current dream gig turns to crap I could even afford to retire. At least so long as inflation doesn't get too bad and my health kinda-sorta holds up and a freak storm doesn't mow my house down, I'll be okay. But I don't think most people are very okay. I think an appalling number of them are coming apart at the seams. And the ones that aren't, are mentally adjusting to much reduced prospects. My 19 year old grandson has his act very much together and is thriving in college but his mother struggles to pay for it and he does not think he'll ever be able to afford the staple of the American Dream -- a house. Indeed he wonders how he will afford an apartment. He wonders when it will ever make sense for him to have a child -- both the ethics of bringing a child into such a world, and the expense.
So yeah ... it's not surprising that people are going all yargle-bargle on each other at times. Here at Chez Mordant we have to disconnect from national and world news regularly for periods of time, to protect our own sanity. There's a surfeit of very bad news almost every blasted day. Mass genocide, wars against autocrats, refugee crises, you name it. One can only take so much.
As to human nature, I've always thought that human beings are animals that specialize in intelligence AND social cooperation. That's our strategy for survival in the world. Eroding our social cooperation is a deliberate tactic intended to harm societies, it is obvious and not new. But the thing is, when I go out into the world I can still interact in positive ways with most people that I encounter.
Now I will grant that different regions of the US have very different social behavior as a general thing. I know a lot of people who have stayed in one place for a long time, and who believe that the whole country is like where they're at, except for someplace else that they point to as incomprehensibly nutty. I know folks in red states who believe that everyone in California is crazy super left (when in fact it's the same thing as in most places; the country has more conservative thinking, the cities more liberal.) I know people who live in more liberal places who think that the southern states are all like Deliverance or something. If you never bother to GO to a place and interact with the people, you don't really know what it's like and it's a mistake to act like you do. The most narrow minded people I know never left the area where they grew up. Having traveled around quite a bit, I can confidently say that I fit in more readily in some areas than others, but if I have a couple of years in any one place and I put any effort into it at all, I can acclimate to at least a basic degree of social comfort.
But I definitely hear you about people being unhappy that a reasonable quality of life seems way out of reach for many, and a lot of upsetting stuff being blasted into our faces from nonstop news feeds. We're gonna have to learn to walk away from the screens...go outside, let the sun shine or the rain fall on your face for a moment. Breathe the air and listen to the birds and say hi to your neighbors.
I had a bit of conversation on Facebook about AI recently. I said that I hope it fizzles and gets limited traction in the way that I've seen VR and AR do. Like some years back they were saying that we'd all be walking around with thingies on our faces living life through VR/AR. And sure, some people took up an interest in the tech, but I just don't see MOST people really wanting devices on our faces adding tech input to every moment of our waking lives and feeding back every detail to whoever is buying the information. And I don't see most of us being anything but irritated with having to talk to bots, either. A guy said that all it would take is for tech companies to polish the design of the VR/AR devices and everyone would be using them because just look at smart phones, and that likely AI was going to be embraced by everyone eventually, too. Yeah I don't think that the great success of smart phones has anything to do with this. Like if anything they are bad enough. People use them, but are not really comfortable with just how invasive they are, when they really think about it. But ultimately at least you can leave it at home, turn it off...whether most do or don't, at least we feel like we can.
I want to tell that guy to imagine a future where everyone's got AR headsets on all the time, and someone decides to throw fuel on the fire of the "gender wars" by getting hold of video of where men look and "calling out" supposedly inappropriate glances. Even as a liberal woman I consider that kind of possibility and I'm like NOPE. Nope, nope. Don't trust it; don't want it. I've read 1984. I am not down.
We have become a society without manners or social rules. In the 60s the baby boomers decided such things were silly and now we have to pay for it.
If you look at the social rules of years ago there was an understanding that people were terrible... and the rules were to make it so people could get to know each other - before running away.
But there are also a lot of crazy people these days. I blame laws closing mental hospitals.
I agree to a degree.
But I also think that we need to acknowledge that "manners and social rules" also meant that things that needed to be said often were not said. For example, to take one example in the pre-Civil Rights era -- the concept of "separate but equal". Did anyone with half a brain really believe that? Responding to injustice (regardless of the issue) aught to trump "manners and social rules".
But I do agree very much that the closure of mental hospitals has had a tremendously negative effect on our culture. That's not saying that alternatives shouldn't be tried on individual patients, but overall they had an important function (although there were often severe abuses in them).
