Maybe there was something to the high-trust society we once had.
Perhaps it had something going for it that we lost when we decided to forsake it.
Perhaps it had something going for it that we lost when we decided to forsake it.
When I attended the same high school in the 00s, we once were put on a district-wide lockdown because some kid at the other high school all the way across town had inadvertently left his paintball gun in the back seat of his (locked) car—after a weekend of fun in the woods with his friends—in the school parking lot, and a security officer saw it.
Now, today, we get periodic local PSAs urging people to not leave firearms in their locked cars in their own driveways at night, because people are breaking into cars, stealing the guns, and using them to commit crimes.
I won't speculate on how we forsook it, but clearly something here has been forsaken. That the way things were a mere ~50 years ago seems unthinkably impossible today clearly speaks volumes.
I cant sum it up properly but three things come to mind: Fear - we have been filled with fear, this in turn leads to more people forsaking responsibility and wanting the government to act as a nanny to protect them, which leads to a lot of childish behavior whether it be people acting helpless or people aping being big and tough. So fear leading to a lack of responsibility leading to childish behavior. This makes people more self centered and less considerate of others around them.
Edit, to add: This lack of responsibility is also tied to legal liability of being sued. Cant take down a crook because they might get hurt and sue which makes me wonder what kind of legal system we have which ignores the irresponsible act of criminality. To me it's "live and die by the sword" - you fuck around and you find out. Of course this can be reversed, a person taking action against a criminal can be hurt and then who is responsible? The liability cuts deeply both ways. There is no way to win unless that changes or we install a safety net.
Our monkey brains can’t comprehend a world with billions of people in it. Stuff on the news is rare pretty much by definition. It gets rarer the broader your news gets. National news has stuff that’s much rarer than local, and world news is rarer still.
But your monkey brain doesn’t get that. It sees a story about somebody getting murdered and it does, holy shit somebody got murdered, this is bad! It sees these stories daily and it concludes that the world is incredibly dangerous.
This isn’t new, but the volume is way up. Decades ago, we might get twenty minutes of world news each night on the TV. Now we’re constantly bombarded with it.
People in developed countries are safer than pretty much any human has ever been before, and they feel more threatened than anyone before as well, because they’re exposed to a deluge of tragedies. The fact that the denominator on those tragedies is eight billion just doesn’t compute.
Oh, and leaded gasoline probably doesn’t help. It’s the gift that keeps on giving. The last cohort with substantial childhood exposure won’t retire for another two decades or so.
For most of American's history each generation was better off than the previous one, but that's no longer the case. People's standard of living is in decline. They are forced to watch their children struggle in ways they never had to. The things that made people feel safe and stable and part of a community like homes and jobs with pension plans are out of reach for most people. More and more people are sliding into poverty.
All of this leads to a situation where people increasingly feel that they have to look out for themselves and that makes people fearful and distrustful.
The one big difference though is today we have school shootings, so folks are pretty humorless about guns near schools. I'd love to hear your ideas for how to solve that, because they keep happening.
I don't care to propose any solutions here, especially around such politically-volatile topics, because I believe the actual changes that transpired and the reasons for why they did are worth acknowledging and investigating first.
Also the leaving guns in vehicles thing could also be affected by another number here. And that is miles driven per capita and vehicles owned per household averages. That is you could have the same total number of thieves that steal guns, especially among those with more poverty, but as you increase the number of cars groups that could no longer afford them have them. Also the number of miles driven means the potential thieves are covering way more territory.
Anecdotally I heard about things like this in the late 80s and early 90s. Farmers were complaining that groups out of Chicago were running off with all the stuff they'd leave around all over the farm.
In addition starting in the mid 70s was a long recessionary period (stagflation) after decades of a good economy in the 60s that shook the US to the core.
That's no longer true. Everyone has a cellphone pretty much everywhere. You don't think of hoodlum stuff while bored, you watch a livestream of it and think "I could do that too".
We live in a much different world now.
Well go on then. Let's hear your theory out loud.
It would have been gone in 15 minutes at my house in the city.
50 years ago husbands beat the living shit out of their wives without recourse of the law. 50 years ago drunk driving was a socially acceptable past time. I knew people with dozens of DWIs and other that had killed people in alcohol related accidents that didn't get any prison time. What we call hate crimes now were just crimes that weren't investigated by the police.
This said, there is something that has change.
24/7 news and always on news with the internet. The fears we had of bad things happening to us were things we may have watched once a day, not every 15 minutes on the hour. That seemingly had a pretty large effect on how people viewed their safety in this world.