Solinear
Posts: 283
Joined: 1/8/2007 Status: offline
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The claims of "no courtesy, no politeness, selfishness, blah, blah, blah" have been going on for eons (literally). From Socrates, almost 2500 years ago: "The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they allow disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children now are tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when eleders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers." My guess is that Socrates wasn't saying anything that Hammurabi's contemporaries weren't saying (or at least thinking) 1300 years before. I'm sure Yu said it of Qi's generation (4200-4300 BC Chinese emperors) too. Heinlein (writer) decried the downfall of the US as being caused by all of these same faults and predicted the breakup of the country in almost every single book and expected it to happen no later than early in the 21st century and for the country to grow towards more and more illiteracy. As much as I can piss and moan about the lack of proper grammar, punctuation, the inability to tell the difference between a possessive and contraction, my grandmother was completely clueless, couldn't spell more than a smallish number of words correctly and didn't make it past the 3rd grade. My father graduated high school and most of my siblings graduated from college. Oddly enough, the two that didn't graduate make the most money, but that's another gripe that they should be taking up. Society changes and fluctuates. You can bemoan your situation or accept that in 20 years LA will be sayin the same thing, 20 years after that my children will be saying the same thing, 20 years after that.... it will go on and on throughout time and as long as we can dodge the stupidity of another dark ages, we should keep moving forward. Overall education will increase, our ability to control more and more of the world at large will increase (hopefully for the betterment of the environment soon) and eventually we will either demolish the planet and destroy any chance we have of ever recovering (without a serious revamp of our approach to technology) or we will hit a sustainable point and spread our scourge to other solar systems and worlds due simply to technological momentum. In 200 years we'll all be dead and someone won't even remember that we thought that the younger generation was impatient and selfish... but they'll remember that Socrates said it and laugh the same way when someone says something about how society is headed for a downfall or anything similarly historically contradictory. One thing to remember - society always takes it's greatest leaps forward when we are perceived as 'decadent'. Greece - they were almost universally bisexual and orgies were expected frequently and they laid down the foundation of math (actually they had the chance to leap us forward 1500-2000 years in atomic theory, but Aristotle won the argument and everything was made up of 'elements' like fire, spirit, earth, water, air... until the renaissance). Then they formalized their religion, spent all their time trying to live by some strange set of rules and the Romans threw them down, taking on some of their traits and became decadent and advanced technologies came out - mining, industry, mass production for the first time, so much... then they became 'moral' and everyone else stomped them into the dirt. With decadence comes ambition - I don't want one position, I want *all* positions - I don't want one mate, I want two or three or nine... if I'm successful enough, I'll get as many as I want, whenever I want. So I'll come up with brilliant concepts, a new technology that will revolutionize the world or heck, just something that will make me a crapload of money so I can just buy (you never think of it in those terms) all the pussy, ass, cock, whatever, that I want. If anything, praise the decadence, hope the thought style that says "I should be able to have anything and everything I want, if I can justify it to myself and everyone else" spreads. Hugh Hefner has all the women he wants because he is successful enough to where the women he ends up with believe he is worthy of it. When we become 'moral' and try to do things as we're 'supposed to' (according to old people who feel guilty about their own decadence when they were younger), we get married younger, lose our ambition and simply try to maintain or make it through until we die... content and so bored that going to hell is an acceptable change of scenery. Me? I want to be decadent, ambitious, successful and keep fighting for every bit of life that I can get until I can afford to be immortal or I die after spending years battling that grim reaper. I won't go down politely or courteously. I will only wait for those things that are worth waiting for and only if waiting for them doesn't mean that I wait so long that they're not worth getting any more.
< Message edited by Solinear -- 11/11/2007 8:49:01 PM >
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