My first reaction was to compare the numbers to church attendance in Great Britain. The latest numbers are that 6% of Britain are practicing Christians. Once other religions are accounted for - particularly Muslims - it starts to get within the ballpark of the 20% of British society who don't find life to be crushing and pointless.
We talk frequently of the Western nations becoming culturally suicidal. Polls like this validate our outlook. The people are soulless with no will to live, fight, or propagate their culture. The West may become the first civilization to fall because it lost its will to exist. There are three major problems at play here to explore, which is that our society has become materialist, sterile, and entropic.
Materialism
Materialism has become a common thread on this blog, weaving through a variety of topics and domains, including even the hard sciences. We know materialism is false because it poisons everything it touches. Could any philosophy be more corrosive? It teaches that there is nothing more to life than randomness. Look at how science writers like Ethan Siegel dwell on all the ways the world as we know it may meet its inevitable demise. That is not scientific inquiry; it is morbid fixation by the disturbed.
Materialism is merely evidence for man's unlimited potential for hubris. The paradox is that we are so desperate to make ourselves the supreme intellect of the universe that we make extraordinary logical blunders in trying to prove it. This blog routinely demonstrate the glaring faults that are made in the hard sciences due to religious devotion to materialism. It's not always light reading, but it's the most important work that gets done here. If materialism can wreck even objective fields like physics and biology, imagine what it does to relatively messy constructs, like the human psyche. Here's an experiment you shouldn't try. As soon as your child reaches the age of reason, sit them down and explain that their whole existence is the result of a series of fortuitous random cosmic events, there is no meaning outside of our material experience, soon everyone they love will be dead, and then the entire world will be destroyed and nothing of it will remain. You would never do that to your child! And yet that is exactly what our society indoctrinates our children and grown-ups alike to believe, and any dissent to that orthodoxy is met with all kinds of name-calling, shaming, and worse.
Sterility
Sterility is a consequence of materialism. The modern life primarily consists of soulless consumerism. Children in high school spend countless hours deciding which career they should pursue to make the highest salaries, but almost none thinking about what kind of person they will marry, what character traits they should develop, how many kids they'll have, etc. The focus is on income, not life.
It is now standard that children will be taught sex education with the assumption that young people will engage in sex with the intent of not pro-creating, as that would wreck all career plans. The focus is on pleasure, not life.
Despite polls showing that people have little will to live, corporate profits and the stock market are soaring. Most of these transactions ultimately result from marketing - a scientific form of lying. The goal is always to convince the consumer to pay for a higher quality product than he is actually receiving. The focus is on profits, not life.
Everything now is calculated and goal-oriented. Virtually everyone will tell you that you need goals. Why? What good are they? Goals are the insistence that our plan is superior to God's plan. We so often fail to let life happen. E Michael Jones and Owen Benjamin insist that the sterility of life started with the use of contraception. Intercourse shifted from a holy, life-creating act to mere pleasure seeking. Abstinence-only eduction is ridiculed by the bulk of society for being outdated and unpractical. It is preferable, it seems, to sterilize life to make it safe for children, rather than teach them that life happens and they will have to live with the decisions they make.
Entropy
In thermodynamics, the core principle is that heat always flows from hot to cold. Heat moves from the hot coffee out into the room. Heat moves from the room into the cold beverage, melting the ice. Heat flow increase entropy, which can best be thought of as disorder. In a sense, the room with a hot coffee cup is more ordered, as energy is contained to a smaller area. Once the cup cools, energy is equally dispersed throughout the room. Entropy is maximized when there is no temperature gradient, thus no flow of heat.
A heat death occurs when a system has reached maximum entropy and no work can be achieved. Life on Earth is powered by heat flowing from the sun towards the frigid reaches of outer space. The Earth gathers heat during the day and releases it at night. If the sun did not shine, or space was not cold, or the Earth did not spin, then Earth would suffer a heat death and all life would perish.
Brett Stevens of Amerika.org talks of societal heat death. In the same sense that systems can't function when there is no temperature gradient, society can't function when there are no information and morality gradients. Our modern culture can most concisely be described as a Cult of Equality. If all beliefs, all cultures, all actions, all decisions are inherently equal, how can we choose the correct path, or even a good path? Those who adopt equality as their ethos are utterly incapable of navigating the real world. They have no gradients by which to steer, since all directions are equal. Life, at the least, is a moral struggle. Yet how can there be moral struggle when good and bad are not even permitted constructs? Thus, the 80% of Britons are correct - their lives truly are meaningless.
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