In defense of contemporary Western society

>It may not be perfect, but it is still a beautiful, creative age that we live in.
Creative, surely. It is the first age in which the people believe that the Earth is flat. It is an ugly age, where the advertisements are the only thing holy.

Hey Veeky Forums. This is what I believe. Please give me a good reason to believe it.

>leaving both parties better off for the exchange.
Likely not true for the Gauls, circles nor Carthaginians. The latter may have gained from the abolition of human sacrifice.

t. moron reactionary that rejects a very broad appellation of socialist because his friends at /pol/ told him Obama/Hillary were socialists

Sharing is a universal human trait. However, as such it needs to be cultivated. Merely throwing money at Africa has had serious problems stemming from the practice.

Yeah please give him validation for his insecurity.

There's nothing positive about West anymore.

the edge comments are strong around here.
If you actually think post modern society is good, dig into it's roots, you got to understand how post modernism was built, what kind of philosophy it was built in and all these stuff, so you can find it what's good about it yourself. If you take Foucault for a postmodern as an example, even tho he didn't consider himself as one, he goes against the Bacon's enlightment idea of "knowledge is power" and actually says "power is knowledge", which is a pretty commonly debated thing right now, even though they hardly know that's Foucault.
Those bullshit memes you'll see through your daily life isn't the full representation of post modernism, yet it is part of it. It is a time where things that should be debated, started to get debated, and as all new things come into society, they will be called absurd/shit or be praised as the salvation (which they aren't), but with time they'll be criticized decently and we will grow based on our flaws and progress.
Through history you'll see that society was always dumb and cringy for most of the time, so just ignore the "post modernism is the end of the West" or whatever. I don't like it a lot, but that's just how it goes.

What do the policies of state capitalists have to do with the broader ideology of socialism? Equating socialism to sharing is incredibly reductive, and inaccurate.

The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman
Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress by Marquis de Condorcet

Is conformism the peak of contrarianism?

Fredrich von Hayek, Milton Friedman

If you love contemporary Western society so much, why do you need a book to tell you how great it is? Doesn't that seem a little masturbatory?

literally just watch tv

On what grounds can you actually defend the modern day?
>it's not that bad!
not good enough

I enjoy living in my era, even though I am disillusioned with nearly every narrative that positively apprehends any of its power structures or values. Perhaps it is better to de-emphasise our present pleasure and happiness than it is to turn a blind eye to new modes of suffering and delusion when we try to figure out what kind of world we are living in and how it has changed and where it is going.

It's hard for us to picture the future in any way that isn't very one-note. We can make predictions about certain areas, but its hard to predict how that will interact with other things. I'm not explaining very well. But the whole ordeal is littered with problems of bias and emphasis.

You can look at the future with an eye for the environmental changes that are occurring. You can look at social changes in how we raise our children. You can look at the exponential increase technological sophistication. You can look at the changing religious landscape. You can look at the declining fertility of developed nations and the massive demographic changes they're undergoing. You can look at the evolution of the economy. You can make predictions about which geopolitical powers will be dominant in the future. You can look past humanity and consider the inevitable death of the universe.

Each one taken in isolation will give you an almost completely different fictionalised portrait of the future. Since we're all Whigs who judge things by the standard of Progress, our predictive myopia is actually incredibly disheartening. We judge nearly every thing of the present by its implications for the future. We want to perceive ourselves as going somewhere. But it is impossible to coalesce it all - especially with the abundance of information we drown in now - into a neat, comfortable narrative. Progress and decline - neither are gods, both have their uses. Shut out neither, and trust neither.

The End of History – Francis Fukuyama

Andrew Brietbart's Righteous Idignation

Every book of modern economy

You've realised the truth but now you seek to reject it. You want to believe that everything is fine but unfortunately it isn't.

How about the fact that an enormous amount of people still enjoy their lives and technology is still progressing? The presence of some bad does not negate the good; life is inherently a problem if you think that way.

A socialist or a social democrat? They aren't the same.

