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Comment by virgil_disgr4ce | Hacker News Reader

What do you mean by "broken culture?"

The most charitable interpretation of "broken culture" would be America, across all slices of society, has trended towards selfish shallow values, less intellectual interests and value on hard work, more aggression and an empathy defecit.

I think this has frayed the fabric of society by damaging the reciprocity that binds families and communities, and encourages divisive and antisocial, short-term behaviors over long-term, collective decision-making.

This varies across our rich tapestry of subcultures, but I see it everywhere. Especially among government and business leaders.

An analogy I heard is that there is no single American culture. Or even an "American Culture" at all, and that there probably shouldn't be one. And that various powers/forces/etc have tried to homogenize America into a shared American Culture which can't possibly exist. So, the analogy is America is like a soda machine that has many different flavors of soda and each of them is different and unique and loved by different people. Some flavors disgust some people too and they don't want it. However, we've decided to mix them all together anyways and no one actually likes that. So instead we'd be better off leaving each other alone, allowing different communities with different values to do things the way they want to and to rely less and less on Federal government oversight into social issues. Give more power to the states and in turn the states give more power to localities.

Wholeheartedly agree with your analogy. Americans share a federal political system, but not much of a collective culture, at least not too far beyond that shared by liberal societies around the world. It's one of the best thing about the states. You're 100% right that the Federal govt should step back to allow local government to handle issues differently. Local people care about local people and understand their needs/concerns.

That's it's considered acceptable for kids to be born into situations like this. This is "broken" because it reliably leads to failure and undesirable outcomes.

You’re making a lot of strong assumptions when you say that it’s considered acceptable. I strongly doubt that it is normal for anyone to want to be a single parent (there are of course anecdotal exceptions to this, but not on a cultural level).

I think he means a culture that produces bad outcomes.

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