Despite what schools teach nowadays, the US was founded on Christianity, and English society likewise was grounded on the Bible for hundreds of years. One core tenant was the teaching of Jesus, "let your yes be yes and your no be no," and this reflected throughout society.

Now, even the average church-goer isn't really God fearing in how they live their life, and the unchurched certainly aren't. Instead of "love your neighbor as yourself," self love is taught, to put one's emotions and desires above all else.

As a result, society has become filled with self centered liars and flakes, who make every decision first and foremost based on their own desires.

What you're describing is American degradation from a formerly high trust society into a low trust one.

It's strange how the one redeemable thing that is so pushed within the programming of modern society, the power of friendship, family, and generally the power of keeping your word is seen more as a negligiable guideline or something that is so unimportant that it comes second to an almost ubiquitous urge to just lie, no matter how important your word was to the person you gave it to.

At times it seems like we don't even speak a common language, we communicate with a surface level facade with confused, idiosyncratic babble underneath - connect at enough points of the molecule and you might hold together briefly, but the factor of cohesion through collective values just isn't in the pudding. Cohesion through manipulation and emotional or hierarchal blackmail seems to be much more successful.

I think that the main ingredient that is missing is the concept of self, the deeper kind. The self-concept is lacking in that we don't abstract these things as a part of ourselves anymore where we ought to and the unseen part that promulgates lies is a much more important faculty than the one that tells the truth. We value our word superficially because we live in a very superficial world, and are not equipped to think of our ability to keep our word as an extension of our character - and whenever you do, you are seen as autistic or get taken advantage of.

I think it is noble to atleast try and think of it as your own arm or leg, but that is just lost on most. How can anyone preach self-love if they let such a thing rot?

Western culture has become soft and evasive of consequence over the past 60 years. There's a deficit of purpose and causal reasoning that's a primary factor in obnoxious behaviors being normalized. Adopt a constant mindset of your time being valuable, try to gauge if someone actually interested in a plan upfront, and appropriately scold them if they still want to do shit after flaking.

A consequence of overpopulation and social media is the devaluation of individual relationships.

Part of it is that a lot of people primarily interact with other people over screens now and it's much easier to act wrong when you have that layer of abstraction in the way.

As someone that hates breaking their own word this exact problem keeps me from a lot of social interactions.

As my health is quite frankly abysmal (nothing serious just highly inconvenient) I am very much hesitant to promise to do things yet it seems like more and more people just want that promise even of you don't keep it.

Oh well I'll stick to my principals either way, to the best of my ability at least.

One of the foundation aspects of western civilisation was that you meant what you said. Eroded away.

Honor, integrity, self-sacrifice, accountability and consequences are all lost concepts in the new world. Hedonism, self-love and self-gratification are the new moral virtues of the new religion.

It used to be that calling someone a liar was an insult worthy of a duel to the death. This is because your word meant something. Nowadays words are cheap and nobody bats an eye to slander and insult others without any justification or reason behind it.

Words were more scarce and more valuable, and the insights of people with experience or insight were greatly valued. Nowadays everyone feels entitled to have their opinions heard, and people feel encouraged or even obligated to have strong opinions about everything whether their opinions are worth anything or not.

Morality was objective under Christianity, then it became relative to tear down Christianity, and now it's purely utilitarian, specifically in respect to the political power of the high priests of the new religion. Morality, meaning, language... everything now serves the new religion. It's truly dystopian.

This is the method of discourse now. No honor, no integrity and no truth. Even in seemly innocuous everyday interactions.

And here I thought this avoidance of common decency was strictly a California thing.

I believe the anonymity of online communication . . . what we're doing here, now, lends itself to the sort of anti-social rudeness you refer to.

But then I can make a distinction between typed conversations and conversations in real life and the social customs involved, so I always assumed others can, but maybe it's also a generational problem.

Others make good points. I'll add:

One of the many poisons of liberalism is treating the individual as the fundamental unit of society. This is wrong. The fundamental unit is the family (and family means at least 3 generations, not just parents + children).

With the individual subsumed socially to family and everything subsumed spiritually to Christ, suddenly the individual doesn't exist in a void. Duties and responsibilities, with harsh, if implied, consequences for failure, now constrain the courses of action available to an individual. Flaking wouldn't even occur to most in this world.

One of the other many benefits of this arrangement is that you no longer have to "find yourself." You can start your life right away: elder sons continue the family business, younger sons explore, daughters get married.

Sometimes people are afraid to disappoint, and don't recognize, acknowledge, or really take into account their own limitations. Time management, focus and attention, self discipline, etc etc.

I think it's especially more common with just how increasingly time consuming it is to try and get just about any seemingly simple task done, especially with how finnicky and unreliable technology can be.

There's also so much more we want to do, get done, experience, and achieve, because there's so much more at our finger tips. And yet we still have just as little time as we've had for hundreds of years. More in some regards, but still a rather finite lifespan and a limited supply of energy and focus.

Might just be me projecting though. But that's something I've been feeling for a while now.