Hope in the Dark by Rebecca Solnit

The problem is not the contemporary, it is the modern.

The comfort of contemporary Western society rests on the suffering of most of the 2nd and 3rd world ... and then our liberal governments have the gaul to call themselves paragons of humanitarian virtue.... Humanism is a cancer

t. resentful cuck

i bet you were always overshadowed by an older sibling

>people still enjoy their lives
So would the people in a debauched society
>technology is still progressing
Why is this a good thing?

>You have no right to complain about the world if you happen to live in privilege and comfort

this
we have become so intelligent as a species that the average pleb has reached "post-intelligence"

can I at least keep my iphone X?

>Western society
>contemporary

Western society currently doesn't exist.

Just because most cynical people your age are reactionary assholes who watch Paul Joseph Watson doesn't mean that the claim itself is wrong, just that most people are stupid the understand it.

>uses reactionary to describe right-wingers
>when in every single debate, lefties literally cannot sit quietly for 5 minutes without autistically screeching to listen to the other side's argument
look up 'reactionary' on your closest dictionary

>So would the people in a debauched society
Okay, but it's not a 100% debauched society and some people are still enjoying themselves.

>Why is this a good thing?
Well, first, in order for technology to be progressing, that means there must be enough resources for it (i.e. we are not running out of resources yet). It also means there are enough skilled, educated, and — most importantly — healthy people in society to progress it (i.e. there are people being taken care of). And by definition, progression means advancement, the opposite of decline (i.e. there is a portion of society still focused on improvement and growth). Not to mention, our art continues to refer to advancements we have not yet even made (i.e. there are dreamers in our society who have enough energy to focus beyond themselves and into the future optimistically). All this signals the existence of health in at least some sectors of society.

All growth requires sacrifice. You minimize growth when you minimize the amount you sacrifice.

>Think of how the Romans integrated the better parts of the societies they conquered

Like what?

But why does a bloated society need to grow?

It's quite telling when the far left and the far right agree on this matter.

Why do you think it's bloated? We have so much further to go.

not what i was saying at all. You can recognize problems without whining about them. Your framing of the situation is one in which a monolithic agency, "liberal governments", abuse their power in a hypocritical fashion. You identify with third worlders because you see them as neglected and abused by this hypocritical being. I'm about 50% sure what I'm saying is at least somewhat true.

In any case, this incredibly reductionist narrative of yours could only stem from a mind that has unresolved resentments, because in the absence of logic and facts you fill in with what your emotions want to be true. Something to sort out.

What for?
Every new step we do adds to the misery of mankind. What has this development given us that we really need and cavemen didn't have?

ted pls go

>What for?
To satisfy the desires of the healthy, of course. Healthy and smart people get bored of things and then want new and better things. It's just how it works.

Why haven’t you killed yourself yet?

>It may not be perfect, but it is still a beautiful, creative age that we live in.

le neoliberal talking point

>this incredibly reductionist narrative of yours could only stem from a mind that has unresolved resentments, because in the absence of logic and facts you fill in with what your emotions want to be true

This is not news to me ;_;

Why are you still here?

Nobody likes you. I'll never understand why this faggot lurks this board under some trip code as if she means something

>but it is still a beautiful, creative age that we live in.
No. Neo-Liberalism needs to die, or we all are doomed.

mfw this threads
youtube.com/watch?v=Djv9SfNKZ5Y

>every single debate
Noam Chomsky is a liberal and is the most soft-spoken, calm debater I've ever seen.

"Lefties" are not all socialists, you're attributing anyone to the left of the Republicans to be a leftist when in reality Dems and Repubs are largely only different in weed being illegal, gays marrying and other asinine nonsense.

Also
reactionary
>adj. (of a person or a set of views) opposing political or social liberalization or reform.

Not
>retard pundit who is overly emotional

top kuk

Some people are truly lost and need the brainpower of others who are better at articulating themselves in order to feel resolved and confident in their own lives as well. It shouldn't be that hard to accept that.