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Modern Malaise

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Re: Modern Malaise

#71
post #50
post #39

Most of us feel it. It's real. Don't let anyone gaslight you. You aren't sick: our culture is sick. (For those alone and struggling). Social alienation is the source of much mental illnesses. Poverty itself isn't the source of most people's misery. Our society is our preservation matrix. If we cannot reproduce or at least contribute to something beyond ourselves that bears the promise of persisting, we are left alone…

I believe in hard work, sacrifice, and family… ideals and virtues that have provided solace and guidance to humanity for our entire existence. It seems to be the hyper-online types that reject traditional values that are the most depressed and apocalyptic in their mindset. Myself - I look outside and the sun is shining, my kids are playing, everything is good in the world to me.

You feel well connected through your family. That's all people really need. As you say, your children are your world.

Some people don't have this family structure. Many come from broken homes with no good role models to look up to. They mimic their parent's maladaptive behaviors and end up in bad relationships. The degenerative cycle repeats. Many of these broken homes were the result of economic devastation or cultural disruption. Instead of going to church, for example, many families stayed home and watched T.V., completely degrading their social skills.

Also, some people think about the bigger picture. It's great that your mind can rest within the bounds of your backyard. Less parochial types can be more apocalyptic because they are thinking where we are headed. If we look back, we see the most apocalyptic events ever endured by mankind--the great world wars. If we look forward, we may see the potential of even worse things happening.

What makes matters more difficult is that comments like yours can be interpreted as saying that you are well made, have good values, have a square head on your shoulders, and others have something wrong with them. They aren't "traditional," like you--that's their problem. If only they embraced traditional values, they would be set right--put on the straight and narrow, like you. This is really an oversimplification of what's happening to some people. Material and social conditions affect how people develop.

It's easy to look at a person from a ghetto and say, "If only they had good values, all this would clear itself up. It only they believed in working hard, they would pull themselves up by their bootstraps and seize the day." I wonder why we can't whisper these magic words to people and solve their problems.

Edit: Hyper-online types are clearly looking for a connection they don't have in real life. The internet is almost like a honey pot for these types. Their rejection of traditional values may simply reflect their lack of faith in it because they saw their parent's bad marriage, or it may reflect a rebellion against the old order which seems to have failed them. Liberalism in particular is a home for lost souls looking for forms to express their discontent. It too is a honey pot for these types.

Re: Modern Malaise

#72

Interesting article. I pretty much agree with most of the political and economic points, but one thing that’s palpably absent is an analysis of the structural patterns and habits inherently imposed by technologies, beyond their ties to the political economy. So many of the systems and technologies for discourse we engage with have reduced the amount of content presented on a given topic at a given time down to the sm…

I agree. “The medium is the message” comes to mind [0]. I think it has something to do with broadcast media of all kinds.

When reading works from before the broadcast era, I remember authors would somehow try to converse with the reader with via their writing style as in the writer acknowledged the existence of a reader in their writing explicitly (“Dear Reader”) or via a narrative (the narrative style of Plato) and acknowledged that the reader was somehow capable of responding and that the writer could listen. Over time, writers started acknowledging that the reader was one amongst many (“Dear readers”), but still capable and worthy of being conversed with. Moving further along, wartime recruiting posters are what comes to mind of when I think of broadcast media when there is a short message often written in the imperative: the reader exists and expected to do something, but has no avenue or agency to discuss the message. There are examples and counter-examples of the styles I mentioned, but my observation has been that the prevailing writing style has changed from expecting/demanding a two-way conversation to a sort of “speaking at each other not to each other” unless negotiated differently otherwise.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_medium_is_the_message

Re: Modern Malaise

#73
post #64

>How can the world get better if no one is steering? Did it get better when somebody was steering? hitler was a strong and popular leader. Democracy is about people being self-governmed, not about having a strong leader Individualism is the ultimate goal of this Enlightenment era that we are still part of. The goal was to take away the power from the monarch and the collective, and empower the individual, and our civ…

There is no proof of social democracy being unpopular in Europe.

The only relevant political movements that advocate against social democracy are mainly extreme right wing. Even those are not growing - and usually collapsing afterwards - because of their individualistic approach to society but because of their appeal to people that feel migration is not good, that climate change doesn’t exist, etc.

Also, every time I read about “social democracy being a Ponzi scheme” along the demographics argument I feel an urge to remember that social democracy isn’t only the pensions system. Healthcare, education, infrastructure aren’t Ponzi schemes neither feasible from a pure individualistic approach.

Re: Modern Malaise

#74
All true, but while listing all the reasons for being depressed, it curiously misses the state of the environment.

And by that I don't just mean climate change. The terrifying truth of our time is that we are destroying life on this planet at an unprecedented rate; all life: not just megafauna but insects as well as forests, etc., in exchange for... building parking lots.

We make the world lonelier and uglier and there is zero solution in sight.

Responses to climate change have not yet begun, we have not started to modify our behavior in any meaningful way. But much more importantly, climate change is but one problem, not the only problem. If climate change was solved today, it would maybe postpone the apocalypse for a little while, but it would not make us happier.

Switching to less CO2-emitting energy sources doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things; if we use an electric truck to build a parking lot in the middle of a forest, we may emit a little less CO2 while doing so, but eventually we will still have replaced a piece of forest by a slab of concrete, and in the process destroyed life and made the world uglier.