But I also think that we need to acknowledge that "manners and social rules" also meant that things that needed to be said often were not said. For example, to take one example in the pre-Civil Rights era -- the concept of "separate but equal". Did anyone with half a brain really believe that? Responding to injustice (regardless of the issue) aught to trump "manners and social rules".
But I do agree very much that the closure of mental hospitals has had a tremendously negative effect on our culture. That's not saying that alternatives shouldn't be tried on individual patients, but overall they had an important function (although there were often severe abuses in them).
I had a disturbing experience not long ago. My son (22) has been diagnosed with schizo-affective disorder. For those who don't know, this means a schizophrenic component AND an "affective" component such as depression and/or anxiety. In his case, he does not hallucinate voices or things that are not there, but if off his meds and especially if he's taking the wrong ones or self medicating with drugs, he'll be intensely paranoid, delusional and fearful. To a point where he cannot speak or act normally. He is not a violent person, I've never felt in any danger from him.
Well, he unfortunately was involved with a girl who was a hardcore alcoholic and user of all kinds of harder drugs like LSD and meth. These kids were living out of her car for a bit, and she was driving around under the influence of all this crap. She would hit him, quite often. She'd start fights in public, she would put herself in danger. In one of these altercations when my son was trying to restrain her from running off into the road and beating on him and acting wild, the police were called and when they arrived, it was their understanding that HE had been seen hitting HER. They took her home, but he ended up (after a couple of hospital stays) in jail overnight before we bonded him out. No one was hurt, and no one wanted to press any charges, but in Colorado it's a mandatory arrest and charge for anything DV related. Good policy but...well, it does not allow much room for some of the complications that can arise between messy people.
I watched the video feed of the bond hearing. My kid looked like a deer in the headlights. But there were a whole series of offenders who came before him who also said they had schizo-affective disorder, and most of them were up on pretty serious charges, some of them repeat offenders, most really rough looking, some acting visibly erratic. I did not see where the claim of this mental illness helped anyone's bond case any. But I was really struck at how different these other people seemed, from my kid...who never seemed THAT bad at his worst, and who when on his meds and not on other things seems normal, even charming. Sweet and well mannered.
I really thought about what made this difference. My son has always had a certain amount of family support, although it has been stretched pretty thin in recent years and he's made some bad choices that have led to bad situations. But we've always tried to be there for him. I dunno, I think that if I could choose a perfect place for him to be, it would be one that is not unduly cruel, but one with a pretty strict structure and routine. Rules to follow and no option to not comply with them. I just wish that there were such a place that was not set up to be a form of punishment.
But I definitely hear you about people being unhappy that a reasonable quality of life seems way out of reach for many, and a lot of upsetting stuff being blasted into our faces from nonstop news feeds. We're gonna have to learn to walk away from the screens...go outside, let the sun shine or the rain fall on your face for a moment. Breathe the air and listen to the birds and say hi to your neighbors.
Disconnecting is important but only goes so far if you aren't making ends meet and have no reasonable prospects of bettering yourself.
My wife and I had young adulthoods where we were totally certain that there were opportunities to be had, that it might require being assertive or proactive or creative at times but we could always land jobs easily and it really was mostly true that anyone willing to work hard could gradually improve their situation without compromising themselves morally or having to make various other Hobson's choices. Or at least it was true of people of sufficient privilege. But today if I were just getting started I think it'd be a completely different ball game. People are regularly having to choose between buying needed meds and eating or paying the rent, etc. And doing all this while working soul-crushing jobs purposely designed to keep you from getting anywhere. Some of the fast food and retail jobs wouldn't be so bad as they are for example if they weren't deliberately cut off at 30 hours max so employers can escape providing healthcare or vacation time. You end up working 2 or 3 of those jobs at once, gambling that you won't break a leg or something.
And it's not just the blue collar entry level jobs as such ... there are way too many people with degrees who end up in those jobs. Adjunct professors at universities forced to resort to prostitution to make ends meet. Lots of insane, dehumanizing stuff going on.
I think it's important to understand that people -- especially young people -- are under terrible pressure. Which leads to a host of problems, including people embracing demagogues who promise to fix all this. That is insane right there, but it's also completely predictable / understandable when you desperately need a lifeline, or even the hope of a lifeline.
