Judging by the way our society is run today, it’s pretty clear most people don’t agree with John Adams. In fact, many Americans don’t even seem to understand what he was driving at when he said that. That’s because they didn’t grow up going to church and all they’ve heard about morality is “Keep the government out of the bedroom,” “Judge not lest ye be judged,” and “Laws shouldn’t be based on morality.”
However, the truth is almost diametrically opposed to this.
The way our entire society functions is undergirded by our customs, our mores, and morality. When they erode, everything else in our society erodes along with them and we flail around, trying to come up with explanations that don’t admit that Americans just aren’t as moral, good, religious, and responsible as they used to be in most ways.
There are many examples of this we could name, and they go way beyond Onlyfans, pornography, and drag queen story hours. Those may be the more obvious consequences of America’s degeneracy, but the unfortunate truth is that the rot goes from the top to the bottom of our whole society in a variety of ways.
One that immediately comes to mind, because I just finished reading “Sickening: How Big Pharma Broke American Health Care and How We Can Repair It,” is America’s drug companies. The author comes across as a socialist who loves Obamacare, but he’s been an expert witness in multiple huge cases that big pharma has lost, so he’s extremely credible. It’s fascinating to actually get details from someone like this on how compromised many of the scientific studies we see today are, how deliberately deceptive the drug companies have become, and how completely indifferent the drug companies are to the impact their products have on people as long as they’re making a big profit in the process. There are lots of examples we could use, but this one should do:
“I finished my talk by summarizing an article published in The Lancet the previous week by Dr. David Graham of the FDA and others. The authors estimated that Vioxx was responsible for between 88,000 and 140,000 heart attacks during its five years on the U.S. market. This meant 40,000 to 60,000 Americans died as a result of taking Vioxx, roughly the number of American soldiers who died in the Vietnam War. ...The “heritage and values” of a pharmaceutical company ought to be safeguarded by ensuring that doctors are given complete and accurate information about its products, so patients can receive full benefit without being exposed to unnecessary harm. Had Merck done that with Vioxx, Stacey Palmer would now almost certainly be in her thirties, and an estimated thirty thousand or more deaths in this country that resulted from taking Vioxx after Merck knew of the increased cardiovascular risk would not have occurred.”
This is an ethical issue -- and it isn’t just a problem with big pharma.
Science is now being funded, directed, and controlled by industry to such an extent that it’s fundamentally impossible to “trust the science” anymore. Don’t get me wrong, there are still brilliant and honest scientists out there who are dedicated to finding the truth, but there are now so many universities and scientists whose paycheck depends on finding certain results that it’s very difficult to trust scientific research on any controversial topic anymore. Would you trust scientists funded by Philip Morris who said smoking was healthy for you? Of course not, but in effect, we are doing exactly that kind of thing on everything from cell phones to global warming to the latest drug advertised on TV. We’re getting cherry-picked data from heavily compromised scientists that is printed in scientific journals that are financially reliant on the companies funding the studies. Meanwhile, what those companies are looking for is “scientific proof” to use in their advertising campaigns. That is an awful lot of what modern “science” consists of today.
Again, this is an ethical issue. Everyone knows that “He who pays the piper, calls the tune.” Universities, scientists, and scientific journals all know this, but research is expensive, so they take the money for research even though they know that it looks dirty and that it will make people in the know question their results.
We could say the same thing about journalism in America. I’d like to think that even the leftward-leaning journalists from 25 years ago would find the tactics of today’s journalists appalling. Today’s journalists don’t even make a good-faith effort to APPEAR non-biased anymore. They run stories based on anonymous sources that regularly turn out to be wrong with zero accountability. They pick on the powerless and cozy up to the powerful on the Left. They’re not watchdogs, they’re lapdogs for the Democrat Party.
Ultimately, this is an ethical issue.
Politicians have always been liars, but at this point, it feels rare to find one that mostly tells the truth. It seems ever rarer to find politicians who actually seem to care about what happens to the country, which in a sense, is a reflection of modern voters. Pretty clearly, a large chunk of Americans no longer care about their neighbors, their nation, or what kind of country they leave to their kids. All they want to know from politicians is, “What will you give me?” Everything and everyone else is secondary. This is a big reason why politics in America has become so vicious, destructive, and toxic. The more people act like selfish rats trying to grab as much cheese as they can before they jump off a sinking ship, the worse they behave.
Once more, this is an ethical issue.
Getting back to what John Adams said, what good does having an extraordinary Constitution do if corrupt, liberal judges willfully ignore it and claim they can do whatever they want under the rubric of a “living constitution?” When justice becomes subverted and turned into just politics by other means, people will deservedly lose faith in the law. Look at the riots by ANTIFA and BLM that have been allowed in liberal cities. Look at Joe Biden deliberately opening our border and ignoring our laws to allow illegal aliens into our country. Look at the politicized prosecutions we’ve seen from liberal prosecutors over the last few years.
At their root, these are all ethical issues.
We could say the same thing about teachers pushing weird gender and political tics on their students. Politicians being completely indifferent to whether the taxpayers get any kind of value for their money. Gratuitously insulting random strangers online. Stealing songs online. Influencers creating careers out of making fun of people. People casually getting divorced. Even mass killings and school shootings. Certainly, they’ve always existed, but does anyone think the drop off in church attendance and the lack of morality in our society DO NOT play a role in so many people being completely indifferent to taking the lives of strangers?
These are all ethical issues.
No society is perfect. Every society has rot, corruption, and evil in it just as every human body has some harmful bacteria and cells in it. The problem in both cases comes when the bad things reach a critical mass and start to crowd out the good to such an extent that they start doing real harm. Then, the question becomes whether a healthy balance is going to be re-established or whether the rot is going to grow so much that it threatens the continued existence of the host. Just as a body can’t properly function if it’s overrun with sickness, infection, and cancer, a society can’t properly function if it’s overrun with immorality, degeneracy, and corruption.
Once a society full of people concludes it’s every man for themselves and being a good person is a sucker’s game, things will start to fall apart in a hurry in almost every conceivable way. We are much farther along that road than most people realize. Going in the right direction means being more moral, more godly, and more ethical before our country is too far gone to save.
What a wonderfully insightful article. It's rare for anyone to admit this and refreshing to read your analysis of our degenerate society which seems to be headed for a collapse as large as that of the Roman Empire.
A summation of the causes of our society's dilemma, share-worthy. We, your subscribers, are fortunate to have your well-written posts to read, consider, and share in the hopes of awakening others to the truth.