How is kindness a bad thing? I thought that was universally agreed to be a good message to have in a piece of media. I guess the excuse is they don’t want media to have messages at all but like, how would you even have a movie where the hero has no values that they stand for?
You’re reciting history through rose colored glasses. The whole American dream has been to come here get some land of your own and go do your own thing.
There’s nothing “rosey” about the struggles of pioneering communities in early European settlement in the Americas, nor in the way that people pretty much had to shelter together for the last million years before America’s founding, my well-agreed on thesis is that community is how our species has survived and the idea of single-family homes and individualism is not only a new thing in our history but antithetical to our very nature as a species, which is why “social death” is a mentally and physically harmful condition that we’re all vulnerable to.
The “American Dream” was for people to make their own way, and at the time it was groups of people who settled and built communities, it was the drive for wealth along with the sudden vast tracts of land that came with America that encouraged people to start spreading out into single-family homes and leaving one’s community or family system. If you curl your lip at the idea of staying with your family through your life, that’s understandable, but that’s because families and our perceptions of family has changed. It’s not something easily reversible nor am I making a prescriptive statement, I am describing how things have changed and if I were to prescribe anything at all, it’s that we need to work harder at renormalizing actual socializing, at making and preserving friend groups so we learn and understand emotional intelligence, so challenge ourselves to new ideas and re-learn compromise and compassion, something not just missing from the worst people, but broadly through all ends of the political spectrum. Understanding that our current state of loneliness and depression and anxiety is not a natural part of our lives is an important fact that we can’t lose.
We are not living how we’ve been adapted by hundreds of thousands of years of evolution and it’s having profound impact on our collective mental health, and it’s allowing the atomization of our political perspectives to disastrous consequence.
I don’t want to livelihood we’ve been adapted". We were adapted to run through grass from tree group to tree group while avoiding large predators. Dying horrible and often gruesome deaths. Or slowly withering away in pain thanks to a simple infection. Society can not exist in the way that we evolved. Again. Rose colored glasses.
We don’t get a choice about it. We have to have a society and we cannot live in any other way than we’ve evolved, so our societies are going to be a reflection of our natures. We can build it blindly and just let whatever happen, or we can make informed decisions about the kind of future we want to have.
But we’re intelligent and can mitigate the harmful parts our biological drives with cognition and we do this all day every day, but we still have biological imperatives that we can’t escape from.
You can choose to not consume cake because you know you’re not calorie-starved even though nature rewards you for it. You cannot however have good mental health while in isolation. Understanding what parts of our nature are flexible or what parts need to be managed around is the fundamental thing I’m talking about here. Just like you will be healthier if you eat more vegetables like we were adapted for, your society will be healthier if it values community like we’ve been adapted for.
You keep using this word. I do not think it means what you think it means.