Posts Tagged ‘News Sentinel’

Stopping The Wreck: Professor’s Research Builds A Case That We’re Losing The Battle To Save American Society

February 22, 2023

The following is a reblog from 2/3/13. I humbly submit that I see evidence everywhere that confirms my dire predictions. It truly pains me to say this. Tom Mawhinney

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By Bob Caylor of the News Sentinel, Fort Wayne In., November 17, 1994

This is the continuation of the newspaper article explaining my research and theories on America’s decline.

Part Four

CONTAGION

No one is raised in utter isolation, and people–particularly children–are influenced to an extraordinary degree by what happens to them and around them.

Just as people can spread a cold or the flu among themselves, so can behavior spread.

“That thoughts, emotions and actions can spread from on individual to others is a well-established fact…we have all felt the powerful contagious influence of someone’s yawn and also their happiness, sadness, fear or anger,” Mawhinney said.

“For example, individuals who were born and raised in the circumstances of the ghetto may move into a peripheral area to sell drugs. The greater availability of drugs in this new area will then lead to increased rates of addiction within that segment of the population. Increasing rates of addiction will, in turn, lead to the spread of incompetent and damaging behavior patterns such as juvenile delinquncey, robbery, murder, child neglect and abuse, family disorganization, child abandonment, intellectual impairment and underachievement, and more,” he said.

Although there’s debate over whether sex and violence depicted by the media lower sexual standards and encourage violence, the argument’s over in Mawhinney’s mind.

He’s satisfied that what we see, read and hear influences us, whether it’s news or fiction. He’s convinced by research linking acts of violence on television with increased aggression in toddlers. He’s particularly adamant about the influence of sexual depictions, or worse yet, the intermingling of sexual and violent themes. Sometimes he shows parts of “I Spit on Your Grave” to his students to show them–in stomach-turning detail–an agent of contagion.

“You can go to the video-rental store, in the horror section, and you can see simulated anal rape…and assault by a woman getting even for anal rape. You can see her cut the penis off a man in a bathtub with blood going everywhere and him shrieking…this is contagion,” he said.

As The population increases and as a greater share of the population clusters in urban areas, the density with which people pack together makes contagion a greater risk, he argues.

“I’m just suggesting that the more dense the population, the more likely that the alcoholic’s behavior will impact on more people. The child molester, the pedophiliac, will have hundreds of victims…I think population density is catalytic to contagion, period.”

In the next part five, learn how the mechanisms of Sociocultural Entropy weaken the viability of our Nation.

V. Thomas Mawhinney, Ph.D., 2/13/13

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Stopping The Wreck: Professor’s Research Builds A Case That We’re Losing The Battle To Save American Society

February 12, 2023

By Bob Caylor of the News Sentinel, Fort Wayne In., November 17, 1994

This is the continuation of the newspaper article explaining my research and theories on America’s decline.

The following is a reblog from 2013, VTM

Part Three

MORE CHILDREN AT RISK

At the same time, as the numbers of children younger than 6 are shrinking in proportion to the population as a whole, these youngest children–a critical population segment–are being subjected to increasing stresses.

Although the poverty rate has remained fairly steady in the population as a whole, it’s rising among the youngest children. A greater percentage of them than ever before live in poverty.

It is estimated that divorces and annulments per 1.000 children in the United States increased by 173 percent between 1950 and 1984. From 1920 to 1984, estimated divorces and annulments per 1,000 women increased 169 percent.

Among scientific researchers and laymen alike, there is growing certainty that children from broken homes suffer developmental and emotional problems that can affect them for decades.

More and more children are being born and raised in single-parent families , and, with rare exceptions, two parents have more time and energy for the demanding job of rearing children than does a single parent.

Even many two-parent homes aren’t what they used to be. As more mothers enter the work force, fewer and fewer children benefit from growing up with a full-time parent at home. The quality of day care varies dramatically, but few children with paid caretakers receive that same kind of intensive nurturing that families could provide.

The rate of premature births and percentage of babies with low birth weight has remained roughly steady since 1960. The difference today is that we’ve developed the means–at enormous cost to society–to save many more of these tiny babies than we used to.

But once we’ve saved these smaller, more fragile babies, they often compete with full-term infants at a physical and intellectual disadvantage that continues throughout their lives.

Teen-agers continue to harm themselves, both physically and intellectually, with high rates of drug and alcohol abuse.

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In the next part, learn how the mechanisms of Bad Behavioral Contagion damage the quality of our population’s behaviors.

V. Thomas Mawhinney, Ph.D., 2/12/13

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Loosing The Battle To Save America: Part Two

February 11, 2013

Stopping The Wreck: Professor’s Research Builds A Case That We’re Losing The Battle To Save American Society

By Bob Caylor of the News Sentinel, Fort Wayne In., November 17, 1994

This is the continuation of the newspaper article explaining my research and theories on America’s decline

Part Two

FEWER CHILDREN, MORE ELDERLY

Mawhinney’s theory begins and ends with children. The condition of children today foreshadows the shape of society decades from now, and what he sees isn’t good.

Children younger than 5 are a smaller portion of our population than ever before. In 1900, 12 percent of Americans were 5 or younger; in 1986, 7.4 percent of the population was in that age group. By 2010, that number is expected to fall to 6 percent.

Meanwhile, the 25- to 64-year-old age group is increasing its share of the population, but slowly. Mawhinney calls this young to middle-aged group the “culture-sustaining” portion of the population. They are working, paying taxes, raising children–in short, doing the bulk of the work involved in maintaining society.

And the elderly comprise an ever-growing share of the population. Most of them are retired and collecting much more in government benefits than they’er paying in taxes.

Much of the culture-building work the elderly could perform–helping with child care and passing on knowledge, tradition, ends up not being done, because many grandparents don’t live close to their grandchildren.

In the next part, learn how an increasing percent of our decreasing population of children (our future) are at increased risk for various bio-psycho-social problems.

V. Thomas Mawhinney, Ph.D., 2/11/13

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