Liberal Forum

Monderegal » 31 May 2022, 11:13 am » wrote: ↑

31 May 2022, 11:13 am

I found this article in the Atlantic interesting for several reasons. First, it is about American culture itself. We bombard ourselves with violence and anger that has gone to the level of being desensitized to the reality of death. Now, more and more people are taking up arms and acting out their fatal fantasies. This is not simply a gun issue. It is a cultural issue where we never even second guess the media we consume for entertainment as a loathsome effect on our psyches. This used to be a question of political importance but it seems voices that condemned such notions have now gone deaf. With this culture at work, the anger and dark tendencies of human nature will probably rear their ugly head again and again to a point that such violence could become even more common.
The second note here is that it seems many people have given up hope in a better future. The decline of spiritual practices and the alienation of citizens and their government are both signs of this. Even masks are seen as an intrusive government on a public that has given up on civic engagement. The debate on Covid safety measures, of course, is one of democracy but the reasoning sometimes points to a complete rejection of the government in general. Nihilism or the complete rejection of meaning in life was the result of the secularization of American society in my opinion. This was mostly not the case at first when most rejection of organized religion still instilled spirituality in some sort of form. Now as time passes the world has become more bleak for many and the rejection of any sort of meaning in life is much more common. This is a proper analysis of the state of American society at this point in my opinion where we find ourselves looking in the mirror again with the latest mass killing. Link to Atlantic article here.