2022-08-23 19:59:59
An interesting final paragraph from someone on Mumsnet, discouraging people from taking "conspiracy theories" seriously:
"Also think it’s important to compare society now to 50/100/200 years ago - and see, despite peaks and troughs - there is a gradual uphill trend towards better healthcare, education, freedom, recognition of people’s rights etc, etc. I agree we are not in a great place, things need to improve - but overall you probably have more freedom/opportunities available to you than 100 years ago."
First, I don't think that people have more freedom than they did 100 years ago. The ever-increasing political correctness at work and in daily life reduces freedom, as does the incredible amount of regulation and bureaucracy that people have to contend with compared to 1912, when we were vastly more free to go about our daily lives as we pleased. I suspect that people then were so much freer than we are today, that they had a radically different notion of what it is to "live in a society".
Second, I don't think we have more opportunities than we had 100 years ago. It might have been fairly true until about 2010, but in a lot of ways was illusory even then. The increasing paucity of middle-class careers reduces opportunity. Furthermore, a lot of opportunity is predicated on having a (pointless) university degree, which means you have to voluntarily reduce your own financial freedom (by getting into huge debt) in order to maximise the opportunities available to you - but in practice even that doesn't work, because of offshoring and AI replacing middle-class workers.
Third, while I would agree that access to education is better than it was 100 years ago, I think this has been ever less of an advantage since about 1960. Since then, educational standards have very clearly slipped decade by decade. At this point, a truly great education - as in, an education
as such - is much
less available than it was 100 years ago. Back then, at least a parent could know that, if they got their kid into a private school, the child would be "A-OK", to say the least. They would have history, Latin, the Western canon, philosophy, art history...
everything. To get such an education for your child today... I don't know what you'd have to do. Does even Eton provide that kind of thing nowadays?
Fourth, the writer takes solace in the general concept of "progress", meaning "a gradual uphill trend towards better healthcare, education, freedom". This "progress" is reliant upon ever-increasing prosperity and ever-improving technology, which in turn are both reliant upon stable societies, stable cultures, robust infrastructure and high IQ populations. "Progress" is about to end, and end badly.
Sorry, Mumsnet.
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