Tag Archives: Society

Are Kids REALLY Getting Worse?

The other day I was talking to a neighbor of mine. She was saying how lately some of the kids in the neighborhood have been acting less polite than usual. And I think when she said lately, she meant the last several years. And because of her age, I was almost ready to discount her statement as just another disgruntled old person’s expected “kids today,” rant.

There is a famous quote that goes something like this: “kids today don’t listen anymore, and they don’t respect their elders, blah blah blah,” which sounds like a common enough complaint. When you realize that was spoken by some Greek guy over two thousand years ago, it becomes apparent that old people grumbling about kids is common to every generation.

But one thing that is different, at least in this particular situation is there are some statistics to back this up. According to several sources, there are less and less people getting and staying married. And there are less and less people attending religious services on a regular basis. Before you click off this page thinking that I’m some right wing family values religious nutcase, please understand I haven’t stepped foot in a church since my fathers funeral, and I think it’s absolutely fantastic that social pressures that keep people in otherwise unhappy marriages are crumbling, giving people freedom that they wouldn’t have enjoyed in other generations.

That being said, I think this is an interesting phenomenon from a scientific, societal standpoint. There are less and less marriages, and many more divorces, which many argue lead naturally to a less stable upbringing for kids. Of course there is the argument that kids are better of with separated or divorced parents than with parents together but at each others throat all the time.

Also, less and less families are attending any kind of church services as a whole. When you combine these two together, you have less positive role models for kids to look up to, which leaves them only with each other to learn how to behave and act in modern society.

Please keep in mind that I am not arguing for people to stay married if they hate each other, or get married if they aren’t ready. Nor am I advocating any church participation of any sort. I jus think it’s interesting to watch the dynamic unfold, and how it will affect society in years to come.

I am a firm believer in personal responsibility, and if you are of the persuasion that it is up to society to teach you morals and proper behavior, and then you are at the mercy of the ebbs and flow of societal trends, be they good or bad.

If, however, you are inclined to choose your own moral path, based upon your own choices and decisions for where you want your own life to lead, then there has never been a better time that right now.

Crumbling influences of society can be good, and it can be bad. Like any other system, those that depend upon it stand to lose when the system has problems. Those that understand the system for what it is, and use it to their advantage usually come out ahead, regardless of their social economic background and upbringing.

Crumbling social pressures to get and stay married may make finding and keeping a partner more difficult, but much more rewarding once they are found.

Similarly, releasing oneself from the restrictions of the two thousand year old religious moral authority may seem frightening at first, but when you realize you can make your own rules, (so long as you are prepared to live with the consequences,) you can gain so much more power.

What many come to realize is that when they choose their own path in life, they find that their own personal code of morals and ethics closely mimic the beneficial ones from religion. Don’t kill, steal, or covet, or lie. And as a bonus, some of the stuff is supposedly bad, isn’t so bad after all.

Like sex and money are perfectly fine so long as you make sure everybody is happy, and nobody gets hurt. Of course, if you’re going to make more people, then you need to be sure they grow up with the best resources, mental and otherwise, to achieve their dreams in life as well. Maybe that’s what my neighbor was getting at.

What God do You Worship?

I read an interesting paper on the Internet the other day. It was a long, academic treatise on the difference between males and females. I won’t bore you with the details, but the gist of it was that men are better at some things than women, and worse at other things. And women are better at some things, and worse at other things. I know, really breathtaking breakthrough, right? The interesting things, or one of the interesting things about the paper, which actually was transcribed from a speech the guy gave, was some interesting thing they found out through genetic research. Doing some kind of advanced genetic testing, the methods of which are way over my head, they discovered something really interesting. All humans, judging only by their DNA, have way more female ancestors than they do male ancestors.

Of course if you look at one person, then obviously they have to have an equal number of males and females. Mom and dad, grandma and grandpa and however many greats you want to add on down the line until you get to the proverbial (or not so proverbial, according to your belief system) Adam and Eve. But when you combine groups of people, they find they the females start to outnumber the males when you go back further into history.

