When I was younger it seemed politics were more rational and cruelty never seemed to be the point of doing nothing.

The cruelty was outside our borders. The rational, reasonable debate was for domestic issues. Foreigners got the bullet.

As the empire collapses the cruelty turns inwards i.e. fascism.

Grew up watching news of Palestinians and Israelis killing each other. Good thing that was 40 years ago.

Twenty-five years ago many slurs now rightly shunned were still part of common speech.

Twenty-five years ago marriage equality was not even on the table.

A lot of things are worse now, but a lot of things are better, too. I’d say right now things are worse than ten years ago but you can’t go much farther back without it getting murky.

The US was better but we were on course for this. Earlier laws restricting suing of international companies, the patriot act, citizens united, etc. Honestly beyond all of this is the lack of shame. Like I don’t think people are necessarily worse than they used to be but there was a vague agreement of what was bad and good and bad people wanted to hide being bad. There was shame. We seem to be living in the age of shamelessness. Like nazi types used to hide under klu klux klan robes but now they make youtube videos about how other races are inferior and the woke members of their race are race traitors. Again the roots go way back like the greed is good thing from the 80’s.

Most news is bad news and you certainly are exposed to more (bad) news these days than decades earlier. That certainly must be one factor why you can get increasingly bitter about the world.

But that doesn’t mean that the situation hasn’t gotten worse. It definitely has.

The three main factors are (although #2 and #3 are related): increasingly problematic climate change and exhausting the planetary resources too quickly while at the same time polluting it more and more, increasingly ruthless neo-liberalist capitalism (leading to increasingly poor regular people and increasingly rich rich people), and the rise of right-wing extremism / fascism (related to the previous factor because whenever the population is worse off, they tend to vote more for right-wing populists lying to make everything better and knowing the true causes, while in reality they deflect from real problems and will make things even worse for the general population, and faster). And since we have the internet, local fascism doesn’t stay local. It spreads globally.

It is getting worse. Humanity is entering a deeper and deeper crisis. Alienation is growing with each passing year. The inner contradiction in every one of us is getting more intense, which manifests itself in more external conflicts: between people, between people and nature, between everything.

That being sad, this crisis just highlights the slow death of the previous, deeply troubled era and marks the transition to another way of living. The destructive aspect of things, that we all suffer from, is therefore not absolute. It is not going to destroy neither us nor the world around us. It is balanced off by the progress that we’re making.

Take 3d printing, for example. If you think of it, it is actually the (very) beginning of something fundamentally new: local automated production. Automation eliminates the routine part of producing goods, which makes the process creative again, while not compromising on efficiency. This leads to production becoming a means of self-actualisation rather than something that takes away all your freedom. And since the process of making new things gives you value instead of taking it, the need for charging others for using your creations vanishes, giving way to free exchange and collaboration. This, if applied globally, would solve the fundamental issue of our current society, where creating good takes away just as much, making any growth a form of self-destruction. And solving that would spare us of all different kinds of problems, ranging from pollution, wars to emotional abuse.

So I think by getting worse it’s also getting better and these difficult times we’ve happened to live in are still marvelous.

P.S. Apart from 3d printing, there’s, of course, free software movement as well, which in my opinion is also part of the global free production evolution

the contradictions are piling up and things are more openly fascist, economic opportunities are shrinking in the west, income inequality is off the chart, yeah things are actually worse

The world is definitely worse for younger people. I’m raising four kids and I weep for them.

Smart phones and social media have a LOT to answer for. I know that won’t necessarily be a popular opinion but that’s where I find the root of the problem. Well, that and FPTP election systems.

Yep.

It’s very important to remember that between 1991 and 2001, the US saw 10 years of a world that was the epilogue of the End of History. We had won the Cold War, and while there were problems, they were largely distant, the politics fairly civil, things like the internet changing life quickly, and even the moments of hard times gave us great music. It took 2-3 years for the effects of Columbine and 9/11 to really change the country and world.

