Our modern therapeutic language reflects this bias toward progressive, intervention-based thinking. We constantly speak of treating, healing, and fixing—as if every human struggle requires a scientific solution. This mindset creates an arrogance that dismisses prevention and time-tested wisdom in favor of active interventions.
We've become so convinced that our science-based approach holds all the answers that we've forgotten a crucial distinction: there's a difference between an informed life and a good life. Traditional approaches often focused on prevention—building resilience, teaching coping skills, and creating supportive communities before problems arose. But prevention doesn't fit our therapeutic language of diagnosis and treatment.
This reflects a broader cultural shift where we believe we can engineer solutions for every aspect of human experience. We're so focused on what we can fix that we've lost sight of what already worked - and it often worked without an intervention.
vannevar · 4h ago
The article suggests that the culprit is social permissiveness. But I think a more likely explanation is that unregulated capitalism has systematically destroyed our common community institutions and replaced them with impersonal for-profit transactional systems.
jorzel · 1h ago
I woud not say that my article suggest social permissiveness. I would rather say that global capitalism and consumerism indirectly changed our culture into egocentric drive
rramadass · 3h ago
Nietzsche said Man does not seek Happiness; only the Englishman does that. What Man seeks is Meaning and Purpose. That is not an exact quote but a gist of his philosophical outlook.
The fundamental problem is that the Scientific Revolution upended everything we had known and around which we had built our social structures. People were born into an existing "social framework structure" which they followed obediently without questioning and when something went wrong/did not understand, they simply attributed it to an almighty "G-O-D" and washed their hands off of it. Being absolved of any personal responsibility and not being forced to learn and make hard decisions and live with its consequences is highly cognitively consonant rather than dissonant and keeps one "Happy". Mere Scientific Knowledge without resolution into a coherent and understandable framework leads to more cognitive dissonance and hence keeps one "Unhappy".
The solution is to use Modern Science to understand Objective Reality and use ancient Philosophical Concepts/Frameworks from Hindu/Buddhist/Greek Cultures to mould our Subjective View of it (but without going off into la-la land).
jorzel · 1h ago
Before the Scientific Revolution people definitely had less freedom and agency.
And that condition was justified drive to more individualism, more impact in their own life.
However, in the recent years and decades it has gone too fare. We have become rootless and disconnected.
We've become so convinced that our science-based approach holds all the answers that we've forgotten a crucial distinction: there's a difference between an informed life and a good life. Traditional approaches often focused on prevention—building resilience, teaching coping skills, and creating supportive communities before problems arose. But prevention doesn't fit our therapeutic language of diagnosis and treatment.
This reflects a broader cultural shift where we believe we can engineer solutions for every aspect of human experience. We're so focused on what we can fix that we've lost sight of what already worked - and it often worked without an intervention.
The fundamental problem is that the Scientific Revolution upended everything we had known and around which we had built our social structures. People were born into an existing "social framework structure" which they followed obediently without questioning and when something went wrong/did not understand, they simply attributed it to an almighty "G-O-D" and washed their hands off of it. Being absolved of any personal responsibility and not being forced to learn and make hard decisions and live with its consequences is highly cognitively consonant rather than dissonant and keeps one "Happy". Mere Scientific Knowledge without resolution into a coherent and understandable framework leads to more cognitive dissonance and hence keeps one "Unhappy".
The solution is to use Modern Science to understand Objective Reality and use ancient Philosophical Concepts/Frameworks from Hindu/Buddhist/Greek Cultures to mould our Subjective View of it (but without going off into la-la land).
And that condition was justified drive to more individualism, more impact in their own life.
However, in the recent years and decades it has gone too fare. We have become rootless and disconnected.