To think our society is on the verge of a slow but inevitable collapse?

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I'm usually a glass-half-full of gin kind of person but I've been having an increasing number of gloomy thoughts about where we're headed as a society. It feels as though we're losing sight of the things that elevate us and I keep imagining us as being in the same position as other, equally dominant societies shortly before their decline and fall.

I'm thinking in terms of the endless cycles of violence from which we never seem to learn; a rising general distrust of experts and science and evidence (anti-vaxxers etc) leading to outbreaks of diseases that were under control; higher education increasingly seen as important only insofar as it can produce graduates as economic units, rather than the value of learning for its own sake; the funding of things such as libraries, galleries, museums dropping further down the priority list; the tacitly state-sanctioned dehumanisation of those perceived as somehow "lesser", be that because of race, disability, poverty or whatever; climate change and an energy crisis with no real solutions...put it all together and it feels very bleak and End-of-Dayish.

Of course I can see that good things happen too, and also understand on an individual level that whether your local art gallery stays open or is sold off for flats is of little significance when you only ever pass it on the way to the food bank, but at a broader, society level it matters...doesn't it? And I'm not suggesting we're two days from anarchy on the streets and the entire collapse of civilisation overnight, but then all the dinosaurs didn't die on the same day. It just feels like this is the end of a cycle.

I think wesern culture is slowly killing itself with its own greed and self importance and the sooner it happens the better.

Got a bit of land and we're sorting ourselves out. Learning to be self sustaining and live of the land.

YANBU

I now have "news free" weeks because I was having difficulty dealing with some of things I was reading. I've always been a consequences person and when I look to the future, it all looks very grim.

What bothers me most is the wholesale repudiation and silencing of traditional working class and lower middle class values because, to my mind, these are the values in society, on ground level, that actually make the country work properly and stop problems escalating.

It was a kind of communitarianism, I suppose. Communities were self-policing to a large extent. Young people would get jobs through word of mouth. People looked out for one another and helped each other. And it wasn't "virtuous" to do so; it was just what you did, because you were all in it together so to speak.

But now? Crikey, it almost seems like a kind of psychopathic deviancy that taken hold over culture and it's all processed through this weird kind of doublethink.

At the same time, it's as though nobody is in control of anything anymore and nobody wants to take any responsibility for anything. When you ask, well, who created this policy? You just end up with a ghost.

I'm trying to think of examples that are public and the one I can think of is the judge who came out recently and said that the CPS don't understand criminal trials and are taking pleas and deals in cases that should go to trial and you just think ... WTF do you mean the CPS don't understand how criminal trials work? They are the fucking CPS. If they don't know, then how the hell is the criminal justice system supposed to work?

And it's like this all over. Everything I look at in terms of institutions, none of it works. There's idiots, psychos and incompetents at the top everywhere. The whole country is run by bloody Patrick Batemans.

And then there's all these people who seem to have it as their life's mission to defend all these people?! That I do not understand either.

Back in the noughties, I was working in public finance research and by 2006, it was really obvious that there was something wrong. Like really obvious. And I remember saying over and over, if the credit bubble bursts, public finance is going to be screwed because we are going to end up with a £200bn deficit right at the time when we are going to need to increase public expenditure, that we really should have been running a budget around a half to two thirds of what we were, and that would only have been a "2001" budget expenditure.

There were quite a few of us saying this, and we were roundly ignored. And even to this day, there are people that will deny until they are blue in the face that what happened actually even happened.

And this was HM Treasury. I mean, WTF?!

I have got to the point where I really think that we are heading for some sort of conflict: civil or otherwise. If the EU and US don't stop fucking around with Russia, then God help us.

I entirely agree.

I think you've been reading too much news - journalism has certainly collapsed over the last couple of decades! But seriously we live at in an amazing time and place. Free education and health, benefits, air and water cleaner than they've been for centuries, affordable travel... Freedom from political/religious persecution... Women can work and get free childcare... And expect all of their children to survive instead of having ten then only one surviving to adulthood... When was the last time you knew someone who got typhoid, TB, or died of an infected cut? A couple of hundred years ago Oxford was the murder capital of the world. Now you can wander alone and drunk in most parts of the UK and you'll probably be ok. The Victorians fished the dead bodies of suicides out of the Thames every single day, nowhere it's a pretty nice river. Read a history book not the news and you'll cheer right up. What has happened though is the post-war generation had an awesome ride of booming economy plus buying houses for 5p / selling then for £1m... The next couple of generations will be much poorer than their parents and that has made everyone depressed. But that just reflects the fact that one generation was amazingly lucky. It's still a great time to be alive.

With the O p and with Werkz . Wholeheartedly.

We seem to be in an age of smoke and mirrors. There's a curious and universal contempt for depth of knowledge - Trump is so terrifying but he spouts simplistic bar stool nonsense people can swallow without having to actually think.

Children in schools now seem not to be taught to think critically, and are fed and encouraged by cruel and over inflated notions of their own abilities. No one is allowed to fail. Well, not too badly. Failed your exams ? Pah! Academic stuff is for losers, innit! Become a MillionAire celebrity or footballer! Do singing, or sport! The world will fall at your feet!

Much of this , sad to say, started under Labour with a huge and ill conceived expansion of 'university' education. Expanding the number of places and tinkering with the grade structures so more people appear to 'win'does not make more young people more intelligent. Or provide more and better opportunities for a wider demographic.

So all that has happened is a rather sordid squirming around. Trumpington Technical college is now the University of central codswallop , churning out dismal business studies 'graduates' at 30 k a pop who'll end up in zero hours contracts in fast food places. . Such a waste when they could have been taught some sort of practical skill.

What should instead have been funded never was - a massive expansion of polytechnic, trades, apprenticeship type training for the non-academic majority.

The latest two hour Hollywood blockbuster apparently has only 200 odd words of dialogue invented once the c g I action scenes were done - by the film editor - ( there was no need for a script writer as arcane stuff like meaningful dialogue is expensive and tricksy to translate to global audience, so easily dispensed with).

So we can't be doing with emotion or, like, nuance. Far too complicated and expensive and elitist.

Hence Trump.

Yanbu.

I've found myself wondering the same over the last six plus weeks.

I do think our society is more individualistic than ever before.

I think the increasing speed of change, and increasing uncertainty about the future makes people clutch at straws or follow extreme leaders who communicate certainty.

As others have posted, we are far ahead in medicine - see the projected lifespans now.

I don't think 24/7 "news" or the instant info, pics and videos of terrorist attacks or crime on social media help. We see and hear sooooo much more about such incidents than we've ever done and these images are powerful and upsetting which of course makes us more fearful.

I do feel so sad for my kids who I think are going to have a harder time with fewer opportunities (cos we're not loaded) than the two generations before them.