HOW AMERICA GOT MEAN

[TwiceHorn 31283]

This is so relevant to so many things, but I'm going to put it here.  

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/09/us-culture-moral-education-formation/674765/

Non-paywalled in case that's an issue.  https://www.textise.net/showText.aspx?strURL=https%3A//www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/09/us-culture-moral-education-formation/674765/#main-content

I have sensed that we have, as a society, lost our communal rudder, but haven't been able to fully articulate it.

I think this article does so pretty well.  One of the problems is that many of our sources of "moral education" were also quite biased with various -isms (sexism, racism, etc.) and so we abandoned them, but put nothing in their place.  At the same time, we advocated a lot of individualism and "self-actualization," and that has left us too self-referential.

I'm not saying the article is 100% correct or accurate and I know David Brooks is going to raise a lot of hackles.  But I think there's a lot of insight and food for thought here.

[Serak The Preparer 3424]

I think it got mean when lawyers started yelling at us in all fucking caps. Assholes.

[pyrohornIII 4809]

Here's another good article along the same lines.    This one is more about the inherent loneliness that has been growing in America.   

Hillary Rodham Clinton: The Weaponization of Loneliness - The Atlantic

QOSHE - The Weaponization of Loneliness - Hillary Rodham Clinton

Of course since it's Hillary, there can't be any credence shown to her insight and the right wing pundits are having a field day with it.  

 

 

[wildcat09 29260]

You can't make me read David Brooks. I just won't do it.

[TwiceHorn 31283]

48 minutes ago, pyrohornIII said:

Here's another good article along the same lines.    This one is more about the inherent loneliness that has been growing in America.   

Hillary Rodham Clinton: The Weaponization of Loneliness - The Atlantic

QOSHE - The Weaponization of Loneliness - Hillary Rodham Clinton

Of course since it's Hillary, there can't be any credence shown to her insight and the right wing pundits are having a field day with it.  

 

 

Not a huge Hilary fan, but I have never denied that she's smart as shit.  And, It Takes A Village was pretty prescient.  I actually quite liked that at the time.

Also, Brooks does this one in greater depth and with less finger-pointing, which I think it most unhelpful in this context.  There's plenty of blame to go around.

Edited August 14, 2023 by TwiceHorn

[RDCanecutter 26283]

I thought it was came from 1,000 years of Border raids in the middle of Old Northumbria (including the half that is now the Scottish Lowlands) then those guys proved useful for holding stolen land in Ireland.

While there they gradually got more peaceful and industrious in the wool trade, so when the English knocked the bottom out of that they suddenly had thousands of unemployed Andrew-Jackson predecessors with wives and kids they could use to swarm the American back-country.

Then sedentary lifestyles, processed foods, Fox News and Rascal Scooters appeared, and the scions of ancient cattle thieves turned into acid-spitting Jabbas.

And that's all I've got to say about tha-at.

[HRSchenker 2259]

I really wish this wasn't posted to Cloak Room but it is what it is. The pandemic changed everything for me. I work in health care and patients are more mean today than they've ever been. I made the grave mistake of buying into the whole "health care hero" bullshit during the pandemic. When the vaccine came out there were many of us that thought we'd get viewed as heroes and maybe the poor treatment we received pre-March 2020 would reverse. It didn't happen. In fact, the opposite happened. The vaccine turned political and people thought we were killing them. Now I find myself in a position where I want to move on from my current gig. It's a weird feeling man. I've never had "you're making a mistake" and "you need to do this because you've waited and waited and things aren't getting better" collide in my life the way they are now. 

[Neonmoon 38127]

1 hour ago, TwiceHorn said:

This is so relevant to so many things, but I'm going to put it here.  

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/09/us-culture-moral-education-formation/674765/

Non-paywalled in case that's an issue.  https://www.textise.net/showText.aspx?strURL=https%3A//www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/09/us-culture-moral-education-formation/674765/#main-content

I have sensed that we have, as a society, lost our communal rudder, but haven't been able to fully articulate it.

I think this article does so pretty well.  One of the problems is that many of our sources of "moral education" were also quite biased with various -isms (sexism, racism, etc.) and so we abandoned them, but put nothing in their place.  At the same time, we advocated a lot of individualism and "self-actualization," and that has left us too self-referential.

I'm not saying the article is 100% correct or accurate and I know David Brooks is going to raise a lot of hackles.  But I think there's a lot of insight and food for thought here.

Great article. I like this suggestion

Quote

Mandatory social-skills courses. Murdoch’s character-building formula roots us in the simple act of paying attention: Do I attend to you well? It also emphasizes that character is formed and displayed as we treat others considerately. This requires not just a good heart, but good social skills: how to listen well. How to disagree with respect. How to ask for and offer forgiveness. How to patiently cultivate a friendship. How to sit with someone who is grieving or depressed. How to be a good conversationalist.

