Comment by conductr
16 hours ago
The older I get, the more I feel it’s becoming in shorter supply. Even when I don’t like associating with those that seem to lack it, they seem to find me everywhere I go. This is professionally, as a consumer and even just socially. I’m probably just old and grumpy and this is a yearning for the good old days, but, when I look around it just seems to be getting out of control. For example, politics is huge indicator that exemplifies and reinforces the behaviors.
Weekly church attendance is at all-time lows. Nobody I know today goes to church. It was common when I was a child. And I'm not talking about going to save your soul from damnation, but for regular reinforcement of the Golden Rule, and other wisdom on how to live, and belonging to a group of people who care enough about those things to show up for it on a regular basis.
Teaching of right and wrong in school has fallen off. Anything touching on traditional morals risks being conflated with religion, which is kryptonite in the public schools. So now it's much more about how you feel, and excusing bad behavior because of hurt feelings, "disrespect," or some culturally or socially disadvantaged group you might claim to belong to. The soft bigotry of low expectations. We've stopped demanding that people follow the rules. If a kid got in trouble in school, he could probably expect to be in trouble at home too. Now, it's more likely that the parents will call the school and complain.
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I also think a big part of it is that it’s becoming more and more easy to cheat your way through life in many respects. Many people always chase the thing that makes the most money, and they’ll take every shortcut they can to get it. And the tools for cheating your way through life are evolving. Every aspect of the tool chain.
I’m not sure whether it used to just be that everyone had to pretend to have integrity, whether they did or not, since the appearance of integrity was something we indexed on pretty heavily as a society.
I definitely agree with you though: it seems like the need/desire to pretend isn’t even there now much of the time, and I suspect that overall this means there is less integrity: some people who were pretending in the past may have “faked it til they made it,” and even if not, it at least faking it would have led to fewer obviously integrity-less actions being committed in the public sphere.