It’s quick, flattering, incomplete, and it puts the problem in human nature, not in the systems shapingpeople’s lives.
Once you buy that framing, you don’t have to think about decades of public school defunding, unsafeand unstable living conditions, or the commercial attention-harvesting systems that split focus into fragments and sell themwholesale.
You can actually leave all that out, because the villain is “human decline” — something no budgetor law can be blamed for.
That move isn’t unique.
- Moraldecay is everywhere skips right past wage theft, police impunity, and news formats engineered to keep outrage cyclingbecause outrage keeps people glued to screens.
- Nobody wants to work anymore sidesteps flatwages, unsafe shifts, and the fact that benefits have been stripped down until many jobs are impossible to survive on. It’seasier to paint people as lazy than to admit the work stopped being worth the cost.
- Kids are toosensitive makes the same swap — dismissing the impact of climate dread, active-shooter drills, and financialprecarity so you never have to treat those as fixable conditions.
The “culture” complaints lean on thesame omission.
- Merit is dead — participation trophies killed ambition says nothingabout legacy admissions, pay-to-play internships, or the automated résumé screens that quietly lock whole groups out.
- Civility is gone treats manners as the loss, not the fact that “civility” has longbeen used to silence protest and dissent.
- Innovation has stalled blames a lack of geniuswhile monopolies, patent hoarding, and short investor timelines quietly smother long-term research.
- Social media is destroying society hand-waves the one feature that matters: division and polarization are thebusiness model when your revenue depends on keeping people in a constant state of engagement. And
- we’ve lost common sense makes deregulation and privatized risk sound like a mysterious collapse in publicwisdom, rather than deliberate policy that shifted costs onto the many and profits onto the few.
Every one of thesetropes does the same double job: they flatter the person saying them (“I see clearly while the rest falter”) and they keep the ledger closed.
I really enjoyed this piece from on one of the ugliest examples of this today, the intellectually dishonest purveyance of the“abundance” agenda.
MAGA &Abundance;: Are the Imaginary All-Powerful Leftists In The Room With Us Right Now?
The bestway to understand the modern Republican Party is as a right-wing counter-revolution to an imagined left-wing revolution. While mostfascist projects arose to challenge a leftwing victory, such as Francisco Franco's overthrow of the socialist Second SpanishRepublic, the GOP didn’t wait for an opportunity. They created one. Aided by his media al…
2 months ago · 49 likes· 8 comments · Joe Wrote
The notion that we’re living in a final or degraded age —Kaliyuga in Hindu thought, the Age of Strife in Buddhism, the Christian “end times,” Hesiod’s Iron Age— is a recurring way to make sense of disorder. These myths endure because they compress complexity into inevitability: if theage itself is corrupt, decay feels like the natural order. That can be comforting, but it works like “people are gettingdumber” — it turns policy failure and engineered harm into fate.
cosmology offers its own version: the fifth ara of the descending half-cycle (Avasarpinī), when lifespans shorten, capacities diminish,and no new Tīrthaṅkaras will appear. It’s a phase where virtue is harder to sustain, but the pointisn’t to surrender to inevitability. Even in decline, Jain teaching keeps you accountable for the harm you allow, the truth you tell, and the greed you refuse to feed. The cycle explainswhy cruelty, distraction, and exploitation are easier to normalize; it doesn’t excuse ignoring the budgets, laws, and designsthat keep them profitable.
Read metaphorically, these stories can be repurposed. If we live in a time when greed, deception,and injustice are ambient, then our higher calling is to trace the levers — policies, markets, design choices — that makethem profitable. The myth names the mood; the systems analysis shows the mechanism. And the mechanism is where change becomespossible, even in an “age” that insists it’s not.
The compression isn’t accidental — the fewerwords (“abundance!” “decline!”), the less space for causes that point toward power. Thatbrevity turns into a moral alibi and, often, a revenue stream: self-help books, resilience trainings, nostalgia-soaked politicalcampaigns, consultancy gigs to “restore” what the system is built to erode. Myths of the fallen age work the same way— compact, repeatable, and vague enough to survive fact-checking.
So the real test isn’t whether the claim istechnically correct; it’s whether it leaves the design, the policy, the incentive untouched. If it does, it’s not adiagnosis — it’s cover. The useful question isn’t is it true? but who cashes in if we believe it? What money,leverage, or political cost is avoided by keeping the harm framed as a flaw in people’s nature? That’s where the causelives, and where the fix has to start.