These are some of the most important skills a person can have. And yet somehow, we don’t teach them. Our schools spend years prepping students with professional skills—but offer little guidance on how to be an upstanding person in everyday life. If we’re going to build a decent society, elementary schools and high schools should require students to take courses that teach these specific social skills, and thus prepare them for life with one another. We could have courses in how to be a good listener or how to build a friendship. The late feminist philosopher Nel Noddings developed a whole pedagogy around how to effectively care for others.

A new core curriculum. More and more colleges and universities are offering courses in what you might call “How to Live.” Yale has one called “Life Worth Living.” Notre Dame has one called “God and the Good Life.” A first-year honors program in this vein at Valparaiso University, in Indiana, involves not just conducting formal debates on ideas gleaned from the Great Books, but putting on a musical production based on their themes. Many of these courses don’t give students a ready-made formula, but they introduce students to some of the venerated moral traditions—Buddhism, Judeo-Christianity, and Enlightenment rationalism, among others. They introduce students to those thinkers who have thought hard on moral problems, from Aristotle to Desmond Tutu to Martha Nussbaum. They hold up diverse exemplars to serve as models of how to live well. They put the big questions of life firmly on the table: What is the ruling passion of your soul? Whom are you responsible to? What are my moral obligations? What will it take for my life to be meaningful? What does it mean to be a good human in today’s world? What are the central issues we need to engage with concerning new technology and human life?

 

[RDCanecutter 26283]

3 minutes ago, HRSchenker said:

I really wish this wasn't posted to Cloak Room but it is what it is. The pandemic changed everything for me. I work in health care and patients are more mean today than they've ever been. I made the grave mistake of buying into the whole "health care hero" bullshit during the pandemic. When the vaccine came out there were many of us that thought we'd get viewed as heroes and maybe the poor treatment we received pre-March 2020 would reverse. It didn't happen. In fact, the opposite happened. The vaccine turned political and people thought we were killing them. Now I find myself in a position where I want to move on from my current gig. It's a weird feeling man. I've never had "you're making a mistake" and "you need to do this because you've waited and waited and things aren't getting better" collide in my life the way they are now. 

Don't give up mang.

[Brisketexan 104628]

5 minutes ago, HRSchenker said:

I really wish this wasn't posted to Cloak Room but it is what it is. The pandemic changed everything for me. I work in health care and patients are more mean today than they've ever been. I made the grave mistake of buying into the whole "health care hero" bullshit during the pandemic. When the vaccine came out there were many of us that thought we'd get viewed as heroes and maybe the poor treatment we received pre-March 2020 would reverse. It didn't happen. In fact, the opposite happened. The vaccine turned political and people thought we were killing them. Now I find myself in a position where I want to move on from my current gig. It's a weird feeling man. I've never had "you're making a mistake" and "you need to do this because you've waited and waited and things aren't getting better" collide in my life the way they are now. 

I don't want to read the piece.  I know the truth behind it, reading it again will just make me depressed.

And quoting the post above....it's across the board, it permeates our entire culture.  Healthcare workers -- getting shit on.  We have a good friend who is senior in a brewpub chain, she occasionally has to work the floor....and hates it.  She related that "it used to be that maybe 5% of your customers were outright mean/rude....now it's over half.  It's abusive and exhausting."  And as for the legal profession, a shitload of lawyers I know are talking about the undeniable truth: people have gotten meaner, more unhinged, and more unreasonable.  Had that conversation with a very seasoned mediator recently, observing that more and more cases aren't settling, because people just can't get to a reasonable compromise, and he agreed.

We are broken, top to bottom.  And we're doubling down on worshipping our worst tendencies as if they were our BEST qualities.

America is the land of the selfish "fuck you," with zero regard for anyone else.

Edited August 14, 2023 by Brisketexan

[Pam Cummings 9582]

2 minutes ago, Brisketexan said:

I don't want to read the piece.  I know the truth behind it, reading it again will just make me depressed.

And quoting the post above....it's across the board, it permeates our entire culture.  Healthcare workers -- getting shit on.  We have a good friend who is senior in a brewpub chain, she occasionally has to work the floor....and hates it.  She related that "it used to be that maybe 5% of your customers were outright mean/rude....now it's over half.  It's abusive and exhausting."  And as for the legal profession, a shitload of lawyers I know are talking about the undeniable truth: people have gotten meaner, more unhinged, and more unreasonable.  Had that conversation with a very seasoned mediator recently, observing that more and more cases aren't settling, because people just can't get to a reasonable compromise, and he agreed.

We are broken, top to bottom.  And we're doubling down on worshipping our worst tendencies as if they were our BEST qualities.

America is the land of the selfish "fuck you," with zero regard for anyone else.

"He has a lot of money" has replaced "is a decent person who is intelligent and well-spoken" on our priorities list. Just blind, misguided worship of things we think we want.

