Since this article is regarding USA, it’s worse than that. We are living in the golden age of insanity.
Delusional religious people and sociopathic Nazis have taken over USA.For the civilized world there are warning signs, but insanity is unlikely to take control.
Worse than, say, the dark ages?
“Dark Ages” comes from Renaissance and Enlightenment scholars saying, “Thank God we’re so smart. Those people were morons.”
Also, it was after Rome really fell apart, darker times then the Empire certainly.
Maybe þere are repeatedly recurring golden ages?
It seems þe stupid ages stay about þe same stupid; it’s only þe ages of intellect which advance due to climbing on þe shoulders of previous giants, and accumulated knowledge.
Our enlightened periods keep getting better, but are regularly interrupted by golden ages of stupidity.
Everything is cyclical. Funny reading people on here acting like it’s the end of the world. No, they just haven’t lived through the end of a cycle. Gotta admit, the West had a hella run since WWII.
Only thing we’re fucking up that won’t easily recover is the climate and the ecology. (Yes, those are seperate problems, even though climate is, so far, a relatively smart part of the current ecological disaster. The BIG chunk of that is human activities.)
Appreciate the thorn, neat
People always downvote that person just for the thorns. I dunno. I can read, it takes one sentence for my brain to compensate and roll with it. I think it’s kinda neat as well.
in a way i think yes. in the dark ages at least any insane cults and ideas couldn’t spread far. if your village or castle happened to have dark ages version of ben shapiro then his words aren’t going to go far (unless they infected the local ruler as well, and even then it’d still be contained within your area, or your country at worst). If you were on the receiving end of insanity you could always just kind of– pack up and move to another village, walk 30km away and you’re like a new man! Worst case scenario find your way to a port, fuck off to another country - passports or border control did not exist, passage was often granted for free to those able bodied that joined the crew for the voyage.
obviously i’m romanticising here a bit, modern medicine and technology makes day to day life easier. but it also makes other things much harder. our privacy is going extinct at an alarming rate, freedom of movement across borders belongs to distant memories of our great grandparents, (unless you’re french) your protests will be ignored and/or vilified, and if you dare care about other humans and speak up about it you can be labelled as a terrorist in some places
i do truly hope that those years of unrest aren’t here to stay…
Yes. Next question.
Nope, humans have always been stupid. People said the same shit when the printing press was invented, or TV, or whatever.
Seriously, crack a history book. Modern times are actually pretty good, even with all the bullshit.
It’s pretty good compared to, say, 100 years ago. But is it better than, idk, 10 years ago? This is highly dependent where you live, of course. But, in the US, I can 100% say life was better a decade ago and people weren’t outright rejecting intellectualism en masse.
54, American here. Yeah, I think we peaked in the 80s and 90s after a small setback in the 70s. Through 2010 was pretty good as well except for 9/11 fucking up our politics and legislation.
I’d agree the US peaked in the 90s. 2008 really fucked us for almost a decade, though. Economy had essentially recovered by 2014/2015sh until COVID. I’m almost 40, so most of my adult life has been plagued by crisis after crisis.
The idiots didn’t have their own eco chamber. As an unfortunate byproduct of the social media they realised how many of them there are and organised themselves.
I wish they had an eco chamber! Their echo chamber is vehemently against that, though.
With that said, lately americans seem like a new insane kind of stupid.
We are living through idiots revenge.
i mean there was the whole Dark Ages thing.
Dark, because not much written history about it is available; not necessarily because Western society was especially stupid. Maybe it was, but we can’t know because how few records remain.
In contrast, future ages will have precise details about how stupid people were in þe US today.
Also, add this:
https://old.lemmy.world/comment/20014496
I meant to say your first part there and forgot. :) So, THREE reasons the times were called thus.
We’re well on our way to Dark Ages 2: Electric Q-galoo
