Why Is The News So Depressing?

If the truth be told, we're actually living in an extraordinary time of peace and prosperity, because there are no global wars like the last century -- when literally 100 million people perished because of wars and their related persecutions and purges.

Nations didn't recognize the rights of other nations to exist, or to live the lives they saw fit to live, which we now recognize as universal human rights. However, many still think that the role and purpose of governments and societies, is to force people to do what they don't want to do -- and that is a hard habit to break. Most of our institutions still justify themselves in that way -- of forcing children to learn, and people to obey the traffic and other laws, as though that is not what intelligent people would do for some good reason.

Many even seem to think, that laws can't have a good reason, but exist to be arbitrary as an opportunity and excuse to exercise that power over others -- just to maintain the social order that they feel would surely be chaotic, if everyone were allowed to think for themselves. To those brought up in the old world order, there's something not quite right about others being allowed to exercise their own judgment and free will, because it seems like the reason they exist, is to be dominated and exploited by whoever thinks of it first, and is the most ruthless at executing their power.

That seems to be the theme of many of the writers who never left the last century -- that everything still must seem a problem and an argument, to see who is the victor, and who is the vanquished -- and the notion that all can win or be right, is a violation of the premises of their world view. Not surprisingly then, many in that last century, were very conflicted personalities, always at war with every other, and just as much, with themselves over everything.

Nothing could seem as easy as it could be. There had to be a struggle that gave meaning to every effort, goal and desire. Life could not be easy; one had to be in constant torment, anguish and guilt, in order to make it righteous and virtuous.

And then the liberals (socialists) came along to blur the distinctions and discriminations of everything into their random soup that insisted nothing mattered but the perpetual meaningless struggle over everything (the dialectic) -- just to be the devil's advocate -- as though that became the new virtue of the age of struggle and effort without meaning and purpose, because one had so completely lost their way, and the constant agitation and stress, gave them their exhilarating sense of being alive.

It was not enough, just to be, and let be. Somebody had to create a problem for someone else -- and they knew no other way of being, and would not allow it for anybody else.