The press does a good job of keeping a certain level of ugliness and chaos in our lives.
While the items from the police blotter ARE matters of public record, they are seldom highlights in the “events of the day” yet when you turn on the local news report “fire, car crash, cantina shooting, and now here’s sports and weather with a 5-day forecast...”
Very little about what when on in city hall WHICH affects everyone in the community, unlike a car crash, high speed chase, or gloomy house fire.
And then there are the celebrities that the media likes to hold up so we can watch their life like a train wreck in slow motion.
I don’t want to see ANY carnage from ANY US bombing attack or terrorist incident since the damned agit prop media STILL refuses to show us footage of ANY of the 3,000 dead bodies at the scenes of the WTC and DC 9-11 attacks. If we can’t see our OWN dead “out of respect” then do NOT show me dead bodies of the enemy (or victims of foreign terrorist campaigns).
The media is fascinated with serial killers and makes them superstars even more than before. How many minutes of tv did Charles Manson get coverage in a day on tv in 1969? Certainly no network would spend even 3 hours on the story back then but now, it’ll be around the clock news coverage for 2 weeks with lurid descriptions of the activities. Except that the murderers that the media celebrates these days are even MORE sadistic than the Manson family were. And yet, the Al Qaeda Islamic snuff videos got swept under the rug and were called morally equivalent to what “we” were doing at Abu Ghrab and Gitmo.
Mental illness? The culture demands it. Dull the senses with a repetative shock campaign.
You're right, the culture does demand it, but for a different reason than I think you were trying to get at:
"Some philosophers and psychiatrists have suggested that we are investing our great wealth in researching and treating mental illness — medicalizing ever larger swaths of human experience — because we have rather suddenly lost older belief systems that once gave meaning and context to mental suffering.
Or more simply and directly put - God and our connection with the spiritual are no longer central to many people. Our technology gives no comfort, and in fact may be the root of much mental illness. We were not designed for this terribly busy world.
What does the mind do with the constant influx of (often unwanted) information, sensations, and perceptions? It rebels, and increasingly this rebellion takes shape as depression, anxiety, PTSD, mayhem, etc. - i.e. mental illness.
"Offering the latest Western mental-health theories, treatments and categories in an attempt to ameliorate the psychological stress sparked by modernization and globalization is not a solution; it may be part of the problem. When we undermine local conceptions of the self and modes of healing, we may be speeding along the disorienting changes that are at the very heart of much of the world’s mental distress."
And I believe this is the origin of all radicalism, whether it be terrorism or liberalism. Clinging to extremist concepts could very well be an attempt by the individual to create some sort of personal mythos in order to deal with a world that our minds were not designed for.
These are the new religions - ones that their devotees pursue with a vigor equal to the bustling and ever changing world around them. Suicide bombers? Heck, what have they got to lose? Just a world gone mad with change - a world that they are neither prepared for, nor willing to deal with.