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| Philips Square seen from The Bay on 17 October 2009 |
One of the most existentially bleak things I've seen are television commercials promoting online gambling. These commercials extol the great fun to be had by solitary gambling on one's IPhone. In the commercials the actors portraying happy gamblers are all laughing and having a great time by themselves; even when shown in a room full of people, each person is alone, isolated, gambling on their IPhones; whatever the gimmick is to get them to gamble it's working--advertising works--as soon as the gambling begins these people are transformed, suddenly they are all laughing and happy. This scenario is what the gambling companies want you to believe, this is the lie they are promoting. These gambling companies would promote solitary drinking if they could get away with it, maybe that’s the next big thing.
There are moral values for a reason. If you destroy your inherited moral values you face the consequences; we can see the result of our Western society's abandonment of morality; the result of society’s liberalization of the last fifty years has made society, and our individual lives, worse. We have fewer relationships, our families are scattered, we are isolated and alienated from other people, mental illness is rampant, and the worst thing is that our children have been sacrificed for these liberal reforms. Liberalization proceeds to a dystopian world of amorality and the inevitable loss of free speech. The children are not doing well in this new world that has abandoned morality. Liberalization, open mindedness, was ostensibly intended to make society more equitable, to remove injustices, to improve society, and to decriminalize non-victim crimes, but it didn't work out that way.
What did abandoning moral values achieve? In the past we never had homeless people sleeping in the streets, we never had widespread drug use, and the same applies to access to pornography, gambling, prostitution, and so on. Go back fifty years. People had moral values that supported society and emphasized people living a moral life; they were the underpinnings of a good, decent society. Today everyone has an opinion, there is a cacophony of disagreeing voices; people are arguing, opinions matter but facts don't matter, there are no facts, it's all subjective and up to personal opinion. It's better to say nothing or the progressives will attack you, and there is no going back. We laugh at morality, we barely remember that people once had moral values, and we smirk when morality is mentioned—grin and smirk, grin and smirk—. And if you express anything critical of the new morality in public, the thought police will fine you, disagreeing is a hate crime, it's a crime to disagree with the currently fashionable opinions of others. When our moral values were denied, abolished by government to buy our vote, then almost immediately society began to collapse.
Today, good people are not heard from, they are silenced by fear of being attacked, and what is left of society is increasingly looking like some dystopian facsimile of what we once had. The new morality does not include free speech; it is a morality of censorship. No one wants to return to oppressive values, to misogyny, to prejudice or racism, but what we have now is not working. What we change is at a cost; no one has gained anything by discarding the moral foundations of society in favour of the possibility of a better society, it didn't work; gambling is one of the most addictive activities and I suspect the IPhone makes it even more addictive, like "death scrolling", YouTube, Facebook, Pornhub, and the rest of "social" media hell.
