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Another major issue is immigration. You have lots of people living together that don't share any sort of social cultural connection... and then you have work wh
by devoply 7y ago
Another major issue is immigration. You have lots of people living together that don't share any sort of social cultural connection... and then you have work which occupies most people's existence most of the time therefore there is almost no time to build a new culture outside of work... and no one even knows what that would look like to strive towards something like that. Modern capitalist man is one dimensional isolated man whose sense of self is more or less based on providing for him or herself and the things that they care about whether that be people, pets, or the material things which own them such as their financial obligations to the banks for their housing and their employers.
Before that in the Middle Ages, Westerners in the upper classes who had any sort of wealth were much more social living very much like people in the so-called third world live today where they would throw parties to show their wealth and took pride in showing off their children and their accomplishments. When that culture was bulldozed, people forgot that it even existed... and perhaps it never did in the frontier like Canada like it did in old Europe. The immigrants were always busy working to be productive and industrious and always not closely related to the people they lived near.
- zed88 7y agoMore than the immigrants or capitalism , I would boil it down to breaking up of the family as the fundamental building block of society. The 'very recent' social engineering has thrown western societies in a depressive state. Even in the age of plenty, we miss the family bond in our solitary lives.
- devoply 7y agoWell liberation came through technology and politics where women who were quite dependent on men became no longer dependent on men economically or in fear of being impregnated by them. You could not escape that reality before, and so single families proliferated alongside a legal system which encouraged that rather than the patriarchy which forced people to stay together for the kids even if they could no longer stand each other -- or one party was abusive towards the other.
- malvosenior 7y agoAn alternative theory, and I think much larger reason for the destruction of the family unit is that individualism was heavily marketed by mainstream media through the 20th century. People shifted their wants and desires in marriage from one of creating a family unit to that of finding personal enlightenment. The excellent documentary The Century of the Self covers the evolution of marketing, the baby boomers and the psychology behind individualism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Century_of_the_Self https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Century_of_the_Self