[ztejas 43266]

I think a lot of it has to do with the growing class divide. The economy has never been worse for middle America - at least, you have to go back to the Great Depression,  basically - and the anxiety and cynicism that it breeds has everyone living in fear and in permanent survival-mode. 

Are people edgier or more irritable because they aren't going to church or is it because they have $0 in their savings account? 

[wildcat09 29260]

I haven't read the article, but I feel very safe in assuming he doesn't point out that the mythical past when people were much nicer includes shit like slavery, Jim Crow, rampant and largely socially accepted accepted sexual abuse of children, etc. 

There's some interesting evidence indicating that social media actually has contributed to the increase in the murder rate among young people, and the pandemic pretty clearly played a huge part in turning more people into angry public assholes rather than just private assholes. But there were tons of assholes in prior decades too. It's just that more of their asshole behavior was specifically directed at women and minorities and other white people who may not have been assholes themselves didn't have a problem with that.

[Brisketexan 104628]

14 minutes ago, wildcat09 said:

I haven't read the article, but I feel very safe in assuming he doesn't point out that the mythical past when people were much nicer includes shit like slavery, Jim Crow, rampant and largely socially accepted accepted sexual abuse of children, etc. 

There's some interesting evidence indicating that social media actually has contributed to the increase in the murder rate among young people, and the pandemic pretty clearly played a huge part in turning more people into angry public assholes rather than just private assholes. But there were tons of assholes in prior decades too. It's just that more of their asshole behavior was specifically directed at women and minorities and other white people who may not have been assholes themselves didn't have a problem with that.

Oh, there's definitely phenomena like white people catching on to the fact that cops are lawless assholes, while black people are standing next to them going "WHAT THE FUCK HAVE WE BEEN TELLING YOU FOR A DAMNED CENTURY?"

[C-Man 27058]

46 minutes ago, HRSchenker said:

I really wish this wasn't posted to Cloak Room but it is what it is. The pandemic changed everything for me. I work in health care and patients are more mean today than they've ever been. I made the grave mistake of buying into the whole "health care hero" bullshit during the pandemic. When the vaccine came out there were many of us that thought we'd get viewed as heroes and maybe the poor treatment we received pre-March 2020 would reverse. It didn't happen. In fact, the opposite happened. The vaccine turned political and people thought we were killing them. Now I find myself in a position where I want to move on from my current gig. It's a weird feeling man. I've never had "you're making a mistake" and "you need to do this because you've waited and waited and things aren't getting better" collide in my life the way they are now. 

I think a lot of that is pent-up frustration with the health system as a whole (I'm looking at you, you blood-sucking insurance companies), that it is with the boots-on-the-ground healthcare workers. Navigating the system is ridiculously arduous and y'all get caught up in the middle of it. Of course, COVID and all the shit-heads that helped breed doesn't help either. Hang in there.

[Willfully Horn 7916]

Good read, thanks for posting. Agree that this shouldn’t be seen as a political topic.

52 minutes ago, HRSchenker said:

I really wish this wasn't posted to Cloak Room but it is what it is. The pandemic changed everything for me. I work in health care and patients are more mean today than they've ever been. I made the grave mistake of buying into the whole "health care hero" bullshit during the pandemic. When the vaccine came out there were many of us that thought we'd get viewed as heroes and maybe the poor treatment we received pre-March 2020 would reverse. It didn't happen. In fact, the opposite happened. The vaccine turned political and people thought we were killing them. Now I find myself in a position where I want to move on from my current gig. It's a weird feeling man. I've never had "you're making a mistake" and "you need to do this because you've waited and waited and things aren't getting better" collide in my life the way they are now. 

Respect. Thanks for what you do.

[DDD Dad 14252]

46 minutes ago, Brisketexan said:

I don't want to read the piece.  I know the truth behind it, reading it again will just make me depressed.

And quoting the post above....it's across the board, it permeates our entire culture.  Healthcare workers -- getting shit on.  We have a good friend who is senior in a brewpub chain, she occasionally has to work the floor....and hates it.  She related that "it used to be that maybe 5% of your customers were outright mean/rude....now it's over half.  It's abusive and exhausting."  And as for the legal profession, a shitload of lawyers I know are talking about the undeniable truth: people have gotten meaner, more unhinged, and more unreasonable.  Had that conversation with a very seasoned mediator recently, observing that more and more cases aren't settling, because people just can't get to a reasonable compromise, and he agreed.

We are broken, top to bottom.  And we're doubling down on worshipping our worst tendencies as if they were our BEST qualities.

America is the land of the selfish "fuck you," with zero regard for anyone else.

Remember when corporations used to view that they had a responsibility to their employees rather than strictly their shareholders (and their quarterly earnings or P/E ratios)?  I do.  Pensions were fully funded.  Thanks, Milton.

