Societal breakdown has started and will get worse in developed countries

This is a personal, opinion article. What’s it got to do with cats? Everything. What humans do, cats experience because they live in our world. That’s obvious but I’m just touching base because this website is about cats ultimately.

I read the newspaper every day from cover to cover. I’ve got the time. When you do that, you can see trends over many years. And I’ve been reading newspapers every day for 40 years. I can see a trend which is downwards. I don’t want to paint an unnecessarily black or bleak picture but that’s what I see.

How do I see it in the news? I see a fragmentation of society in the UK and in other parts of the world mainly developed countries. It is developed countries which I believe are showing signs of societal breakdown.

Please note that there are two pages to this article with a link at the bottom of the first page which takes you to the next.

Here are some indicators as far as I am concerned:

Birthrate: in Italy and in the UK, the native population don’t want to have kids. The birthrates are plummeting in these countries. As I recall, Germany has a similar problem. These are developed countries. Developing countries tend to have citizens who have larger families because they believe it helps them to survive as a family unit but in the West the opposite pertains.

A plummeting birthrate indicates a lack of hope. Would-be parents are looking to the future and deciding against a family because the future doesn’t look any good. In the UK the number of children being born has sunk to its lowest level for two decades. In Italy Pope Frances has commented on the low birthrate resulting in a shrinking population of native people. Pope Frances criticised Italians for adopting pets rather than having children.

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Many of the challenges faced by developed countries will be exacerbated if the citizens of those countries do not have children. That said, immigrants tend to have larger families than people native to the country which in itself creates societal pressures because the culture changes.

With a low birthrate, there is an increased percentage of elderly people which puts pressures on welfare which in turn puts pressures on those people who are earning money and paying taxes.

But the underlying message here is that when people stop having kids, they don’t like what they see for the future. It’s not just me who sees a breakdown in societal norms.

Depression: you don’t have to look far to see evidence of societal erosion. The headline today (Jan 8th 2023) in The Times is “Depression drives surge in disability benefits”. More people are depressed than normal. They don’t want to work. This puts pressure on welfare which can’t be afforded because Covid seriously damaged the UK economy with enormous borrowing and the burden of servicing that borrowing.

Schooling: parents in Britain think that their kids can skip school and they forget that it’s obligatory to send their children to school. Back in the day parents didn’t question sending their children to school but now they do. By law they have to. People are wantonly breaking the law to the detriment of the children’s education and chances in life.

Students: school children are increasingly feeling stressed. Too many schoolkids are suicidal. Too many are self-harming. There are major issues with schoolchildren because they, too, are looking at the future and many of them don’t like what they see.

On the issue of schooling, one in five children are regularly absent and 140,000 children are absent for very long periods. They seem to be using any excuse not to go to school with their parents’ consent.

Integrity: another Times’ headline today is that there is a huge rise in plagiarism on university applications. A small issue you might think but this shows a lack of integrity and an increased sense of competitiveness in society which is resulting in bad behaviour. There is an undermining of integrity and society and therefore trust. A breakdown in trust is going to further undermine society. But cheating is far more prevalent than it was in the past I believe.

Crime: in the UK crime is rampant. You have people walking into supermarkets scooping up huge quantities of food and walking out the front door. Nobody does anything to stop them. The police have abandoned their duties with respect to shoplifting. This has resulted in supermarkets employing their own security systems. Policing has become privatised. Citizens feel abandoned in terms of protection from the police who, for years, have almost abandoned their obligations. People don’t trust or respect the police anymore in the UK.

Heath: in Britain, the NHS is broken. Once again people feel abandoned. They’ve paid their taxes over many years in order to receive proper NHS treatment at the end of their life but are not getting it. They are going private instead if they can afford it. The breakdown in the NHS is not due to underfunding but to poor management and feather-nesting.

Britain has a sickness problem: The Times report that Britain is getting older and sicker which is a further problem for the NHS. There are rising chronic illnesses caused by problematic “deep economic and social structures” in the aftermath of the pandemic and the cost of living crisis. The government is trying to get people back to work. “Personal independence payments” have ballooned with about 2700 people every day starting to claim this benefit. And there are big issues regarding ballooning mental health issues and health claims.

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Disintegration of societal safety nets: in the UK, welfare is under enormous pressure. There is a lack of money because of the enormous interest payments on the national debt which mounted dramatically during Covid. And inflation damaged the economy. The welfare state is under pressure and it will continue to rise in my opinion.

Laziness and self-discipline: I sense that the old-fashioned ideas of self-discipline and the work ethic have been badly eroded over the past decades to the point now where I sense that many young people are lazier than they were in the past. And the standards of education have dropped. You look at an old exam, an O-level exam, from the past and you will see how much higher the standard was then compared to now. There’s been a dramatic dumbing down of society.

Declining social trust: we see the CEOs of large corporations earning as much in a few days as some employees earn in an entire year. The bosses have become greedier than normal. They are exploiting their position of power and they seem to lack a social conscience. They just take what they can. An indicator of increased competitiveness in society without constraints from societal norms. There is a breakdown in trust between your typical citizen and the leaders of society including politicians. In Britain, many people will not vote at the next general election because they are disinterested. They don’t trust politicians any more. And people are losing trust in each other. People are more scared than they used to be.

Dartmoor rangers: These are people employed by the government to keep an eye on Dartmoor, which is an area of natural beauty and an important nature reserve in the UK. They have taken to wearing video cameras to stop abuse. This reflects the abuse of emergency services providers as well in the UK. The rangers will continue to be issued with body-one video cameras to make them feel safer. This I argue is another symptom of a breakdown in social norms and behaviour which leads to a distrust within society and further stresses and pressures.