The children of post-war America have not lived within their means. They squandered the gifts bestowed them by their parents and previous generations, and perniciously loot their grandchildren and the future. Debt has piled sky high as have our landfills with cheap imported junk. A Faustian bargain was struck to become kings of convenience. Now, everything is a cheap imitation of what used to be and is usually corrupt. The greatest corruption of all, has been the degradation of the currency. The US Dollar is not a unit of value backed by anything, it is an instrument of debt, and in order to keep the debt based system afloat, it always needs more (debt). Feed me! Degrading the currency and treating it like an unlimited resource is awesome! Hyper-debt expansion and living beyond ones means is always super fun at first. But treating anything as if it is an unlimited resource is fraught with moral hazard. In short, our society degraded itself as we cheapened our currency.
The switch from the currency being a unit of value that was to be protected, to a unit of debt that just wants more, was barely noticed when it happened in the 1970s. Government regulators in cahoots with their industry bedfellows, in the meantime, have been crafty in devising new and novel means for credit expansion. This has resulted in exponential explosion of debt across the board: government, corporate, education, healthcare, subscriptions on and on. The slogan for the Great Reset (aka Build Back Better) is “It is 2030, you own nothing and you are happy.” What it will be, is debt servitude and government dependency.
In the later half of the 20th century until now, the global economy was designed to optimize profits, and the financial industry is their to enrich the wealthy. This is less a question of capitalism or socialism but that of corruption and cronyism. The sins of the post war children are many, they now want to repent by sacrificing the young and the poor. They took for granted the blessings and resources they were bestowed, and became ungrateful. Now, a deep cynicism and nihilism haunts the young, a foreboding, anxiety for things they have not done. The mental health problems plaguing the young is the true pandemic with serious consequences.
Truly awful ideas with measurable terrible results have gripped us. Too prideful to say we screwed up, so we continue on. Also, the mind is kept in the dark and few seek to be enlightened, we have plenty of meaningless distractions or symptoms of the problems to focus on. The hamster wheel keeps us from ever looking outside the cage.
Being an intellectual requires questioning the status quo, understanding problems, and working the solutions. Being rabidly anti-intellectual, a mainstream narrative pusher, is not as cool as they make it look.