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Proably because have to learn survival skills or die is a big motivation as was the case not that many years ago.People brains are not any more intelligent regardless of the type of learnigng also.
Someone once told me that studies have shown that there is in fact more crazy people today than ever. Many of the troubled people today would have survived just fine fifty years ago but the temptations of today's world brings the worst out of them. For example the Internet gives an outlet for people who are pedophiles.
There are a lot of things than can cause people to act like nutcases, and Anger is chief among them. Our system is broken, the number of victims falling or being pushed off the edge of the system is spiraling, and that leads to a significant number of angry people, acting like nutcases.
Quite frankly, I am amazed there are not a lot more people running amok. Fifty million school kids in this country. And, inexplicably, sometimes months and months pass by without a single one of them taking a rifle and a scope into their school and killing everybody in sight. I think the self-control of teenagers is nothing short of miraculous. Something must be hypnotizing them.
IMHO there are no more crazy people today then in the past. Our society, its moral and its perceptions has changed.
1) As already mentioned, many cases were undisclosed and were kept secret because of public shame and embarrassment. Today, this element is mostly gone.
2) Mass media amplifies (and sometimes distorts) many cases. As a result, the whole world is aware of them. Cases of mass shootings inspire other deranged individuals who want to get attention at any cost. I am convinced that if mass shootings were not reported the way they are, we would see a significant decline of such incidents.
3) Mass consumption of drugs - both legal and illegal.
Agree, not entirely sure there are more whackos today....just that we hear & read about each & every one of them
Growing up in the 70's I recall a lot more crazy folks running around on the streets of NYC than today. The 70's and 80's were wild, and there were some folks running around that would have had a net thrown over them today. I think today we do not tolerate the random acts of craziness that we did back then. Today folks are quick to call the cops for EVERYTHING, and break out their cameras and video cameras, if I had a video camera on hand back in the 80's to record the craziness that went on it would look like a circus compared to today's standards of conduct and PC everything.
You guys all have this nailed. The media is so omnipresent right now and there is so much of it that we just flat out know more about what goes on in this country while in years past information came from relatively few sources and the variety of it was relatively truncated. So they weren't exposed to non-stop talk about crime like we are now.
An illustration of this is Japan, which has 10% of the crime rate of the U.S. Yet, while I was living with a (now ex) Japanese girlfriend there a few years ago, she was complaining about what she thought was a huge increase in crime in her country. She was wrong. However, like in the U.S., Japanese tv news has become much more sensationalist and now plays up crime stories much more than it used to. So the perception is that there is more crime. There isn't. How can there be the way Japanese society is aging, for example?
It's just like the rate of violent crime in the U.S. had been going down for a decade or more but people were more fearful because their local Eyewitness News station was going crazy on the "if it bleeds it leads" stuff.
As for getting high, America always has loved to get stoned. Heck, even kids drank beer back in colonial times (there were actually good reasons for that, as screwy as that sounds) and on one 100 yard stretch of Deadwood back in the 19th century, there were 70 saloons. Yes, 70 saloons. Must have been quite a party after quittin' time.
You're obviously not familiar with the history of ancient Rome or that of the Middle Ages. We're the acme of enlightenment compared to the generations who have gone before us.
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