Cultural Survival Skills

“On-Demand” Depravity

My wife and I were born in 1942, so life for us continues to be a matter of continuous culture shock, as America’s leftist revolution is gaining steam.

We have several paid streaming movie sites that we have used to break the Covid-19 state and self-imposed social isolation.

So, we look and look for something entertaining that we both could watch on television. My dear wife would prefer movies about hero’s and heroin’s winning over bad things, about triumph over life’s challenges, love conquering all, love growing to a happy fruition, “clean” comedies, family, faith, and any kind of feel-good stuff; including things that can put a lump our throats, but they are good lumps. I enjoy watching them with her.

We looked and looked,  but in our sample of at least 50 movies last night; and many more searches on other nights. We have little success. In our three streaming movie or serial services, nearly all we could find was disgusting to us. The movies we sampled, thinking they might be enjoyable, were emotionally twisted and even bizarre. The plots and roles featured many forms of psychopathology found in our professional diagnostic manuals. Of course some of the diagnoses featured in movies have been removed from historical diagnostic manuals due to matters of political correctness, or social sensitivity regarding the numerous modern evolutions of population sexual proclivities featured among LGBTQ themes. Then, of course, there are the ubiquitous ever-present dysfunctional family dramas.  If you would like a quick laugh, there are the mostly filthy-mouth stand-up comedians telling adolescent sex jokes to audiences that respond with canned-like laughter.

There is the captivating, though stomach wrenching, genre of series and movies about bad people who are seductively presented as poor guys and gals who are trapped in their own webs of deceit, lawlessness and danger from the law or other bad people. These “poor unfortunate” schleps are so hopelessly self-defeating that audiences are sucked into caring for them and hoping that things will turn out well for them. This, even though they are pushing death dealing drugs, having sexual affairs and hiding them from their husbands or wives, incorporating their children into their evil and criminal ways, and even killing others. All of this engendering a sense of sympathy for the bad people, hoping they will not get caught and that everything will turn our well for them in the end.

Then there are evil spirits, ghosts, dirty little secrets in lovely little old-fashioned towns where, at first, all appears to be a wonderful little world and life-style….until everything deteriorates into murder, drugs, and citizens trapped in a social horror stories.

These pathological forms of entertainment interest me as a psychologist, because I have personally been sucked into a few and have had to exit them because of a growing sick feeling in the pit of my stomach…so much so that I concluded that whatever had trapped my interest was not entertainment, rather it was an, artificially inflated (but true) reflection of America’s growing social depravity.

And let’s not forget all the blood drenched, horror shows of chain saws, hatchets, and knives, etc.; hacking, slicing and dicing terrified thousands of victims.

If you want XXX florid pornography of virtually every sort (Illegal until the 1960″s), simply pay and play in the privacy of your own home.

Finally, someone just sent me the following video and he thought it was hilarious. This alerted me to the publication of several “Children’s Books” that I dearly hope will not be read to children. These books are designed to go “over the heads of young children”, but to cause hysterical laughter in adolescents and adults (who’s psychosexual development has been stunted).

Please see this video and then scroll down to search for several other books of this ilk. They are available on Amazon.

I suspect that pedophiles would find this material useful to add to their “grooming strategies” preparing children for sexual abuse, as they characteristically do.

All of this is just more of so very many indicators of our socioculture’s continuing decline into self-destructive immorality (formerly called vice); psychological disorders, self-destructive behavior, and general behavioral/emotional chaos and anarchy.

A reversal of these seemingly unrelenting strong entertainment trends, and so many others bad trends, feels unlikely.

I am grateful for the many fine travelogues, documentaries, and honest history lessons that remain a small proportion of the more grotesque majority of America’s entertainment media.

Vote Constitutional Conservative!

V. Thomas Mawhinney, Ph.D., 5/3/20