[Strangelet]

Originally Posted by Deckard

Strangelet, I've been meaning to respond to this thread since you posted it. The truth is, despite this being something I've frequently wondered myself, I still don't know how to begin to answer adequately. Not through lack of evidence, rather there just seem to be so many factors and facets to consider.

which is why its fun to talk about

take a look at this quote from a speech given by Ann Coulter

When Nietzsche famously said, “God is dead,” he was not exulting nor was he stating a preference (though he was an atheist). He was making an observation and a dire prediction. With belief in God all but gone from the intellectual classes, Nietzsche prophesied that people would soon begin to replace a faith in God with faith in governments -- “barbaric nationalistic brotherhoods,” he called them. As a result, he said, bloody and catastrophic wars would dominate the 20th century. He wrote this in 1888.

That's not what Neitzsche meant at all, even though she's making a great effort to warp it into justifying her jesus fascism against the likes of the holocaust and oval office blow jobs.

According to Walter Kauffman, what N. said was that a mad man comes to the crowd and laments the death of God, that we have killed him. And that it is a terrible secret kept by the thinkers, the common people don't know He's dead. And when they do find out, an age of barbarism will ensue, bringing with it wars the likes of which the world has never seen.

So, instead of the intellectuals causing the decline of society, its the common people as they come to grips with the impact of things like an ever expanding universe, entropy, darwinism, and Ted Haggard.

So how this relates to the current collapse is that, unlike the collapse of the u.s. economy in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, those guilty of greed and corruption are not a small oligargy. Its pretty much systemic in the culture, as discussed in the article.

i mean this is one possible interpretation. it certainly can't explain everything that's happening but the way things are heading it does seem to be a viable start to understanding.

Yet we are undoubtedly more tolerant and enlightened in other ways.

my worry is that we take our hard won tolerance and just decide to stab everyone in the back, regardless of sex, gender, race, or creed.

About the only thing I can say with some confidence is that capitalism appears to be at the heart of much of what I personally view as a marked mental and moral decline.

I really do understand this, but I would make a clear distinction between capitalism and corporatism, the latter being what is driving our economy more than the former.

For me its just about power heirarchies. Those with the power versus those without. And it seems like those in power can thrive in pretty much any kind of economy/political system, which is why, in my early 30's, I still don't know where I fall on the political spectrum.