We were already heading this way, but Covid pushed a lot of people deeper into isolation. We stare at our screens instead of interacting with other people enough. Humans do not thrive psychologically in isolation, we just don't. It makes us weird. Combine that with the fact that by and large most of us are fed a steady diet of manipulative propaganda through our screens, which is meant to make us lose trust in our institutions and neighbors and to increase hostility, fear, outrage and so on... I mean. It's no wonder.
As for this observation here:
I long marveled that I was blessed and fortunate to be able to eat whatever I want and never gain weight. I have been petite my whole life. All of the women and most of the men on both sides of my family put on serious weight by middle age, the women often gaining weight during pregnancy that they were never quite able to lose. Granted, "eat whatever I want" did not mean gorge myself on bags of cookies and pounds of fudge or entire pizzas in a sitting or anything. I could only ever nibble something sweet or rich and be quickly done. I don't have a huge appetite for much of anything, anyhow.
Then came the last attempt that I made to quit smoking, which I have been doing more or less since I was 15 years old (I did quit while pregnant, but started again within months of having my 2 kids.) So there I was, in my early 40s, trying to quit smoking. Got a few weeks in and noticed that even though I did not feel like I was eating more, I was putting on weight immediately and noticeably. I realized that in order to quit smoking without getting fat at the same time, I am going to have to implement an exercise routine, which I have never really had. I fell off the wagon and I still smoke. The 10 lbs I picked up in under a month have not budged, but I haven't gained any more.
This experience got me to thinking. I don't recall as many overweight people around back in the 80s and 90s when I was a kid/teen....and you know what, tons of people smoked back then. You could smoke in malls, restaurants. And in the 1960s even more people smoked, most adults smoked, and most smoked far more heavily because you could do it anywhere, anytime just about. Heck I've seen fixtures in old bathrooms specifically designed for a little ashtray and shelf for one's smokes right by the toilet! And many of those relatives of mine who put on weight in middle age...also quit smoking in middle age.
So I don't think it's necessarily what we are eating. I think it might be the fact that smoking affects weight and metabolism. I mean, too, look at a lot of the art from Europe before they colonized the Americas and tobacco trade became much of a thing at all, there were a lot more fluffy people and thick ladies were often painted as great beauties!
Obviously I'm not saying that people should smoke to avoid being overweight, when smoking is as bad for you or worse. But I think I might really be onto something with this theory about the why of it.
People were a lot more active starting in childhood, both at home and at work. Its not smoking. We also ate out less and when we did the portions were smaller.
The human race is in decline. Our greatest members have already lived and today's civilization no longer presents the challenges that produced the wonderful explorers, inventors, musicians and thinkers of the past. Today, we are all compelled to attend regulated schools, which are dumbed down to accommodate the weakest students. The great minds of the past educated themselves; those days are gone and will remain gone as long as there are governments to insure they are gone.
I don't see a time when it will go back and improve. The modern, stupid, poofed up human is here to stay - for a while. Population decline may cause things to improve, but not for a very long time.
Are people off their rocker?.... No. I think most people are just posturing for whatever team they have selected. The dichotomous thinking that results makes people pretty narrow. There are an awful lot of one-issue people out there.
Want to see proof?.... Go back and read the transcript of the Lincoln-Douglas debates. The average person today, with today's vocabulary and education, can't make sense of what Lincoln and Douglas - both largely self educated - are trying to say. And yet the masses in 1860 were excited and debated the points among themselves.
I don't know that I agree with the OP, but you make a point. The higher educated tend to have 0-2 children while the less educated tend to have larger families on average. If the bottom 20% averaged 3 children while the top 80% averaged 1.5, those two groups would be equal in only 2 generations. In the 1800s, the more "fit" produced more offspring.
I don't know that I agree with the OP, but you make a point. The higher educated tend to have 0-2 children while the less educated tend to have larger families on average. If the bottom 20% averaged 3 children while the top 80% averaged 1.5, those two groups would be equal in only 2 generations. In the 1800s, the more "fit" produced more offspring.
I heard it put another way. The natural lethality of being born stupid has been replaced in modern civilization where stupidity is supported and lethargy is encouraged.
A majority of the people I see in public are fat. And I mean FAT, not plump which some people were in the past. Fat as in 100 lbs. overweight.
It might depend on where you live, but statistically speaking you're wrong. CDC reports approximately 40% of American adults are "obese," which is bad - yes. But not "the majority" as you claim. Also, you have to consider what "obese" means in medical terms. It's not always 100+lbs overweight, as you also claim, since the BMI chart (which is highly problematic) puts you at obese for much less than that.
Is it just me, or are 90% of the people I meet off their rocker?.
