Quote:
Originally Posted by BeornWulfWer
The highlighted sentences just show how the modern world has decayed from it's previous, accepted norms.
Both partners working, balancing childcare and work. Extended families outside of village, town or city boundaries. The collapse of family values and the family core, etc, etc...have, in my eyes all played its part in declining the care we can provide to our loved ones.
I know my thoughts are probably, to some, archaic and unsuitable to modern perceptions and standards, but I do like to think we can revert back to some core values which have sadly been lost.
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We can break the problem down to something simple on a practical level too I might add, namely that caring for old people in need of care is comparable to an economic pyramid game. It only works good as long as the base is strong and much more numerous than the benefiting peak. This leads to the consequence of constant population growth for the old being respected in a traditional way and cared for. And of course, today the base is sick, goes down the drain, we get "the opposite pyramid" in a worst case scenario and at the same time the old getting even older and can live, or better survive with horrible diseases which make them a case for care without dying to say it blunt. With the effect of them surviving that way in many cases just because of special medical care and help, which is hard to provide by the family. This kind of special care didnt exist in the past.
This was rarely the case in the past and the old were often something special, because there were few and they had something of knowledge and experience the young really cared for. In our postindustrial society with masses of old, which often lack the dignity of a patriarch or matriarch of the past and have little of interest to tell for the superficial and constantly shrinking masses of the young, we have a problem indeed which goes beyond the known "generation gap".
The only option for a modern world, even if our social life would get healthier again as well as our base, is to consider the technical progress first on a medical level, to avoid helpless cases and if they occur, that there are enough people and technical help to cope with it left, for the easier cases with local social network organisation, like for the childcare. I propose such "clan like" social network structures on a local level, which I consider the only option for getting a true healthy community spirit and base again. We can't go back to the clan-structure and even if, it would be a bad solution with many problems for our civilisation and modern-effective structures. So we should revive the best parts of it for a modern society and get back something of what Europeans lost not just in the last decades, but in many parts centuries ago already, since the independent clan-family structures being largely destroyed in the context of the Feudal Age, Christianity and Industrial Revolution.