I am neither a good or a bad person. But I believe I tend towards good. Been defending weaker people with my capacity for violence and helped people with my capacity to have a steady job, for my whole life. I am a typical cop and soldier. I intervene and stop people who are essentially like me, men of violence, but for different reasons. So you could say I am in the middle. I do sort of okay in the modern world, in which evrything is turned on its head. I would have fared better in the world of a thousand years ago, but I manage.
Now! I have noticed a big pattern when it comes to people who have serious issues with modern life and end up getting the shitty end of the stick. If you dig a little, many of them (not the psychos, though) are artistic, noble and are pretty bad at earning money in the hamster wheel. They often lack the ruthlessness most people need for office politics or good grades etc. They do their own thing and fail. Or they are highly sensitive people who need to dampen their angst about modern unnatural life and strains with alcohol, drugs or something else.
My hypothesis as far as reasons go is that family structures have changed far too much, as well as how we lived, loved, ate, worshiped and worked.
Outline of how people lived a few hundred to a millennia ago:
1. They lived in clan-like structures in the countryside. Several generations of a family and kin living right next to one another. There were not just two people and strangers at kindergarten to raise the children and do the daily chores. Modern children grow up without their parents, and that leaves an unfillable void. And their grandparents are strangers to them. They are raised by the state, nannies or private schools, in essence. This is a fundamental reason people fail and become fragile, depressed, because they do not develop right.
2. Almost everybody a long time ago worked from home, farming and doing crafts. There were no offices or factories.
3. They ate all-organic produce and grass fed meat, unpolluted fish and so on. It is a myth that ordinary people in the medieval period ate badly. Nobles actually had a more unhealthy diet, because they ate white bread and fancy stuff that was overly sweet, fatty and salty etc. Farmers, most often, ate simple but high quality food. The stuff we pay big bucks for these days, in point and fact. Rye bread, vegetable stews, salmon, cheeses, eggs, pies, soups, pork etc. We have a very negative view on medieval nutrition based on some horrific examples of oppression and famines as well as on bad theories. Scholars today know better, even if pop science does not. Modern nutrition is far worse than medieval nutrition, hands down. Those people had never seen a McDonald's or processed foods full of chemicals, fillers, refined corn syrup and mystery additives. None.
4. People used to have a faith. And most faiths and traditions are far superior to living without them, when it comes to the social cohesion of families and thus societies. Broken families make for unhappiness and broken children. It hasn't worked out well, and we see the results clearly today. The worst examples of the past are often used as deterrents, much lile with the nutrition. People really used to be happier, even if their material standards were lower. Their lives were about family, not things.
5. People did not have TVs or mobile phones. They spent time with each other, doing things. A far more meaningful way of life.
Those who are on the top of the food chain of the modern world are the ones that are the most greedy, cunning, ruthless and amoral. Hands down. How else do you describe a lawyer, a banker or a successful businessman in general? They are usually not very nice people. The modern world favors their type, though. While it certainly does not favor those who instinctively miss all these things that have been robbed from them. Family, good upbringing with their own family, faith, proper food, social belonging and so on.
I remember how it was, clearly enough. You can't look at the world today without seeing that it is completely broken. The only cultures that aren't broken are the ones who we stupidly consider to be "backwards". In my opinion, those backwards types are far wiser than any person whose life revolves around a stupid career and buying meaningless objects. It just removes him or her from everything that really means anything.
Those who do the worst in this terrible torture tragedy of a society are quite often really good people inside. It just goes wrong for them because they can't live like this. Unnaturally. It breaks them.
