CovOps
 Location : Ether-Sphere
Job/hobbies : Irrationality Exterminator
Humor : Über Serious
 |  Subject: America’s Dark Ages have arrived  Sun Jan 16, 2022 2:47 am | |
| The 400-year-long American enlightenment is sunsetting right before our eyes, as our culture slips into darkness and confusion. The country is showing unmistakable signs of receding into a second Christian Dark Ages, the first happening in Western Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire. The American empire is failing today as well, with our defeat in Vietnam, our withdrawals from Iraq and Afghanistan, and distinct signs of disillusionment with or abandonment of NATO and other international treaty agreements.
We also seem to be following the arc of political, legal, economic, literary/cultural, social/familial, public health, and religious decline that characterized long stretches of the Middle Ages in Western Europe.
Our political system is hastening quickly backward to a feudal type of government resting upon two oligarchies of senatorial power, and monarchical levels of power granted to our presidents. We have seen the decay of our legal standards in criminal and civil law by means of 70 years worth of libertarian “legalization” movements.
Small farms and small business are rapidly being replaced by factory farms and monopolies in industry and services. Our workplaces constitute the new version of medieval feudal baronies who rule over their modern subjects/serfs with an iron hand and no mercy. We have fallen hard back into the economic pattern of debt slavery to replace our long history of debt freedom. Stock market values are based on fluff and pornographic-style imagination, rather than earnings.
Like the earlier Dark Age, we see a low output of significant literature by our youthful graduates of educational institutions. They don’t write histories, plays, scientific treatises, curriculum, prose, proverbs and poetry like educated family members in enlightened times did. Our students don’t learn much in school, and rarely pick up a book again after they leave school. Their literary output consists of texts and tweets and poorly constructed office memos.
Our entire culture is going backward in language to the use of ancient Egyptian-style hieroglyphics, using app icons and emojis to communicate interests and intentions. Our native-born citizens can no longer speak their own language with a fluent vocabulary, let alone a multiplicity of languages. Our young people have turned to video games and hate-filled web sites instead of continuing adult education and community involvement for their contribution to society.
In terms of records, we have lost contact not only with our own 400-year-old American history, but also with the classics of the lengthier Anglo-American, Afro-American, Hispanic-American, Native-American and Asian-American histories and cultures. Instead, we rely on “breaking news,” blood and guts events and celebrity noise, of lasting interest only for about a day. Even our professional publishing agencies like newspapers and book publishers are rapidly going out of business.
Our marriages and families lack the solidarity that comes from long-term commitment. Few young people want to marry, and even fewer want to have children. People warmly embrace the kind of excess consumption that leads to addiction, anxiety, depression, chronic disease, and early death by suicide, viral infection, or automatic weapon.
Churches have become hierarchical, bureaucratic, politicized, theologically streamlined and commercialized, and, at times, abjectly corrupt. Religion no longer provides any kind of effective ethical or moral compass for society like it once did.
Our culture currently prepares for its final sinking under the ocean surface of history by embracing, as the European backsliders did, superstition, Gothic and other pagan arts and gods, chivalric romanticism, rejection of science, and aboriginal-style evil-eye cults of violence and spitefulness. The ride is over, folks.
.https://www.hollandsentinel.com/story/opinion/columns/2022/01/16/my-take-americas-dark-ages-have-arrived/6517058001/
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