[TwiceHorn 31283]

20 minutes ago, wildcat09 said:

I haven't read the article, but I feel very safe in assuming he doesn't point out that the mythical past when people were much nicer includes shit like slavery, Jim Crow, rampant and largely socially accepted accepted sexual abuse of children, etc. 

There's some interesting evidence indicating that social media actually has contributed to the increase in the murder rate among young people, and the pandemic pretty clearly played a huge part in turning more people into angry public assholes rather than just private assholes. But there were tons of assholes in prior decades too. It's just that more of their asshole behavior was specifically directed at women and minorities and other white people who may not have been assholes themselves didn't have a problem with that.

You would be completely incorrect on that score.

A couple of obvious things need to be said about this ethos of moral formation that dominated American life for so long. It prevailed alongside all sorts of hierarchies that we now rightly find abhorrent: whites superior to Blacks, men to women, Christians to Jews, straight people to gay people. And the emphasis on morality didn’t produce perfect people. Moral formation doesn’t succeed in making people angels—it tries to make them better than they otherwise might be.

Furthermore, we would never want to go back to the training methods that prevailed for so long, rooted in so many thou shall nots and so much shaming, and riddled with so much racism and sexism. Yet a wise accounting should acknowledge that emphasizing moral formation meant focusing on an important question—what is life for?—and teaching people how to bear up under inevitable difficulties. A culture invested in shaping character helped make people resilient by giving them ideals to cling to when times got hard. In some ways, the old approach to moral formation was, at least theoretically, egalitarian: If your status in the community was based on character and reputation, then a farmer could earn dignity as readily as a banker. This ethos came down hard on self-centeredness and narcissistic display. It offered practical guidance on how to be a good neighbor, a good friend.

54 minutes ago, HRSchenker said:

I really wish this wasn't posted to Cloak Room but it is what it is. The pandemic changed everything for me. I work in health care and patients are more mean today than they've ever been. I made the grave mistake of buying into the whole "health care hero" bullshit during the pandemic. When the vaccine came out there were many of us that thought we'd get viewed as heroes and maybe the poor treatment we received pre-March 2020 would reverse. It didn't happen. In fact, the opposite happened. The vaccine turned political and people thought we were killing them. Now I find myself in a position where I want to move on from my current gig. It's a weird feeling man. I've never had "you're making a mistake" and "you need to do this because you've waited and waited and things aren't getting better" collide in my life the way they are now. 

I also put it in the What Ails You thread.

[Dahobbs 17449]

This is a false premise. America was always mean. The meanness is just more visible (accessible) to everyone thanks to technology. 

[tx 3 putt 76403]

Years back, the middle class was majority white and they could work a job (no degree), buy a house, raise a family and a stay at home wife 

now, the middle class isn’t majority white, and a lot of them have a college degree. The dream of being middle class (no degree) and living a ‘decent’ life is long gone

Poor uneducated whites are pissed and looking for anyone to blame but themselves 

[wildcat09 29260]

6 minutes ago, TwiceHorn said:

You would be completely incorrect on that score.

A couple of obvious things need to be said about this ethos of moral formation that dominated American life for so long. It prevailed alongside all sorts of hierarchies that we now rightly find abhorrent: whites superior to Blacks, men to women, Christians to Jews, straight people to gay people. And the emphasis on morality didn’t produce perfect people. Moral formation doesn’t succeed in making people angels—it tries to make them better than they otherwise might be.

This is one of those "everything before the word 'but' doesn't matter" things (yes I'm aware that the word "but" isn't actually included in what I quoted, it's just clearly implied).  

[wildcat09 29260]

1 minute ago, tx 3 putt said:

Years back, the middle class was majority white and they could work a job (no degree), buy a house, raise a family and a stay at home wife 

now, the middle class isn’t majority white, and a lot of them have a college degree. The dream of being middle class (no degree) and living a ‘decent’ life is long gone

Poor uneducated whites are pissed and looking for anyone to blame but themselves 

Yes and no. Financial precarity is certainly a problem that motivates some assholery. But many, if not most, of the biggest assholes are educated and pretty-to-very well off. 

[TwiceHorn 31283]

9 minutes ago, Dahobbs said:

This is a false premise. America was always mean. The meanness is just more visible (accessible) to everyone thanks to technology. 

The title is somewhat misleading.  It focuses not so much on acts of meanness, but basically on morality in terms of the really big picture:  what is life for, why am I here, and what am I supposed to do.

Communities formed around common notions of these things, although the communities were often segregated.

Among other things, it points out that politics has become a substitute for the morality of community.

I thought this particularly good.

Politics overwhelms everything. Churches, universities, sports, pop culture, health care are swept up in a succession of battles that are really just one big war—red versus blue. Evangelicalism used to be a faith; today it’s primarily a political identity. College humanities departments used to study literature and history to plumb the human heart and mind; now they sometimes seem exclusively preoccupied with politics, and with the oppressive systems built around race, class, and gender. Late-night comedy shows have become political pep rallies. Hundreds of thousands of Americans died unnecessarily during the pandemic because people saw a virus through the lens of a political struggle.

