Absolutely - but who hasn't seen an otherwise decent person morph into King Turd once they can do so with impunity?
I don't think anybody hasn't. I live in a small town of about 40k ppls. And I can assure you there are king turds lurking everywhere
the broader phenomenon and the game are bunghole makers - but responsibility for this STILL must be awarded the a-hole in question. Otherwise, we only issue accelerators in the race to the bottom.
I agree that the responsibility is on the aforementioned a-holes. Acting otherwise might require quite a bit of self control and reasonable thought. Both of which a fair share (and personally I think : the vast majority) of the world population are clearly ill-equipped to deal with, mainly through lack of education.Not because they are dumb.
One point I wish to disagree on though : I don't see more people acting selfish and dumb than before. The problem is we have no real empirical data to support these claims. All we have is the human perception of his environment, and this have been proven, countless times, to be wrong. This is all associated with the phenomenon of nostalgia and how the human long term memory works. In the psyche of a person, the long term memory will tend to retain mostly the good memory, in such a way we get to a point where we regrets those past times. All the bad memory of people being disrespectful and all the little problems of your life at the time fade to leave you with the feeling that "these were the good ol' times". I'll give you a very concrete example of this : I work at a car dealership (if you know of a better place to meet a-holes, tell me. I do not). Sometimes some old guy will come to me and talk about the cars they owned in their life. If the guys are old enough it often go back to the 60's and 70's. They tell me of how THESE were good, RELIABLE cars. Not like the junk they sell today. That's the perception they got. I often ask them how often they had to bring these cars in for tune-up, maintenance, bodywork, engine work, ect... they look at me with big eyes. The fact being that while they had great styling in those days, the cars nowadays are WAY more reliable than they've ever been. I've heard stories from one of our old tech that's been in the business for 35 years now. Bodywork to fix rust HOLES every 2 years on these oldies(I live in Quebec, very hard condition for cars). Muffler
every years, complete tune up every 6 months. Now to start them in the winter, choke, 2 press of the pedals to spray some fuel in the carburetor and pray it'll start cause it's minus 20 Celsius outside. Great cars...yeah right...pieces of junk that you were lucky if all went well they were (and pu-lease(sic), don't get me started on volks) Yet all they remember is the fun they had on their road trips. It's in the human nature. All this to say. Don't be so quick to judge and tell us how the people now are such jerks. The bad phenomenons always
seems at a peak for people living in those times. You also have to factor in that you now have access to a broad pool of genetically inferior group thanks to the net. which you probably didn't have 30 years ago (even if you did, back then you probably were communicating with well educated people who knew how the f... these old 'puter worked). And also factor in the fact you grew older over the years. Yes. The teens always looked kinda bizarre to their parent's generation(let's talk about the hippie and how they were perceived in the 60 by the people 40-50-60 years old...).
If you read all the way through, congratulations. I just want to finish with this : I, in no way, affirm being the sole holder of the truth. I think I presented a rather solid argumentation, that is well debatable and refutable, and not a bunch of conjecture put together. Now I ask you. What do
you think?