What this means is that going way, way back in time, most of the kids were made by a relatively small group of males, and a generally large group of females. This of course, predates modern society, so we are talking about many thousands of years of pre-history. By this guy’s estimation, all of us collectively come from 40% of the males of history, and 80% of the females. Until very recently in human history, it was a sad fact that most males, and a few females didn’t ever get together with somebody long enough to produce a child.

Some have argued that when large societies were created, this became a problem, as so many males together competing for the females more often than not turned into violence and disaster. It wasn’t a problem when you had hunter-gatherers in groups of fifty or a hundred or so. But when they invented agriculture, and lots of people started living together, it became a problem. They needed to come up with a system. A one man, one woman system that would keep guys from braining each other to death whenever they passed each other on the street.

So how to the guys who were in the 40 percent from taking all the girls for themselves? How to create a system so the other 60 percent wouldn’t feel left out and conspire to destroy society? What beautiful method did they come up with to keep everybody in check? Yep.

Religion.

That’s right. As sacrilegious as it sounds, religion was invented so that everybody could get laid. That was God’s original job. To make sure there was enough sex to go around for everybody, and those that were naturally good at it (for whatever the reason) wouldn’t take more than their fair share.

So what happened? What happened after they invented the giant all seeing, all knowing eye in the sky to keep watch over everybody so they wouldn’t kill each other over a woman? Society flourished. Great temples and Churches and works of art were built. Art, music, literature were created. Giant cities were built. The Pyramids, the Great Wall of China, the bold and daring journeys of Zheng He, Magellan, and Columbus.

Something to think about next time you’re in church, if that’s your thing.

Here’s a link to the article, and here’s a link to a YouTube video I recently made on the subject. Enjoy.

Cultivating Ideas can Lead to Greatness

Everywhere you look today you can’t help but find bad news. You’d have to dig pretty deep in order to find something uplifting and inspiring. I don’t know if it’s because there really is a lot of bad things happening, or if reporting bad news is the easiest way to grab your attention in an effort to get you to buy whatever it is that the particular advertisers are trying to get you to buy. They try to get your attention by telling you how bad the economy is so you’ll buy what the advertisers are trying to sell. Somebody is making money. When you think about it, the fact that people go to great lengths to fight for your attention is a supreme compliment. Because your attention is very important resource to advertisers and businesses.

According to most evolutionary biologists, the whole idea of consciousness itself is based on a drive to get resources. Because humans are the most flexible of animals, able to live and flourish under almost any situation and environment, we developed our consciousness many hundreds of thousands if not millions of years ago to  help us to search for resources to use. In the beginning, these resources were simple things, like food and water, and fuel for fire. Later they turned into shelter and animal skins for clothing to keep us warm. And later, we developed complex social skills to be able to exist coherently in larger and larger groups. Finally, a few thousand years after discovering agriculture, humankind began to discover our most precious resource.

Your thoughts. Because, as Napoleon Hill so eloquently drove home in his international best seller, “Think and Grow Rich,” thoughts are things. People had to develop long reaching plans to be able to cultivate large crops and ideas that could feed the multitudes. You had to use your brain for things other than chasing and killing animals for food. You had to build cities, castles, cathedrals. Man learned to create art, and music, and poetry. And the more man created beautiful things with your wonderful human brain, the more society flourished. The thoughts that you think on a daily basis create your reality. When you notice and control your thoughts, you will be able to notice and control your reality. That genius potential of the past that allowed men and women to create magnificent works of art and science and literature, resides in your head. Right here, right now.

And I don’t know if evolutionary biologists ever intend to take their theories to the metaphysical like this, but there it is. Either by design or by creation or by random chance, here you are. With your thoughts that you can learn to control, or let someone else control, whereby you actually give up control. The choice was, is, and always be yours on where to put your attention. On this thought I suggest you begin to notice who is trying to sway your mind. Who is trying to lead your thoughts.

Because in these times of economic crisis, no matter your place in life or your financial level of success or failure, you will never ever lose your most precious resource. Your mind, your thoughts, your imagination, your wonderful creativity with which you can create whatever reality you desire. Now.

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