This is not politics as it is normally understood. In psychically healthy societies, people fight over the politics of distribution: How high should taxes be? How much money should go to social programs for the poor and the elderly? We’ve shifted focus from the politics of redistribution to the politics of recognition. Political movements are fueled by resentment, by feelings that society does not respect or recognize me. Political and media personalities gin up dramas in which our side is emotionally validated and the other side is emotionally shamed. The person practicing the politics of recognition is not trying to get resources for himself or his constituency; he is trying to admire himself. He’s trying to use politics to fill the hole in his soul. It doesn’t work.

The politics of recognition doesn’t give you community and connection, certainly not in a system like our current one, mired in structural dysfunction. People join partisan tribes in search of belonging—but they end up in a lonely mob of isolated belligerents who merely obey the same orthodoxy.

If you are asking politics to be the reigning source of meaning in your life, you are asking more of politics than it can bear. Seeking to escape sadness, loneliness, and anomie through politics serves only to drop you into a world marked by fear and rage, by a sadistic striving for domination. Sure, you’ve left the moral vacuum—but you’ve landed in the pulverizing destructiveness of moral war. The politics of recognition has not produced a happy society. When asked by the General Social Survey to rate their happiness level, 20 percent of Americans in 2022 rated it at the lowest level—only 8 percent did the same in 1990.

[Brisketexan 104628]

24 minutes ago, Dahobbs said:

This is a false premise. America was always mean. The meanness is just more visible (accessible) to everyone thanks to technology. 

Yes....and no.  Yes, we definitely can see more of it, in broad strokes (I didn't see some racist going off on a black dude in a casino but now, thanks to the interwebs I do).

But the things I pointed to above -- customers getting meaner to downright cruel to waitstaff, people being less and less willing to compromise/be reasonable in disputes, are non-social media things that I and others have observed first hand.

I'm inclined to think that the tidal wave of assholes aren't people who weren't already assholes....but before, they kept their assholery in check, because they were convinced to do so by prevailing social norms.  Now....probably the single most adored and worshipped person in the country (note that I didn't say the best person, or liked by the most people) is one of the worst human beings most of us have ever seen.  He has made cruelty, contempt, and meanness VALUABLE COMMODITIES.  He preaches them as virtues.  And 40% of America adores him for it, and it has given them license to be their worst selves.

Selfishness and cruelty are virtues.  That's fucked.

Edited August 14, 2023 by Brisketexan

[locodos 5334]

15 minutes ago, Dahobbs said:

This is a false premise. America was always mean. The meanness is just more visible (accessible) to everyone thanks to technology. 

I completely disagree.  I have some ideas, but nothing really worth sharing, it's all personal observation, and basically useless because we each only see a tiny sliver of the world around us.  Need big studies and the benefit of hindsight to see what happened.

But from my viewpoint, the pandemic caused some strings that were already under strain to snap for a lot of folks.   People are angry, seething, it's palpable, road behavior is MadMax crazy around here, fucking nazis show up at strip malls, just right out in the open.

I have doubled down on treating everyone I interact with as much care, compassion, and kindness as I can muster.   I have seen MOST people react by dropping their guard a little and slipping back into civility, sometimes you can almost see them visibly relax.  I try to get a smile from everyone, I think we all need to do that to turn this shit around.

[G650 14108]

1 hour ago, Pam Cummings said:

"He has a lot of money" has replaced "is a decent person who is intelligent and well-spoken" on our priorities list. Just blind, misguided worship of things we think we want.

 

I said exactly this like a week ago, in the DT thread about Texas being the worst place or whatever. Our priorities as a country are just absolutely bizarre and alienating to me.

[G650 14108]

2 minutes ago, locodos said:

I completely disagree.  I have some ideas, but nothing really worth sharing, it's all personal observation, and basically useless because we each only see a tiny sliver of the world around us.  Need big studies and the benefit of hindsight to see what happened.

But from my viewpoint, the pandemic caused some strings that were already under strain to snap for a lot of folks.   People are angry, seething, it's palpable, road behavior is MadMax crazy around here, fucking nazis show up at strip malls, just right out in the open.

I have doubled down on treating everyone I interact with as much care, compassion, and kindness as I can muster.   I have seen MOST people react by dropping their guard a little and slipping back into civility, sometimes you can almost see them visibly relax.  I try to get a smile from everyone, I think we all need to do that to turn this shit around.

 

Troof.

[Goredho 17349]

I haven't read the full article, but a lot of morality and ethics used to be covered by a family's church/religion.  So a simple conclusion is that as participation in organized religion has waned, nothing is filling the vacuum of instilling morality and ethics in its former adherents...