25 years is also not nothing. 25 years before 2001 was 1976. Star Wars was new. Ford was president. Disco was HOT. Apple and Microsoft were founded. Things can change a lot.

In terms of politics, yes. But we are better in almost every other aspect.

The chickens came home to roost again ✈️🏢

I think the answer is “yes” and “it depends on what you mean.” What is better or worse? For whom is it better or worse? Are we talking about the causes or the results?

If we are talking about results and how they affect the majority of people, yes, it is worse. Wealth concentration has increased. The environment has gotten worse. There is more war now than there was pre-2000, etc. All of these were problems in the past, but the course of history has naturally intensified them over time.

But a lot of what you’re talking about are causes: What politics leads to these things? Was it better back then and it getting worse now is why things are worse? And to that I say: Not really. America has been this cruel and greedy for a long time and that past greed and cruelty directly contributed to how things are today. Perhaps some of this feeling is you just becoming more aware of things, but part of it is that the politicians of that day cared more about keeping up the mask. They weren’t any less cruel, but they were better at hiding it behind a facade of respectability.

So what’s changed and what has stayed the same? The core feature running through all of this history is capitalism. Capitalists have immense power by virtue of their control over wealth and production and therefore the state primarily represents their interests. They might have different strategies for accomplishing that, different personalities, or different secondary priorities, but regardless of which politician is in office, support for capitalists is the primary concern.

This support for capital has to contend with various forces of history. Technology, labor power, geopolitics, etc all affect capitalism and the government must respond accordingly.

The period between the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 and 9/11 2001 was considered to be a period in which the US became the unrivaled power in the world. It may have appeared more peaceful, but that was due to a lack of meaningful geopolitical rivals to fight against. But it’s not like it stopped developing the military industrial complex during that time. It was still prepared to exert it’s power over the world, violently if necessary. This changed post 2001 because they finally got push back for their imperialism and had someone to openly fight. And with a new foreign enemy, the US once again had something to direct people’s fear and anger away from capitalism.

Some combination of globalization and advances in automation broke what little power workers had managed to earn during the mid-20th century. This meant that the government and capitalists didn’t have to give as many concessions to workers as they used to and the resulting economic losses created an angry and desperate population. This anger COULD have been directed towards the root of the problem if there were better class consciousness in the US, but instead racists were able to capitalize on it to direct people to their causes.

The last major development to talk about here is the rise of the internet. On one had, this enabled people to see things and communicate with people they never would have been able to in the past. The potential for this to open people’s minds and connect people was tremendous and obviously a potential threat to capitalism as it wasn’t as easy to control the flow of information anymore. Unfortunately the dark side is that algorithmic social media has managed to bring out the worst in people. Some of that is due to deliberate manipulations by platform owners, but some of it is just the unfortunate consequences of how mass human psychology interacts with an algorithm designed to optimize the amount of time people spend looking at ads and getting others to spend time looking at ads. Certain kinds of content, usually ones that elicit strong emotions, are more likely to get people’s attention than others. So in the absence of that class consciousness, it’s pretty easy for hatemongers to get their messages to spread.

I suppose my point is, when you get these kinds of feelings, it helps to try to learn some more and take an analytical approach to understand better and hopefully find a way forward. Just feeling like things are generically worse is an oversimplification that misses the underlying forces responsible for that feeling. We wouldn’t be where we are now if things were different in the past, so just thinking of the past as being better misses the role it plays in the present.

All of the jokes in early simpsons seasons pointing out problems inside the US are still valid today. Long standing problems have not been solved and if anything the situation has continued to deteriorate.

There are a lot of things going on. Internationally, China and Russia and others at war or preparing for war with the west. So big geopolitical stuff. At home an aligment of those forces to create political instbility with existing forces internal to the US. A media and social media enviornment that thrives on outrage not truth. Disastisfaction that has resulted in a major political party being taken over by fascist, authoritarian. and corrupt influences. A populus that thinks this is just fine for one reason or another. A wealthy corporate power elite behind the scenes that likes this.

Yes