Most people are far too left, far too right, far too religious, or far too non religious to share anything in common with.
One of my coworker is extremely knowledgeable in history, geopolitics, religion, etc. but he's also one of the most liberal people I have ever met in my life.
So yes, most people you meet are off their rocker.
I don't know that I agree with the OP, but you make a point. The higher educated tend to have 0-2 children while the less educated tend to have larger families on average. If the bottom 20% averaged 3 children while the top 80% averaged 1.5, those two groups would be equal in only 2 generations. In the 1800s, the more "fit" produced more offspring.
Fit by what metric? And do you have any stats to support that statement?
I can tell you that from what I've read of autobiographies written by those who lived in the 1800s, it's pretty questionable. Those who were very wealthy did not necessarily have a ton of kids, and a lower level of education for those at the socioeconomic bottom was widely pervasive. The poor had many kids, but child mortality was far higher. Education was not universally available. Child labor was more common than not.
I think that to some extent, more prolific reproduction for humans existing in scarcity is perhaps factored into our nature. Not when the women are making the choice necessarily, but poor men may be more aggressive and want to create more offspring. In a world not governed by modern morality, those children (the ones that survive) become a labor asset to the family unit as soon as possible. The young girls begin to learn to help in the home and with siblings and the young boys begin to learn whatever trade, craft, job or farm work etc. is available and needs doing. As soon as they can walk and talk. I think that there is a similar mechanism to the impulse to hoard animals by those who can least afford to do so, in that for most of our species' time on this earth, animals were not costly pampered pets, they were domestic livestock. Getting more meant increasing your resources.
For most of our existence this would have made a lot of sense from a survival standpoint.
Not that I necessarily think that evo-psych can unilaterally explain all of why people do the things that they do. I do believe that our thinking brains can be more powerful and our nurture matters more than our nature in many ways. But we know that scarcity and stress change the hormonal balances in our bodies and the neurochemical functions of our brains. And I can tell you that easily one of the most irrational things that I've ever experienced in my whole life, is when I was painfully, desperately poor and living in terrible conditions, and I got pregnant. I felt, IMMEDIATELY, a ferocious and overwhelming need to protect my developing baby from the morning after conception. I get that most women don't know right away, but I did. And the thought of terminating my pregnancy caused feelings of irrational panic. I was overcome with the sense that I'd rather die than allow anything or anyone to harm that life within me.
If you had asked me, 48 hours prior, if I ever wanted to have a child or what I would do if I became pregnant, I would have told you - and meant it! - that I never wanted kids, especially not in my circumstances, are you nuts?? And that I'd get an abortion...reluctantly, but out of obvious necessity. Uh huh, well, that was before nature got involved.
I can remember that giving birth was painful, but I cannot recall what it actually felt like. I can remember what it feels like to stub my toe with more vividness.
When it comes to something like the continuation of life...it's pretty wild the way that our biology can override our plans and thoughts sometimes. We do things that don't always make sense. And none of that is new. Asking our natural survival mechanisms to always keep up with changing social values like the capitalism-driven shift to spend, spend, spend on kids instead of having them be a value generating asset to the family collective...
And of course there is a chicken and egg question to ask about people who live in poverty. I would argue that a lot of poor people I know, including myself when I was living it, struggle to resist impulses and have many impulses to struggle with. When I lived in scarcity, I was in a constant state of want. When I got a buck or two, I had a harder time making the right choice in what to do with it. But when I achieved relative prosperity? Now I rarely want anything. I never feel like eating out, it always seems like a waste of money. I can go to a store and not want to buy much. But that's a whole circular problem...does living in the stress of scarcity cause one's brain to struggle with that impulse control and make good decisions, or does the poor impulse control cause the poverty? Both, probably, to some degree, in a way that can form a trap that's hard to escape.
That's before we even get to the fact that no one truly at society's "top" tier has much cause to want those most wealthy and successful to outnumber the poor. Exploitation of the relatively poor masses is the single most effective way to get and stay wealthy. If you are a rancher, you do not want fewer cattle and more ranchers around. That makes no sense. And this rule applies no matter if you've got a capitalist society or some kind of empire, monarchy, dictatorship, and I don't know that there's ever been a large scale society, even one that tried to embrace the ideals of communism, that did not end up this kind of pyramid shaped business with a prosperous and powerful few and masses who labor to support them. (I would LOVE if anyone could show me an example of any large scale social model that was anything else!)
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