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Southern Skeptic's avatar

Thanks for this post Captain. Laying out the truth in plain language is very helpful to me. There is so much bullshit information and contradictory “truths” that an article like this one helps clear things up.

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Guillermou's avatar

A great perspective on a reality in many fields of health science. In all of this, a decline of a society marked by money and power. In his bestselling book Factfulness, Hans Rosling offered some explanations for the decline and loss of ethical values ​​in today's society. We see it today in the enslavement of people to power and money. In all of this, aspects are partly related to our tendency to focus on the negative, fueled in part by the media and social media. Drama and surprise sell more than routine and kindness. The Canadian economist John Kenneth Galbraith, who died in 2006, explained it differently when he said that every publisher wants to publish a book called The Crisis of Democracy because they know it sells. The authors of the recent article published in Nature attribute this to a dual psychological factor, which they have dubbed BEAM, an acronym for 'biased exposure and memory'. They claim that it's the combination of exposure to negative news, which captures our attention more than positive news, and a bias in our memory, which tends to blur negative memories more quickly than positive ones. Thus, when we look back, we will remember more vividly the episodes that made us feel good. But when we look at the present, it will be the bad news that most captures our attention.

The combination of both explains this tendency to fall into the temptation of thinking that society is losing its values. "There are many problems in today's society," Mastroianni concludes. "Fortunately, the moral crisis is a mere illusion, and it doesn't take much effort to reverse it." Because things aren't that bad, perhaps it's our own prejudices we need to revise."

Socrates. "Spoiled Children"

Socrates, 4th century BC: "Today's youth loves luxury, is malicious and spoiled, mocks authority, and has no respect for their elders. Our young people today are tyrants who don't rise when an old man enters the room and who respond haughtily to their parents."

Ross Douthat, a columnist for The New York Times and former editor of The Atlantic magazine, says this assertion is at the heart of his book, *The Decadent Society: How We Have Become Victims of Our Own Success*. The book "reveals what happens when a rich and powerful society stops moving forward, and how the combination of wealth and technological dominance with economic stagnation, political paralysis, cultural exhaustion, and demographic decline creates a kind of 'sustainable decline.'"

The publisher recalls that "many of today's discontents, as well as the absurd and erratic evolution that characterizes reality—from grounded space shuttles to Silicon Valley villains, from blandly recycled film and television to escapism through drug use or virtual reality—reflect a sense of futility and disappointment, that the roads ahead lead only to decline."

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