A reader wrote me. “Glenn, in a recent newsletter you mentioned that ai can’t solve our most pressing problems. What do you think those are?”
People living in the United States have, by historical standards, an incredibly high standard of living. If stuff could make people happy, we’d be insanely happy as a people. If an abundance of information and entertainment could make people happy, we’d be ecstatic every hour of the day. Yet survey after survey provides data about the unhappiness of millions.
First, let’s review symptoms and markers of trends:
- Escalating personal and government debt.
- Increased fatherlessness
- Significant drug and alcohol addictions, and suicide. The US has been losing over 100,000 people to drug overdoses and fentanyl poisoning and about 50,000 people kill themselves, annually. Mental health measures continue to decline. (Yes, I’m aware of a recent drop in overdoses – let’s pray that trend continues!)
- Plummeting education results, K through 12, and college/university.
- Decreasing % of the population is working. The majority of new job openings are part-time or government positions.
- Seriously declining attendance at religious services. This is a long-term trend, accelerated by the pandemic.
- More than half of US adults do not believe their children will enjoy a better life than they have.
- Spiking distrust of institutions of all kinds.
- Increasing censorship.
- Increasing porn. One example: OnlyFans now had 4.1M creators and 305M users paying $6.6B last year.
All these are measures and symptoms of the pressing problems. You might well add other symptoms to this list. A doctor might say these are the ‘presenting symptoms’ but not the root cause.
It’s puzzling where to start to identify root causes. A wise friend of mine says ruefully, “We created barbarians inside the gate. We’ve done this to ourselves.” She and I discuss the Dunning-Kruger effect, which describes why poorly informed people are supremely confident they are correct. Shallowness is amplified, depth is under-valued. Our collective frameworks for interpreting information have become warped and untrustworthy. Our fragmentation acts as an accelerant; our governing systems continue but are hollowed out of substance. Somehow, we’ve arrived at a point in time when moral authority is expressed in anger and hate. The teleois of the age is power for domination. Outrage at hurts caused by others is leveraged into a source of identity. Other people, rather than ideas and practices, are perceived as “the enemy of all that is good.”
Pride, insecurity, and immaturity add more fuel for the fires of dehumanization. These are the source of our worst behaviors individually and collectively. (Search the Bible – there is not a single positive use of the words ‘pride’ or ‘proud.’) Great power players exploit this reality.
How do we recover? That’s for the next blog post.
