Morality Is Not Declining, Bigot
You really have to wonder if anyone in the future will take any form of our modern science seriously at all.
Especially when you take into consideration things like this:
People everywhere believe society’s morals are in decline
A new study suggests fear of society’s downfall stems from negative media and biased memory
Participants generally estimated that such a moral decline began around the time they were born, regardless of how long ago that was. When asked to report specific examples that illustrate such slouching morality, however, few could cite any. Ultimately, the team concluded, the notion that morals are in decline is an illusion that may result from news focusing on negative information and our tendency to forget or misremember bad experiences, making the past look rosier than the present. “The challenge,” Melissa Wheeler, an ethics researcher at Swinburne University of Technology, tells Nature reporters, “will be in getting people to accept that they hold this illusion, which is so prominent and widely held.”
Why, for the love of all things holy, do these people never come ask me these questions? I read variations of this in about one in every ten research studies: “The team asked to report specific examples, however few could cite any”.
Are they asking blind dudes that live in a cave? It’s not exactly rocket science to cite some examples. Or I wonder if they filtered out the answers they did not like, such as:
- Sexualization of everything, including kids.
- Trans insanity.
- Homosexuality is literally everywhere.
- Less Church attendance/religiosity.
- A shift in who the nation admires (Greed > honor).
Did this guy not live through covid? I struggle to understand how anyone that experienced those two years in particular would postulate that morality is not declining.
Further, I truly do not comprehend how someone could say something so completely and obviously incorrect. Has he not left the Ivory Tower for over two seconds and seen homosexual and tranny flags everywhere? Newsflash: Those were not there even ten years ago. It’s not like we have to dig into the memory bank. If that is not a moral decline, then what is?
We have a city where they fought to fly the gay flag but banned the Christian flag. That would not happen seventy years ago.
Also, a significant minority of our citizens do not even know what gender they are. You want to know an example of moral decline? It’s half of the country knowingly playing pretend about the trans person’s gender/sex because they are no longer courageous enough to stand up to boldfaced lies.
Then there is objective data such as this:
Sodomy and cross-dressing are moral sins. If they increase, then moral decline has increased. How does the author handle this? Simple, he just ignores it completely. In the research study, “morality” is all about “kindness” and “respect” and other fluffy emotional things. You know, things that would be a moral decline from a courageous, virtuous, dominant, non-crybaby civilization?
So his own subjective morality is evidence of a decline in morality. How meta.
We can take this to even more extremes: I actually wrote an article last year where I gave over 50 examples of degeneracy (moral decline) just off the top of my head in one sitting.
And I’m not even great with this stuff. I bet my readers could think of a hundred examples easily.
So, there are some examples, genius. Moving on.
The actual study is here. Abstract is below:
Anecdotal evidence indicates that people believe that morality is declining. In a series of studies using both archival and original data (n = 12,492,983), we show that people in at least 60 nations around the world believe that morality is declining, that they have believed this for at least 70 years and that they attribute this decline both to the decreasing morality of individuals as they age and to the decreasing morality of successive generations. Next, we show that people’s reports of the morality of their contemporaries have not declined over time, suggesting that the perception of moral decline is an illusion. Finally, we show how a simple mechanism based on two well-established psychological phenomena (biased exposure to information and biased memory for information) can produce an illusion of moral decline, and we report studies that confirm two of its predictions about the circumstances under which the perception of moral decline is attenuated, eliminated or reversed (that is, when respondents are asked about the morality of people they know well or people who lived before the respondent was born). Together, our studies show that the perception of moral decline is pervasive, perdurable, unfounded and easily produced. This illusion has implications for research on the misallocation of scarce resources, the underuse of social support and social influence.
The entire study revolves around surveys. As is typical for psych research.
Because asking people if their subjective perception of moral values in their local community (such as whether they were or were not treated with “respect” during the day, and if people are generally helpful) somehow translates to an objective recognition of declining morality. (Hint: it does not.)
Morality is objective. It is not subjective. So attempting to quantify it based on subjective measures (especially one based on the responses of the grey masses) is already wrong. It immediately disqualifies this study from a serious discussion of moral decline.
In effect, this author concocted a fake, soft morality in his head and then searched for survey questions to see if those parameters have changed based on individuals reporting their experience of the day.
He has a PhD in psychology, so I do not expect much better, but still this is awfully blind. It is truly incredible just how moronic the “smart” people are.
The author also acts like it is odd that a belief in moral decline is pervasive throughout history. He clearly holds a linear view of history—Which is also wrong. If he knew that history is cyclical, then this would be much easier to answer, because morality always declines during the civilizational lifecycle. We would expect that to happen. It’s not a continual downward spiral as the author paints it; the process ebbs and flows as do nation-states and systems.
So yes, we would expect to find declining morality discussed during the decline periods. Which we do. Few talk about declining morality in the glory ages of Rome, the Ottomans, or the British Empire. But they do talk about it during their descent stages.
We are currently in the Great American Decline, so morality is declining with it. So more people are talking about it than in the past. An Ivory Tower researcher cannot see this because they are completely insulated/compromised and do not have a proper moral compass (God).
Because if God is your source, it is plainly obvious that morality is declining.
If a researcher wanted to do an honest study, all they would need to do is just read the moral laws in the Bible. Then record how they have changed the past 100 years. My readers already know the answer.
I must say, this study tops some of the other scientism articles in terms of sheer lunacy. They are truly outdoing themselves now.
I can hear them chirping in the background:
Didn’t you know morality is actually unchanged from the founder’s era? What, don’t you trust the science, bigot?
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