So, are people actually getting dumber?
It’s quick, flattering, incomplete, and it puts the problem in human nature, not in the systems shaping people’s lives. But is it true?
It’s quick, flattering, incomplete, and it puts the problem in human nature, not in the systems shaping people’s lives.
Once you buy that framing, you don’t have to think about decades of public school defunding, unsafe and unstable living conditions, or the commercial attention-harvesting systems that split focus into fragments and sell them wholesale.
You can actually leave all that out, because the villain is “human decline” — something no budget or law can be blamed for.
That move isn’t unique.
Moral decay is everywhere skips right past wage theft, police impunity, and news formats engineered to keep outrage cycling because outrage keeps people glued to screens.
Nobody wants to work anymore sidesteps flat wages, unsafe shifts, and the fact that benefits have been stripped down until many jobs are impossible to survive on. It’s easier to paint people as lazy than to admit the work stopped being worth the cost.
Kids are too sensitive makes the same swap — dismissing the impact of climate dread, active-shooter drills, and financial precarity so you never have to treat those as fixable conditions.
The “culture” complaints lean on the same omission.
Merit is dead — participation trophies killed ambition says nothing about legacy admissions, pay-to-play internships, or the automated résumé screens that quietly lock whole groups out.
Civility is gone treats manners as the loss, not the fact that “civility” has long been used to silence protest and dissent.
Innovation has stalled blames a lack of genius while monopolies, patent hoarding, and short investor timelines quietly smother long-term research.
Social media is destroying society hand-waves the one feature that matters: division and polarization are the business model when your revenue depends on keeping people in a constant state of engagement. And
we’ve lost common sense makes deregulation and privatized risk sound like a mysterious collapse in public wisdom, rather than deliberate policy that shifted costs onto the many and profits onto the few.
Every one of these tropes does the same double job: they flatter the person saying them (“I see clearly while the rest falter”) and they keep the ledger closed.
I really enjoyed this piece from
on one of the ugliest examples of this today, the intellectually dishonest purveyance of the “abundance” agenda.
The notion that we’re living in a final or degraded age — Kaliyuga in Hindu thought, the Age of Strife in Buddhism, the Christian “end times,” Hesiod’s Iron Age — is a recurring way to make sense of disorder. These myths endure because they compress complexity into inevitability: if the age itself is corrupt, decay feels like the natural order. That can be comforting, but it works like “people are getting dumber” — it turns policy failure and engineered harm into fate.
Jain cosmology offers its own version: the fifth ara of the descending half-cycle (Avasarpinī), when lifespans shorten, capacities diminish, and no new Tīrthaṅkaras will appear. It’s a phase where virtue is harder to sustain, but the point isn’t to surrender to inevitability. Even in decline, Jain teaching keeps you accountable for the harm you allow, the truth you tell, and the greed you refuse to feed. The cycle explains why cruelty, distraction, and exploitation are easier to normalize; it doesn’t excuse ignoring the budgets, laws, and designs that keep them profitable.
Read metaphorically, these stories can be repurposed. If we live in a time when greed, deception, and injustice are ambient, then our higher calling is to trace the levers — policies, markets, design choices — that make them profitable. The myth names the mood; the systems analysis shows the mechanism. And the mechanism is where change becomes possible, even in an “age” that insists it’s not.
The compression isn’t accidental — the fewer words (“abundance!” “decline!”), the less space for causes that point toward power. That brevity turns into a moral alibi and, often, a revenue stream: self-help books, resilience trainings, nostalgia-soaked political campaigns, consultancy gigs to “restore” what the system is built to erode. Myths of the fallen age work the same way — compact, repeatable, and vague enough to survive fact-checking.
So the real test isn’t whether the claim is technically correct; it’s whether it leaves the design, the policy, the incentive untouched. If it does, it’s not a diagnosis — it’s cover. The useful question isn’t is it true? but who cashes in if we believe it? What money, leverage, or political cost is avoided by keeping the harm framed as a flaw in people’s nature? That’s where the cause lives, and where the fix has to start.
The Myth of Moral Decay
When someone collapses in public and the crowd hesitates, we’re told we’re living through an “empathy crisis”—a nation gone numb, atomized by screens, its moral fiber frayed. But the real story isn’t a collapse of conscience. It’s the visible output of a system that has spent decades turning compassion into a gamble with your future.