Re:Young adults are struggling with their mental health
by civilized on Friday December 30, 2022 @10:42PM
(#34193310)
What I see is mutually interlocking and supporting drivers:
1. Profiteering media based on a 24/7/365 fixation on fear and violence: "if it bleeds it leads", and encouraging our worst tendencies toward moral panic (e.g. the 80s satanic ritual abuse panic, which recapitulated in some ways the Salem witch trials)
2. A people who easily go along with the media-driven culture of fear, and learn e.g. that their kids can't go anywhere without falling into pedophile clutches
3. The hyper-punitive systems of US law and child protective services
Re:Young adults are struggling with their mental health
by tootie on Friday December 30, 2022 @11:12PM
(#34193475)
Honestly I'm dubious it's any of those. I blame more cars on the road.
Re:Young adults are struggling with their mental health
by voldacar on Saturday December 31, 2022 @12:59AM
(#34194037)
The book Where is my Flying Car traces a lot of different developments back to the late 60s/early 70s explosion in number of pages of federal regulations and lawyers per capita. The massive cultural obsession with danger and liability is relatively young and can essentially be blamed on Richard Nixon.
Well before then. I got one of the last chemistry sets around 1970, when they were all emasculated.
> The entire capitalist machine realised just how profitable fear can be
Oh come on. A huge driver of this problem is the legal system which encourages jackpot lawsuits, along with our culture of it's always someone else's fault (usually the party with money that becomes worthwhile to sue).