I blame the media
Thats right, you heard me.
Here it is in a nutshell.
There are a certain percentage of people in the world who are just assholes, always have been, always will be.
These people act anti-socially
The media report on this behaviour and declare standards in society are 'starting to slip'
The people who were acting anti-socially now feel validated and emboldened because they're a part of a group and they can rationalise their behaviour as due to a social phenomenon beyond their control.
People who were on the verge of acting like assholes, (ie: They're assholes some of the time, but they usually restrain themselves due to social pressure to not be an asshole) see the others acting like assholes on the news and think to themselves "why should I bother restraining myself, Other people are getting all the benefit from their assholey behaviour and here I am, restraining myself like a chump!"
So, they start acting like assholes more often, doing whatever assholey things they feel like doing, not giving a damn about what other people might think
Now the media sees that there are more assholes doing more assholey things, so they report "assholes run wild on our streets"
This encourages the assholes even further, Being an asshole is now become more widespread and the people who act like assholes, while still looked upon as assholes by the general public, start to find niches and are even targetted as a market by businesses who can profit from assholish behaviour.
Now the media will report on these events "The vast majority of people are now assholes"
This is where we are now. The media has declared that all young people are now out of control. This encourages the assholes even further, but more than this, it turns people with very few natural assholish tendencies to start acting more assholish just in order to fit in. While fleeting moments of assholish behaviour would before have been suppressed, now they are encouraged.
The media has hyped the lowest common denominator into the new cultural aspiration for the most impressionable people in society.
Social Psychologists such as nobel Prize winning Daniel Kahneman have long known that people can be influenced subconsciously by external triggers that we might not even be aware of. It has been demonstrated through countless experiments, when people are exposed to ideas/social queues and then asked to perform tasks, their performance in those tasks will be affected by the queues they have recently been exposed to (and they will not be aware any effects). Our brains work in a complex way and the short version of this story is that we end up with a herd mentality. People will be encouraged to act (in both positive and negative ways) based on how they percieve their peers expect them to behave.
Normal cultural and social peer pressure has been replaced by Media hysteria. Every time a media outlet makes a statement such as "More and More children are drinking at a younger and younger age" It validates the children who have already started to drink, and it pressurises the rest of the children who feel they are missing out or not conforming to their peer group
When The Media goes looking for drunk kids on St Patricks day so they can show far society has collapsed, all the kids who didn't get drunk on St Patricks day will be sent a signal that it is normal for people their age to act this way and by extention, they are missing out on something by not acting this way.
When the media shows people falling about on the streets and fighting after a saturday night, the people who behave this way feel normal instead of ashamed which is how they should be felt to feel.
When the media states that more and more people are drinking a bottle of wine every night in front of the tv, this becomes normal and acceptable behaviour.
It's all in the Framing.
The way messages are stated, has a huge impact on the effects they will have.
If the media reports negative behaviour by the majority in a different way "Tiny Minority of assholes destroy festival for everyone else" then this will place the social pressure on the assholes to stop being assholes and send the message that their behaviour is not normal or acceptable
Instead of the media reporting stats to exaggerate drug use "60% of all students have taken Drugs" they could report the story as "95% of students don't take drugs regularly".
Don't even get me started on these rubbish tv shows that pretend to be documentaries and just show assholes being assholes abroad, or assholes living in a house with other assholes doing assholey stuff. This is the kind of media output that does the most damage. Its like they're deliberately glamorising the most purile and immature behaviour just for short term advertising profits.
These shows are so damaging, it's not even funny.