The "loss of meaning" results from the awareness that what we're doing is not just pointless but evil, and we have no alternative.

Re: Modern Malaise

#75
post #70
post #64

>How can the world get better if no one is steering? Did it get better when somebody was steering? hitler was a strong and popular leader. Democracy is about people being self-governmed, not about having a strong leader Individualism is the ultimate goal of this Enlightenment era that we are still part of. The goal was to take away the power from the monarch and the collective, and empower the individual, and our civ…

Are our societies ready for a real democracy, that is a direct vote on all issues type of self-governing rule where anything can be put up to a vote including votes for execution of members of the society? Or did you mean something else?

My theory is that technology will get us there eventually (direct democracy), and we'll get closer to a better, more functional and more inclusive society than the modern representative democracies which are starting to show their massive shortcomings.

It was a stroke of genius to call what we have now in most of the world "democracy", as in "government by the people", when it's anything but that.

Re: Modern Malaise

#76
post #75
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are our societies ready for a real democracy, that is a direct vote on all issues type of self-governing rule where anything can be put up to a vote including votes for execution of members of the society? Or did you mean something else?

My theory is that technology will get us there eventually (direct democracy), and we'll get closer to a better, more functional and more inclusive society than the modern representative democracies which are starting to show their massive shortcomings. It was a stroke of genius to call what we have now in most of the world "democracy", as in "government by the people", when it's anything but that.

My hopes for the future are the same.

However, until we get there, the current system is quite good at maintaining a stable society with increasing gains in technological development and social welfare. It is far from perfect or ideal, and it is full of lies, but until we have something better that is tangible and real, and not just theoretical, I wouldn't touch it.

Re: Modern Malaise

#77

> All meritocratic platforms are winner-take-all, with the top 1% of performers collecting a vastly disproportionate share of rewards. Even if you simulate an economy where every participant starts out with the same amount of money, and all trades are completely random, over enough trades the participants' wealth will still end up in a power-law distribution.

A top 1% on it’s own is not a problem. It is the power they have over everything to not only keep things that way but make life worse for everyone else. For example by lobbying for laws that help corporations not people.

I mostly agree, except corporations aren't being helped; people are. Might be through higher dividend payments to shareholders, higher salaries to employees or lower prices to consumers, but the corporation isn't a thing in itself that benefits.

Re: Modern Malaise

#78
post #70
post #64

>How can the world get better if no one is steering? Did it get better when somebody was steering? hitler was a strong and popular leader. Democracy is about people being self-governmed, not about having a strong leader Individualism is the ultimate goal of this Enlightenment era that we are still part of. The goal was to take away the power from the monarch and the collective, and empower the individual, and our civ…

Are our societies ready for a real democracy, that is a direct vote on all issues type of self-governing rule where anything can be put up to a vote including votes for execution of members of the society? Or did you mean something else?

One of the important questions is where to put the line beyond which humans should be independent of their neighbors. E.g. what democracy is not able to touch.

Most people would reject the idea of a city voting what everyone's compulsory dinner will be. But when it comes to zoning and building codes, that's already grey area.

Re: Modern Malaise

#79
post #64

>How can the world get better if no one is steering? Did it get better when somebody was steering? hitler was a strong and popular leader. Democracy is about people being self-governmed, not about having a strong leader Individualism is the ultimate goal of this Enlightenment era that we are still part of. The goal was to take away the power from the monarch and the collective, and empower the individual, and our civ…

In the states we feel like we're just coming into perspective on social democracy. Can you tell me a bit more about why it doesn't work? (genuine question) I'd like to think I sharply understand the differences between communism and socialism - and social democracy - and that some of my older family members confuse these all as the same thing. Why is social democracy unpopular in Europe?

It... really depends on which bits of Europe you're talking about. The bits where corruption is endemic and the money never actually winds up going to help anyone? Sure, certain policies are floundering there. The state pension systems? Yeah, people are a bit miffed about mismanagement there.

But like... very few people sitting here arguing that e.g. a right to decent healthcare isn't a thing we want; that education shouldn't be accessible to as many people as possible; that we shouldn't provide public services such as libraries, parks, and sports centres for all; and in a bunch of places there's a general feeling that the pendulum swung way too far against welfare, in the bid to force people to work, that it's now not helpful for the people it was meant to help.

It appears the person you're replying to lives in Germany; so do I. The parties (e.g. the FDP) here which would like to tear down what Germany has built have a minority of the votes compared to those which have social democratic or broadly neutral policies.

Re: Modern Malaise

#80
post #70
post #64

>How can the world get better if no one is steering? Did it get better when somebody was steering? hitler was a strong and popular leader. Democracy is about people being self-governmed, not about having a strong leader Individualism is the ultimate goal of this Enlightenment era that we are still part of. The goal was to take away the power from the monarch and the collective, and empower the individual, and our civ…

Are our societies ready for a real democracy, that is a direct vote on all issues type of self-governing rule where anything can be put up to a vote including votes for execution of members of the society? Or did you mean something else?

I think we are; unless you can point out politicians/representatives whose individual contribution is so much better than what the average citizen would do. There are no strong politicians in europe (barring autocrats) or in the US (which was until recently led by a cartoonish bully and now by someone who is in obvious cognitive decline), and for decades, it is pollsters that run the show.

One issue is that current states have accumulated too much power . A second one is that individual rights need to be untouchable. But otherwise i think our current representative systems are just fertile grounds for corruption.

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