Except that some of the meanest people in America right now are highly religious.  Not all, certainly.  But a lot of the right-wing extremists view themselves as pious followers of Christ.   The dude in Utah that just got taken down by the FBI? He was a member of the LDS church described as "cranky" but "generally well-liked" by people who attended his ward.  He was a nice guy capable of building a disability ramp for a neighbor, but he was also an extremist capable of projecting a desire to murder people of a different political ideology:

Quote

 

I HEAR BIDEN IS COMING TO UTAH.  DIGGING OUT MY OLD GHILLIE SUIT AND CLEANING THE DUST OFF THE M24 SNIPER RIFLE.  WELCOME, BUFFOON-IN-CHIEF!

 

It can't be overlooked that people are being radicalized and motivated to be political soldiers.  They can be reasonable, functioning and even kind people in most aspects of their life.  But they are being drafted as soldiers into a brewing civil war.  That isn't a random outcome from a vacuum created by crumbling moral and ethical institutions, the failure of modern parents to properly educate their kids about right and wrong, etc...  It's the outcome of deliberate radicalization by people who hold the power to influence others.  Its politicians, church leaders, community leaders, TV, radio and social media personalities.  They are taking people like the church-going, neighbor-helping Craig Robertson in Utah and turning him into a would-be assassin.

In many ways, I think all the other things being talked about are distractions from the biggest problem at hand -- how do we prevent ordinary Americans from being intentionally radicalized to the point that they would be willing participants in the destruction of America?

[TwiceHorn 31283]

2 minutes ago, Goredho said:

I haven't read the full article, but a lot of morality and ethics used to be covered by a family's church/religion.  So a simple conclusion is that as participation in organized religion has waned, nothing is filling the vacuum of instilling morality and ethics in its former adherents...

Except that some of the meanest people in America right now are highly religious.  Not all, certainly.  But a lot of the right-wing extremists view themselves as pious followers of Christ.   The dude in Utah that just got taken down by the FBI? He was a member of the LDS church described as "cranky" but "generally well-liked" by people who attended his ward.  He was a nice guy capable of building a disability ramp for a neighbor, but he was also an extremist capable of projecting a desire to murder people of a different political ideology:

It can't be overlooked that people are being radicalized and motivated to be political soldiers.  They can be reasonable, functioning and even kind people in most aspects of their life.  But they are being drafted as soldiers into a brewing civil war.  That isn't a random outcome from a vacuum created by crumbling moral and ethical institutions, the failure of modern parents to properly educate their kids about right and wrong, etc...  It's the outcome of deliberate radicalization by people who hold the power to influence others.  Its politicians, church leaders, community leaders, TV, radio and social media personalities.  They are taking people like the church-going, neighbor-helping Craig Robertson in Utah and turning him into a would-be assassin.

In many ways, I think all the other things being talked about are distractions from the biggest problem at hand -- how do we prevent ordinary Americans from being intentionally radicalized to the point that they would be willing participants in the destruction of America?

Absolutely, and Brooks acknowledges the imperfections of the old communities.  But now we've got mostly nothing and worse, politics has filled that void.

One of the reasons this resonates with me is that Alcoholics Anonymous has been termed a brilliant work of "moral psychology."  I was unfamiliar with that term but kind of used context to define it, and was wrong.  While alkies and addicts certainly do "immoral" things of all sorts, that isn't what it's really all about.

Alcoholics and addicts are the most "self-referential" beings that may exist, although the Trump narcissist challenges that idea.  Another term I use is "inward dwelling."  It's not as simple as pure selfishness, it's seeing everything through the lens of your own psychological pain/comfort.

AA and a lot of psychology works on "getting people out of their own head," meaning getting involved with other people, helping them, practicing humility and gratitude and empathy.  Another aspect of it is seeing and understanding that you are not in control, that you have a place in the world and a throne at the center of it is not it:  you are part of a community where you are dependent on others and they on you.

So, something as seemingly weird as an AA group is a moral community that is lacking elsewhere in society.

 

[Satchel 6908]

3 hours ago, TwiceHorn said:

Not a huge Hilary fan, but I have never denied that she's smart as shit.  And, It Takes A Village was pretty prescient.  I actually quite liked that at the time.

Also, Brooks does this one in greater depth and with less finger-pointing, which I think it most unhelpful in this context.  There's plenty of blame to go around.

You highlight another interesting challenge confronting us. It’s becoming a liability to be or to aspire to be smart and knowledgeable 

[faps 806]

59 minutes ago, locodos said:

road behavior is MadMax crazy around here

This is where I notice it the most. Just unhinged crazy driving with a heaping dose of distracted, head down on their cell phone driving. People don't care anymore, they just live in their tiktok bubble.

[G650 14108]

2 minutes ago, faps said:

This is where I notice it the most. Just unhinged crazy driving with a heaping dose of distracted, head down on their cell phone driving. People don't care anymore, they just live in their tiktok bubble.

