What I'm trying to figure out is: how new is this? Have things always been this way and I've just started paying more attention? Is the media spinning things as bleaker than they are so it can sell headlines? Or is the world really taking a dark turn? Are these simply lessons that humanity has to re-learn every few generations? Was democracy a brief experiment that's starting to fail? Is internet connectedness killing it through polarization, or was it always doomed to fail?
Obviously nobody can answer these questions with certainty, but I'm curious what people think.
But a few considerations. One, I think it's an age thing. As kids we take the world as it is for granted; as we become older we understand that things can actually go worse and that history changes as a result of choices. We have comparison points with better or different times, and we're used to a world that is not there any more.
Then there are media effects. Traditional media always sold bad news and outrage; social media has only accelerated and removed all the brakes to it. And yes I think we're also dealing with the new enormous possibilities of the internet and we haven't evolved suitable cultural tools yet.
And finally yes, in part it's going badly, compared to other more or less recent times. Maybe there's moments in which bad things happen followed by moments of respite, and this is not one of the latter. But if you compare the current times with say 50 years ago, with the USSR, the cold war and Europe split in two and torn by political terrorism, and the Vietnam war, middle east wars, Pinochet's golpe... well. Maybe we don't have it that bad after all.