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Last weekend, a fifteen year old girl was raped in killed by an eighteen year old in a small town not far from where I live, and half a kilometer from the house of one of my clients. She was also the same age as a daughter of another client in the same group. As said, I am not fun at parties, and we ended up discussing this in our session today. However, I am not going to go into this particular incident, rather just highlight bits of the discussion on how things have changed in life, and perhaps, why this kind of behavior is increasing. 


![image.png](https://files.peakd.com/file/peakd-hive/tarazkp/23wqyZ5THaeBeFuHz12svdHed7ARYurusXUeFaQ2tpQuDCKEpxorCHTKnmgsYosXqdpkj.png)


> I am no expert on this.

But that aside, for a couple decades now I have been observing changes in culture that are influencing changes in behaviors in society. This is of course how culture works, but we don't seem to be putting much thought into the repercussions of our actions, and how it is going to affect our living standards. I will mention these more in brief here, and perhaps dive into some of them later.

For instance, one of the topics I have often enough spoken about here is schoolyard bullying and how I think it is actually a good thing to have *some level* of it. The reason is that it allows children in what is a relatively safe environment to learn about a subset of human behavior and develop personal and social strategies to deal with it. However, things have changed since I was a kid, because of the internet and commercialization. We have taught kids from a young age to build digital avatars of themselves for a global audience, and said that this the brand they must protect. 

In the schoolyard, there is a face of a bully, which also means that there is risk in being the bully, and after the school day has ended, there is respite for the victim, as they are able to go home and spend time with family and friends. But, that digital avatar is available every hour of the day, and it is available to a faceless mass, and because it has had so much importance put on it, so much identity it gives a very big target, with very low consequence for the aggressors. The actions of online bullying are of the *same* vein as the masses that look to cancel a person or a group they don't like. 

> What leads to the aggression?

There is lots of talk about toxic masculinity, most of which I disagree with, because masculinity itself *isn't toxic.* However, toxicity is rife in society because we have built a culture around the wants of the individual being the most important, regardless of what damage it might do to others. "Me time" where a mother will go on holidays and take selfies, while their infant is starving to death alone at home over the space of days. 

> People feel they are entitled to whatever they want - *without consequence.*

You'll notice that the example I used above while talking about toxic masculinity was of a woman, not a man. This is because toxicity isn't specific to whether a person was born with a penis or a vagina. Instead, toxicity just takes on different forms in the entire population through exposure and influence to the pathogen that is culture. 

> Everything is on demand.

Like spoiled children who have had every want fulfilled, we live in a world where everything is available, all of the time. It wasn't so long ago that if you wanted to watch your favorite show, you had to be at home at a specific time with the television on, otherwise it was missed. And, if you forgot to buy milk or cigarettes and it was after six in the evening, *too bad,* you had to go without. 

While the "getting what you want" influences levels of entitlement, there is also the other aspect that is overlooked. The lack of disappointment. Disappointment is when expectations aren't met, when things are missed out on, when outcomes don't align with desires. When we don't have to go without, we don't have to live with disappointment, which means we firstly don't experience what the depth of discomfort might be, and secondly don't build strategies to deal with it, or learn how to be resilient and live with it. 

> We have wants, and we want it now.

And, even if our wants are outliers in society, we live in a world where "like minds" are able to gather and connect, share desires, influencing each other and pushing the group further into the extremes. People who might not have been radicalized if surrounded by a different crowd of people, become so when they are part of a flock of the same strange bird. And again this is a faceless mass, with very little chance of their being consequences. It is through these mechanisms that there has been an explosion in child sexual abuse, and the material created and shared. 

> Fantasy becomes reality.

And again, I think it is important to note the faceless nature of the internet, coupled with the productization of ourselves upon it, because everyone becomes a disposable commodity. Now matter how narrow the niche, the niche has been filled, in an environment where people have a decreasing sense of social responsibility, have been conditioned and desensitized to all types of violence, see others as tools to fulfil needs, are increasingly disconnected from community, and are feeling disenfranchised - and an automated algorithm to keep feeding more of what we want.  

> A lack of humanity. 

Anyone can be and is conditioned, but the average conditions are going to affect people differently. While most men for instance would likely not engage in sexual violence, a growing proportion will. The reason is that they are exposing themselves to, and being influenced by the digital culture they have chosen, and this is a place that they can always access, and is not bound by proximity. People are able to lock themselves in with a group of the most heinous types, with no balancing audience, no community, no perspective. 

> And then build identity.

This drive to differentiate ourselves based on individual traits is probably partially driven by the commercialization of the internet too, as productization benefits from differentiation in the marketplace. We are incentivized to be different, to segment, to appeal to a narrow, but strongly supportive group, which ultimately is going to get the polarized response of the strongly opposed. 

>And the *commercial* media loves it. 

Because polarization sells advertising space. And as the entire internet is commercialized, the algorithms are made to drive profits, not the health of society. Everything has become a sport, where there is uncompromising love for the home team, and uncompromising despise for any opposition. Politics has become a sport also, where people will say "I am a republican or I am a democrat", without acknowledging that politics should be about *policies.* It isn't about which team wins, it is about creating the best outcomes for society.

> But society is dead. 

And while I have mentioned only a few here, it is only the tip of the iceberg. It is a death by a thousand cuts, where one individual slice alone isn't enough to warrant concern, but they add up and compound against each other. Any single individual is exposed to hundreds of these cuts, and some of them are going to hit a nerve or support or opposition, driving the algorithms into doubling-down and serving up more. When everyone is exposed to a whole range of pathogens, there are going to be many reactions. And, lower the quality of the immune system, and the severity of the reaction will increase.

These and the many more things on the list have weakened us as individuals in many ways, where we are less resilient, less able to deal with discomfort, and less able to control our emotional responses. Yet, they have also strengthened our feelings of entitlement, our sense that our personal desire fulfilment is paramount, and we shouldn't pay consequences for actions. Couple this with a rapidly degrading society, with family units no longer stable places on average, and a diminished sense of responsibility in an environment where everyone is disposable, and the outcomes are inevitable. 

>A growing percentage are going to radicalize in their niche.

We have built a society that doesn't promote wellness, it incentivizes instant gratification. We should be surprised at the increase of violence in the world, of suicide, of victimization, of victimhood, of crime, and of extremism in all its forms, because they are the fruits of the trees we have planted.  

>It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.
_Jiddu Krishnamurti

*Culture has shifted. 
We have adjusted.*

The best of us and the worst of us - we are all filled with contributing factors. 


Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]



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