Can We Reverse America’s Distemper?

November 14, 2023

by Charles Hugh Smith Of Two Minds

Social trust, a baseline measure of social stability, has eroded.

Consider this description of America’s discontent:

“…a Hamlet-like loss of self-confidence, with an apocalyptic sense of doom for the civilization. On the Right it embodies a conviction that the sensate culture is pushing the society down the Gaderene slope of drugs-and-fornication to destruction. On the Left there is the vague sense that America is imperialist, fascist-oriented, caught in inner contradictions of class and ethnic struggles which will end in self-destructive wars or civil chaos.

…the fragmenting and polarizing of institutions (family, neighborhood, university, church, nation)–in short, the overloading of the social nervous system by sudden accelerations of change.”