by Mark Waybill

Created on: October 15, 2009

In my opinion times are changing for the worse, and are getting worse with every generation. Having been born in 1991, I am of a fairly recent generation, and yet I still believe the world is going downhill. However, as I am rational and objective in all my data, I also know that it is mostly a matter of my opinion that I think in this fashion, as I know that change is necessary for society to maintain itself.

Change is something one must accept, if not tolerate, as part of a context operating by the rules of evolution. Our universe, being of the Newtonian action-reaction variety, is one large ever changing and ever evolving mass. As such our society, being composed of part of this universe, operates by the same system of evolution, and change is both neccessary and beneficial to it on the whole.

So why do I argue that society is going downhill? Well I never said I liked living in a scientific Newtonian universe, now did I? Just because something is an accepted fact does not make it a good thing. Pain, unfairness, etc are all accepted facts, but that does not make them good, however much the hippies, naturalists and environmentalists will argue that everything should be savage and uncivilized.

In my opinion recent society can be loosely classified into various periods, as well as different nations and demographics within them. Thus the various cultures, and thus the various ways and lifestyles, morals and norms, of society, can be classified rather vaguely and by no means precisely. I could not give an exact date, nor even a rough estimate, for the point at which society reached its apex of development and progress, as it differs between nations and demographics contained therein. I will thus use the recent history of the three main English speaking nations, the United Kingdom, the United States of America, and Australia, for my argument.

These three nations, despite many differences between them, along with Canada and New Zealand and to some extent several European countries and their dominions, constitute what I define as the nations of normalcy. Lets not bother to define normalcy as that would take up an entire series of rather heavy books, but suffice it to say that when you say 'times used to be better' you are referring to the past in the nations of normalcy, and not to the recent past in, say, Kenya, or Japan.

As such one can loosely define the period 1850-1960 as the old normalcy, and the period 1960-2000 as the new normalcy. This is of course a gross generalization

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