What is normal in societies that have gone mad?

When I was at Harvard so long ago, I tried to imagine life at the university 300 years earlier. Let’s imagine that a contemporary student of my day studied three hours each night. He was busy with classes, sports, extracurricular activities, and a little bit of a social life. Now let’s have Scotty beam him up and drop him off on campus 300 years earlier. He notes that the average student studied outside of class eight hours each day — until his candle burned out and he fell into bed. So which one of our “students” is normal? If the fellow from before the foundation of the US came forward to our class, he would be bewildered at how little we actually studied and how busy we were with things that had nothing to do with academic progress.

The violent protests in France were not born overnight. The collapse of Europe occurred over decades. I wouldn’t say that it started the day World War II ended, but there seem to be many things that we simply have forgotten, even in the US. For example:

With the all-volunteer army, we no longer believe that we have obligations to our country beyond paying obligatory taxes and not throwing a Coke can behind a tree in Yellowstone Park.

With the demise of religion, we have lost the connection between the rights we enjoy and their Source, namely God above. The US cannot abrogate unalienable rights, while other Western countries give rights and take them away.

We lost love for our country, partly through a demented education system. Nobody would allow people to overrun his home, and in the past the same was true for our country. But if one is absolutely convinced that his country is evil and based on slavery and racism, then why not let in millions in order to get better lives and maybe help us atone for a supposedly evil past.

We forgot to marry and procreate. This point is definitely related to the........

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