 

It's like that here too. I actually really used to enjoy driving, always the driver among my friends or family or whoever. It's so awful now I dread getting on the road, which given I drive like 200 miles a day, is not optimal.

[Stilicho 1397]

2 hours ago, HRSchenker said:

I really wish this wasn't posted to Cloak Room but it is what it is. The pandemic changed everything for me. I work in health care and patients are more mean today than they've ever been. I made the grave mistake of buying into the whole "health care hero" bullshit during the pandemic. When the vaccine came out there were many of us that thought we'd get viewed as heroes and maybe the poor treatment we received pre-March 2020 would reverse. It didn't happen. In fact, the opposite happened. The vaccine turned political and people thought we were killing them. Now I find myself in a position where I want to move on from my current gig. It's a weird feeling man. I've never had "you're making a mistake" and "you need to do this because you've waited and waited and things aren't getting better" collide in my life the way they are now. 

Wish there were more of you in the medical field here in Oklahoma. I have nurses that tell me the fallout from my long COVID diagnosis is because I got the vaccine. Also had more than one nurse and a nerve specialist tell me that I really need to "talk to Jesus about these problems, he helps." I thought I did the respectful thing by not telling them to go fuck themselves.

Trying to see doctor these days feels like a fucking coin flip between an actual medical diagnosis or a faith healing.

['stache 21777]

1 hour ago, tx 3 putt said:

Years back, the middle class was majority white and they could work a job (no degree), buy a house, raise a family and a stay at home wife 

now, the middle class isn’t majority white, and a lot of them have a college degree. The dream of being middle class (no degree) and living a ‘decent’ life is long gone

Poor uneducated whites are pissed and looking for anyone to blame but themselves 

This, and the people who have profited the most from the death of those days are the ones who started politics as a culture war, using issues like abortion, and distorting the term "socialism," to the extent that it wasn't policy disagreements to their followers, but literal evil (killing babies, soviet socialism, etc.). That is where it got mean, to the extent that these people don't even care that their overlords are the reason their bank accounts increased tenfold in the billions while everyone else's wages stagnated. 

[Celery Man 20886]

I haven't made it all the way through yet (and am about to be interrupted) but the thought that I'm having from the early "we are no longer trained to treat people with kindness and consideration" argument is that folks who grew up in the '50s and '60s are by no means excluded from the meanification of our society.

[Guest]

2 hours ago, Brisketexan said:

Oh, there's definitely phenomena like white people catching on to the fact that cops are lawless assholes, while black people are standing next to them going "WHAT THE FUCK HAVE WE BEEN TELLING YOU FOR A DAMNED CENTURY?"

Guilty.

Single biggest thing of which I have become more aware due to Surly, and I fought it like hell.  LOL, but not LOL.

[locodos 5334]

43 minutes ago, faps said:

This is where I notice it the most. Just unhinged crazy driving with a heaping dose of distracted, head down on their cell phone driving. People don't care anymore, they just live in their tiktok bubble.

I don't mean to diminish your post (and I agree), but I'm talking about running gun battles...  It's a monthly occurrence here

2 killed after being shot on Sunrise Blvd. near I-95 ramp

 

Quote

According to the Florida Highway Patrol, there have been 10 highway shooting in Miami-Dade and five in Broward County for the first three months of the year.

Dead kids, dead pre-school teacher, missing parents...  

A few months back I witnessed a car deliberately hit a cyclist who was in the crosswalk (with a walk signal).  Not only that, he backed up, to get a running start to try and run over the guy laying on the ground with his bike.  The cyclist scrambled away and the car went fully over the bike and swerved to try and get the guy too.  Attempted murder for crossing the road with the light.  This was ~200yds from the Elementary school my kids attended in a "nice" part of town.  I don't imagine they caught the guy, I gave a statement to the cops and a description of the vehicle, never heard anything back.

[David Dennison 18661]

4 hours ago, TwiceHorn said:

This is so relevant to so many things, but I'm going to put it here.  

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/09/us-culture-moral-education-formation/674765/

Non-paywalled in case that's an issue.  https://www.textise.net/showText.aspx?strURL=https%3A//www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/09/us-culture-moral-education-formation/674765/#main-content

I have sensed that we have, as a society, lost our communal rudder, but haven't been able to fully articulate it.

I think this article does so pretty well.  One of the problems is that many of our sources of "moral education" were also quite biased with various -isms (sexism, racism, etc.) and so we abandoned them, but put nothing in their place.  At the same time, we advocated a lot of individualism and "self-actualization," and that has left us too self-referential.

I'm not saying the article is 100% correct or accurate and I know David Brooks is going to raise a lot of hackles.  But I think there's a lot of insight and food for thought here.

Counterpoint:

 

[TwiceHorn 31283]

19 minutes ago, David Dennison said:

Counterpoint:

 

That's really a gross oversimplification of the issue and the article.

And, I suppose it's fair given the title of the article and thread.

