![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
1) There is a natural cognitive bias, the older one gets, to see society as going downhill.
2) I have been increasingly worried about social trends for several years now.
It's getting very hard to write off my worries as just being a symptom of #1. All the antisocial behavior we kept excusing as something "just on the internet" has been leaking more and more into the physical world. We all spend all our time in an environment where the only response to the most hideous of attacks is just "oh, ignore it, it's not serious". Of course empathy is becoming increasingly unfashionable! Even traffic is getting more aggressive, with people breaking the speed limit much more consistently and to greater average degrees it seems. But obviously it's hard to trust those observations.
Is there an intellectually rigorous method for resolving this dilemma?
2) I have been increasingly worried about social trends for several years now.
It's getting very hard to write off my worries as just being a symptom of #1. All the antisocial behavior we kept excusing as something "just on the internet" has been leaking more and more into the physical world. We all spend all our time in an environment where the only response to the most hideous of attacks is just "oh, ignore it, it's not serious". Of course empathy is becoming increasingly unfashionable! Even traffic is getting more aggressive, with people breaking the speed limit much more consistently and to greater average degrees it seems. But obviously it's hard to trust those observations.
Is there an intellectually rigorous method for resolving this dilemma?
no subject
For example: Have people been brutal and antisocial in the same intensity as today, say, 20 years ago?
Summarize for yourself what is similar and where you find the differences. And where you find possible differences to today, how much of a meaning or change did they make to the bigger picture? Like, people back then still had some little sense of mercy while they seem to have lost it more and more until today. Or, the social status of people who did it wasn't like it is today. Among kids they remained outsiders 'cause no-one wanted to have these bullies around himself who beat up everyone just for fun. In society they didn't get the best positions, they became criminals and sooner or later ended in jail or a least with the bottle stuck to their mouths.
Yes, some way like that...