human nature...

[joko]

many people on here often comment about 'what has the world come to', 'sign of the times', 'collapse of society' and other commonly trotted out statements, and complain about how they cant believe the state of society and how awful some humans are nowadays

however...
what about our history?

it is littered with examples of how rotten people can be, in all sorts of ways... such as wars, the taking of whole villages and countries and decimation of the indigenous population, rape and pillage, highway robbery, etc etc - the list is endless! .... and thats just in this country...other places have a whole host of other atrocities to add to that.
its clear that the things happening now are not new..

so why do so many assume and believe that lack of care and bad behaviour in society is a modern thing...?

[tenrec]

When you are a child I think that most things seem quite "rosy". As you getter older you realise that there are bad things in the world. Perhaps that makes you think that things are changing for the worse. Only my opinion though!

[boxtops]

It's not, joko - Victorian society was as bad, a lot of camouflage going on there. I blame the media for a lot of it - in the past, everything wasn't "in your face", so much which happened we never got to hear about.
I do worry, though, about some of the youth of today being misguided and ill-informed - it doesn't bode well for the future.

[heathfield]

Back in the 50s and 60s our local morning and evening daily newspapers had a deliberate policy of never reporting anything on cases of rape, paedophilia, or homosexuality. This made it seem everything was rosy when it wasn't.

[joko]

thats terrible heathfield! no wonder a lot of people thought nothing bad was happening

[ummmm]

And many bad things were swept under the carpet and kept from the outside world.

[Mosaic]

I agree that mass reporting contributes to perception that things are worse than ever before. However, I wonder if there is also a feeling that we 'ought to know better' - with all we have at our disposal, without fear of famine, gross injustice or imminenet warfare, how can people still make silly hate-fuelled decisions in order to hurt others?

[joko]

yes mosaic, i do think perhaps its about time we learnt a few lessons, and although we have undoubtedly learnt many and things have vastly changed from hundreds of years ago, i guess with each new generation, some of the learned ones die so sometimes the lessons need to be learnt all over again...

[Old_Geezer]

Whilst it is true folk have been rotten in the past too, I think one expects (or at least hopes) the human race to have progressed and would be at a higher standard these days.

But I think what triggers most of the comments of this nature is things that were common courtesies in the past now being abandoned. I think one tends to moan of degenerating social behaviour generally as opposed to specific incidents.