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Originally Posted by ratbastid
It's funny--as I read this, I kept jumping to "And you know whose fault that is?"  |
Smartass.............
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Look: human beings are righteous, inflexible, stubborn creatures. We want to be right above all things. We'd much rather be right than happy. Even when we're wrong. It's human nature.
I'm not convinced that now is a particularly special time in history for that. It could be that a veneer of civility that has been there in the past is now not there. In some ways that's a good thing. You have to deal with what's really there before anything can be done about it, and sugarcoating or veneering civility over it is a great way not to deal with what's really there.
Only question is whether people are committed to doing anything about it.
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Ah, but is it really human "
nature" or a learned element that is becoming more and more confrontational and not just about being right, but winning because winning means everything today.
I think there is a little bit of both in society.
I am not just looking at world leaders but the way we communicate just with each other. Maybe in my Pollyanna world growing up neighbors just talked to each other, got along for the most part and communities strived for the common good of all to better themselves.
Today, what I see is everyone out for themselves. If you dare to do something I don't agree with or find offensive, I will sue your ever loving pants off, if I see you punish your child in anyway I'll call Children's Services, but if you are too scared to punish your child then I will label him a brat, who has no manners, label you as bad parents and tell everyone in the community just how eveil you are no matter which scenario happened.
If you cut me off in traffic your an asshole, who is out to kill someone and I hope you crash, yet if I cut you off it was because you are moving too slow, even though I got no further than 1 car length ahead of you and will not make my destination that much noticably faster.
And so on. Don't get me wrong there are still acts of kindness and good people around, but anymore it gets rarer and rarer and people are looking for ulterior motives and seeing kindness as weakness, rather than seeing it for what it truly is.