At another level, it jibes perfectly with the main article:  people are so self-centered that they can't exist outside their own little bubble of untruth.

Edited August 14, 2023 by TwiceHorn

[David Dennison 18661]

1 minute ago, TwiceHorn said:

That's really a gross oversimplification of the issue and the article.

And, I suppose it's fair given the title of the article and thread.

Did you read it?

[Bullneck 18987]

3 hours ago, tx 3 putt said:

Years back, the middle class was majority white and they could work a job (no degree), buy a house, raise a family and a stay at home wife 

now, the middle class isn’t majority white, and a lot of them have a college degree. The dream of being middle class (no degree) and living a ‘decent’ life is long gone

Poor uneducated whites are pissed and looking for anyone to blame but themselves 

They don't understand why it worked for these guys but not them.

 

[TwiceHorn 31283]

18 minutes ago, David Dennison said:

Did you read it?

I did.  And that discussion acknowledges many of the same problems that Brooks identifies.

One thing is that the American Dream mythos, and capitalism encourage this rugged individualism shit that is always going to be an obstacle to creating much sense of community.

But there have been a number of factors that have increased the amount of isolation among Americans, and that leads to stewing in your own juices.

The community institutions we used to have weren't perfect and Brooks doesn't contend they were, but they at least created some community as far as they went.

The more modern substitutes, like political affiliation and social media groups or communities create tribes, but not necessarily a community interest group in the sense of the older institutions.

This isn't the same as pining for some bullshit Beaver Cleaver ideal of the 50s.  It is recognizing that there were elements of past eras that were worth having and improving upon and not discarding entirely because they were imperfect, even grossly so.

Edited August 14, 2023 by TwiceHorn

[David Dennison 18661]

7 minutes ago, TwiceHorn said:

This isn't the same as pining for some bullshit Beaver Cleaver ideal of the 50s.  It is recognizing that there were elements of past eras that were worth having and improving upon and not discarding entirely because they were imperfect, even grossly so.

I find it a tad ironic that this article is written by a man whose political ideology squares with a party that has gone out of its way to weaken American labor unions.

[Satchel 6908]

3 hours ago, Brisketexan said:

Yes....and no.  Yes, we definitely can see more of it, in broad strokes (I didn't see some racist going off on a black dude in a casino but now, thanks to the interwebs I do).

But the things I pointed to above -- customers getting meaner to downright cruel to waitstaff, people being less and less willing to compromise/be reasonable in disputes, are non-social media things that I and others have observed first hand.

I'm inclined to think that the tidal wave of assholes aren't people who weren't already assholes....but before, they kept their assholery in check, because they were convinced to do so by prevailing social norms.  Now....probably the single most adored and worshipped person in the country (note that I didn't say the best person, or liked by the most people) is one of the worst human beings most of us have ever seen.  He has made cruelty, contempt, and meanness VALUABLE COMMODITIES.  He preaches them as virtues.  And 40% of America adores him for it, and it has given them license to be their worst selves.

Selfishness and cruelty are virtues.  That's fucked.

I blame Rush Limbaugh and Howard Stern (and I’m only mildly kidding)

[GenXer 2778]

5 hours ago, Stilicho said:

Wish there were more of you in the medical field here in Oklahoma. I have nurses that tell me the fallout from my long COVID diagnosis is because I got the vaccine. Also had more than one nurse and a nerve specialist tell me that I really need to "talk to Jesus about these problems, he helps." I thought I did the respectful thing by not telling them to go fuck themselves.

Trying to see doctor these days feels like a fucking coin flip between an actual medical diagnosis or a faith healing.

No one has been brave enough to tell me that jesus/god/santa claus will cure my type 1 diabetes. I suspect my reaction would make it somewhere on the internet.

[Fastbreak 3959]

It all points back to when the “christians” were given the keys to the GOP and became emboldened to say their quiet things out loud.

[Nivek 16861]

Our wealth distribution, coupled with fraud, polarizing politics, and in your face luxury of the elite, population density, traffic, heat, gun culture, hyper individualism, lack of mentorship and career advancement within organizations.

JFK, blown away, what else do I have to say….

[immamac 42521]

I think it's a lot simpler than everyone is making it. 

People forgot how to act in public because they weren't allowed in public for a year or more. 

They reverted to internet state and then started being that way in public instead of just behind a keyboard. It's that simple. People aren't meaner than before they just don't know how to act in the absence of a screen. 

[Brisketexan 104628]

I think it's a lot simpler than everyone is making it. 
People forgot how to act in public because they weren't allowed in public for a year or more. 
They reverted to internet state and then started being that way in public instead of just behind a keyboard. It's that simple. People aren't meaner than before they just don't know how to act in the absence of a screen. 

That would explain people jerking off in public, too.

[GenXer 2778]

37 minutes ago, Brisketexan said:

That would explain people jerking off in public, too.