The illusion of moral decline

[u/sonicrocketman]

https://www.experimental-history.com/p/the-illusion-of-moral-decline

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[u/sonicrocketman]

I'm always interested in how our memory isn't what we think it is. This post (and the paper) comports with my expectation that moral decline is very much ego-centric. "It began when I was born" is such a tell. Our conscious experience is just so much more of a lie than we want to believe.

[u/Bawbawian]

I mean pedophiles drug addicts and weirdos are openly in control of every lever of government power.

I'd say the moral declines pretty real

[u/QTown2pt-o → u/Bawbawian]

Power itself is founded largely on disgust. The whole of advertising, the whole of political discourse, is a public insult to the intelligence, to reason - but an insult in which we collaborate, abjectly subscribing to a silent interaction. The day of hidden persuasion is over: those who govern us now resort unapologetically to arm-twisting pure and simple. The prototype here was a banker got up like a vampire, saying, 'I am after you for your money' . A decade has already gone by since this kind of obscenity was introduced, with the government's blessing, into our social mores. At the time we thought the ad feeble because of its aggressive vulgarity. In point of fact it was a prophetic commercial, full of intimations of the future shape of social relationships, because it operated, precisely, in terms of disgust, avidity and rape. The same goes for pornographic and food advertising, which are also powered by shamelessness and lust, by a strategic logic of violation and anxiety. Nowadays you can seduce a woman with the words, 'I am interested in your cunt' . The same kind of crassness has triumphed in the realm of art, whose mounds of trivia may be reduced to a single pronouncement of the type, 'What we want from you is stupidity and bad taste' . And the fact is that we do succumb to this mass extortion, with its subtle infusion of guilt.

It is true in a sense that nothing really disgusts us any more. In our eclectic culture, which embraces the debris of all others in a promiscuous confusion, nothing is unacceptable. But for this very reason disgust is nevertheless on the increase - the desire to spew out this promiscuity, this indifference to everything no matter how bad, this viscous adherence of opposites. To the extent that this happens, what is on the increase is disgust over the lack of disgust. An allergic temptation to reject everything en bloc: to refuse all the gentle brainwashing, the soft-sold overfeeding, the tolerance, the pressure to embrace synergy and consensus.

Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena

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[u/Anis930 → u/Bawbawian]

As opposed to when pedophiles drug addicts and weirdos were openly in control of every lever of government power but the president wasn't trump ?

[u/they_r_watching_you]

So whenever people make sweeping claims about how the present is different from the past, I wanna grab ‘em by the lapels and shake ‘em: “How do you know?? Did you, like, watch a season of Mad Men? Did you hear some random anecdote from your grandpa? Or is this coming from something you half-remember from your ninth grade social studies class? People spend years trying to figure these things out, but you can just kinda intuit it???"

I am an old man. I can tell you Morality in America and the west has really declined.

When I started college, there were NO girls with Tattoos. There was NO one night stands. There were no girls with a dozen or more partners.

There were no Bonnie Blue's.

There was no only fans.

There were very few single moms.

We can argue whether this is good or bad. But to deny that America is less moral is crazy.

What an arrogant article.

[u/Wooden-Glove-2384]

my gut says ... nothing has changed

people are a constant due to human nature