10 Jul WTF Happened To Our Morals??
I remember the days where honor, respect, and service were the seam to our moral and social fabric. When love and loyalty guided relationships and family, and courage and bravery guided our men. What do we have now? Polyamorous relationships, entitlement, and OnlyFans. Literally none of these contribute to the betterment of human kind or community. My how we have progressed /s.
Sodom & Gomorrah
So with hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution, these are the best examples of morality we could come up with? Hedonism, selfishness, and selling sex for money? I know this sounds a bit like a religious rally (I’m not religious btw), but am I the only one looking at this like this is kind of F’d up?? It’s like one step away from becoming a fireball like Sodom & Gomorrah, with a smidge less sodomy.
We’ve given way from a culture lifting up values, morals, and ethics to become a better human and contribute to society, to a culture that promotes self centeredness, selfishness, and self gratification. It’s no longer about how can you help your fellow man and community, but instead all about how you can help yourself. Name a time when these values have had a long term positive result on a society without eventual collapse. Yeah, not one.
The Pattern
I’ve noticed that for every single major society, when there were long periods of abundance, the morals of that society declined. Almost like clock work the people became more selfish, hedonistic, and sexual. It’s like when there’s an absence of struggle, people have to fill that void of purpose with something else. Usually entertainment, desires, and more bickering. Sounds a lot like the United States right now if you ask me.
In the absence of purpose, people are more lost regarding their place in the world and become bored. They begin looking for any form of entertainment, gratification, and distraction to hide their sense of purposelessness from themselves. You can see this today in the form of constant browsing through social media, all to pass the time, get their emotional fix, and distract from the problems in the world. Without purpose, our mental state crumbles, and our emotional state becomes toxic.
The Religious Comparison
Now, I mentioned that I’m not a religious person; this is after growing up in the church as a child. But one thing that I noticed that was a net positive from people who “had religion” was their tendency to try to focus on decent morals and values. No, not all of them displayed this, but I have noticed this focus as a whole. Often the focus of church sermons and teachings were qualities like humility, selflessness, gratitude, respect, and love.
Now in contrast to selfishness, entitlement, and promiscuous sex; which one of the mentioned church values has a negative impact on people or society? None, because these are all qualities that every human can agree has a positive effect on people and community. Most of the values that I learned as a child on how to be a good human and helping other people I learned in church. That also makes it so I can’t ignore the interesting fact that less people are religious today and they also have less positive morals than they use to. An interesting correlation.
People Without Their Mask
My view of society and its actual real life morals comes from my background of using psychology daily in my profession. It is my job to understand the core of people down to their inner desires and insecurities; their true desires and insecurities rather than what they say btw. My view of people’s true self is represented in the movie Gladiator. There’s a scene in the Roman colosseum where the main character Maximus (Russell Crow) has beaten his opponent and is waiting for the crowds judgement of whether to kill the opponent or let him live. In an emotional frenzy, the crowd is shouting “Kill! Kill! Kill!” with the emperor giving the same signal to kill the opponent via thumbs up, but Maximus instead shows proper values of mercy, compassion, and forgiveness and instead lets him live.
The crowd was driven purely by their emotion in the moment to go as far as encouraging the death of an individual purely for their entertainment. This behavior driven by emotion is what I see underneath the mask when I look at people in high emotional states such as fear, anger, and jealousy. Seems like a pessimistic view of humans, yet I use this understanding daily in my profession of 20+ years successfully and it has yet to been proven otherwise. Point being, people will abandon morals and values when in strong emotions; it is natural human tendency that is displayed repeatedly throughout history, whether you agree with this or not.
Humanity’s Guiding Light
For people, morals are guiding principles for how to live, but are often abandoned in times of abundance or highly emotional times of intense fear and anger. This is further exacerbated by disasters, wars, and resource scarcity. People instead revert back to their basic animalistic instincts for survival at all costs instead of leaning on the very morals that allowed them to come this far in the first place. Again, this is something I place a bet on daily, sometimes to the tune of millions of dollars on the line, and the result always comes back backing this perspective successfully (unfortunately). I don’t argue with results in reality, regardless of how I feel about them.
Hey DJ, Bring That Back
I say it’s time to bring back the very morals that once guided our society on how to get along with one another and help our fellow man (or woman) to win together. Bring back values and morals that produced positive value for society such as strength, courage, wisdom, humility, selflessness, compassion, loyalty, and love. Bring back the leadership that didn’t just promise everyone their instant wants and desires, buying their loyalty with trinkets they don’t need that rarely produce a positive effect long term. Our morals are not something to be cast aside for instant gratification as that is fleeting, but instead are guiding rules for how we live together as a people. Our lack of morals compromised our ability for rational decision making for the betterment of the future. It will be a readopting of these morals that bring us together again successfully for the long term.
The purpose of this GI SAID IT blog is simple, to provide perspective. GI delivers this unique perspective in a style that is unapologetically honest, straight to the point, and at times a bit brutal. GI SAID IT: Brutally honest, no BS. Click for more GI SAID IT shows and articles.
More GI SAID IT Articles:
GI’s experience expands across multiple industries including entertainment, marketing and branding, the music industry, and tech. This diverse experience has shaped his perspective on various topics in which he delivers in a style that is unapologetically honest, straight to the point, and at times a bit brutal. Brutally honest, with no BS.
GI SAID IT Shows: GI SAID IT