It really is a perfect storm, IMO, of a hundred little things, but yes.

This became much longer than I intended, no expectations to read, but it is what I have to say on the matter.

Highly generalizing here:

Physically is the most easily to point to. We are fed highly processed, sugary, and thus addictive foods with poor nutritional content, often used for being cheap, widely accessible, and essy to make; our problem with obesity and adjacent conditions is quite famous, after all. People are addicted to their phones and spend no time outside, many physically engaging activities are prohibitively expensive and paired with a highly isolated and alienated community (or lack thereof), people then become lonely and only find a modicum of socialization online (reinforcing horribly long screen time consumption). This pairs with everything from predatory companies ensuring people end up vaping, smoking, drinking, and drugging to excess, not to mention advertising and Big Pharma + pill-happy therapists. And, finally, of course, our terrible healthcare system, and insurances fighting to deny coverage.

Mentally, again we must bring up the phones and how TikTok rots our brains, our attention spans and our critical thinking. There is an extreme crisis of mental illness and people are barely functional enough to live a normal life. The destruction of community has made us unfit for socializing and this is reinforced by everything from our car-centered cities, hyper commodification of time, purposefully polarizing news media, extremely hostile and isolatory interest niches and job overspecialization that people fall into, all taking place in a culture that celebrates violence and porn and repressing emotions. Capitalism of course has an open secret where dishonesty, ruthlessness, and a lack of empathy are necessary to survive, and the people who then become successful reinforce these values. People are utterly hopeless, fed either a complete lie of how the world is that they must live inside a bubble to maintain, or they are fed a rabidly dystopian idea of the future, about a world full of enemies, about how danger and crime lurks around every corner. Our school system, both public K-12 and our universities, are laughably bad, famous of course for how bad our students are no matter how much money is thrown at them. Our media is geared towards lowest common denominator, shallow and safe, and from a young age children are being fed garbage music and movies through unrestricted access to smart devices that are omnipresent. People skim headlines, they do not read. Policies are taken to just force students to pass classes by default instead of actually building learning; children are focused on rote memorization to pass tests, before dumping the info for the next set of stuff to memorize, and nothing more.

As for bravery, a much less measurable concept, well. Fear is the axis of which American psyche operates. We fear the boogeymen across the world, we fear our government, we fear other races, we fear the future, we fear each other. We fear speaking truth, because we learn from a young age that speaking plain truth is punished, whether by our peers or by the legal system. We fear our militarized police, we fear the “thug” boogeymen that they purportedly protect us from. Fed constant stories about cartels, mobs, gangs, terrorists. A new war! War war war! USSR is going to nuke you! Cuba is going to nuke you! North Korea, no, Iran, no, North Korea again, okay maybe terrorists? Russia? China? You are going to be instantly vaporized one day, very soon, we promise! The White Protestant values are so deeply ingrained, the anticommunism so deep, those who stray will quickly be chastized. It is social suicide to not adhere to whatever niche you find yourself in. We, especially the meek or those on the Left, we are trained to say “sorry” to excess, to be deferrant, we are taught saying the wrong thing online will send a hate mob against you who will doxx you until you lose your job and your family and friends will abandon you–and they will! I’ve seen it happen based solely on rumors!–which of course is just a mechanism of public executions that fascistic societies are so fond of since Roman times. Everybody is eager to tear someone who “deserves it” down…so do you want to stick your neck out? Despite being so incompetent, people are taught the CIA & Friends are like magic Gestapo who will teleport to your location and torture you in Guantanamo if you so much as say one wrong thing in front of the ever-present surveillance state, whether the literal microphones all well-known to be tapped and skimming your speech and texts for keywords, or the panopticon made by our friends and family who might turn on you in a moment. People are taught to either be passive aggressive, or passive. Being plainly aggressive is only seen in very poor communities, it is highly unacceptable in the majority of society, if you raise your voice too much people are quick to think you are dangerously deranged, people are quick to call the (again, militarized, incompetent, and trigger happy) cops. Being assertive is then impossible; people are not taught to resolve conflicts with measured confrontation, to stand up for themselves or others, only to keep their head down, OR play a sneaky game of deceit and cruelty. The assertive are rarely seen and quickly labelled as aggressive. Then there is the culture famous here of coddling, of parents who want to wrap their children’s lives up in bubble wrap (I can only speculate its origins), resulting in grown adults who can’t make choices for themselves, can’t speak for themselves, have never been in even mildly dangerous or unpredictable situations.

This is a lot, and yet I feel like it is only half of it. So much goes into play here, some natural consequences of unfettered capitalism and fascism, but some purposefully orchestrated by the CIA etc. to degrade the body, mind, and courage of would-be dissidents, such as them pushing a Compatible Left which just encourages more of the same “tear everyone down like a hate mob” and “skim headlines” and “celebrate laziness and hypersensitivity” culture over people trying to build actual knowledge, understanding, and compassion.

I’m going to stop talking immediately or I won’t stop 🫢😅