Revolution is good, but is there an alternative to revolt to? If there was a vision of a bright future available, I think people would be more interested in change. Our culture just doesn't have that vision available. We look backward not forward, because how do you look into the future. (I work to describe an alternative, bright future of our aspirtations, but that's another story.)
What you say about women is interesting. I'm too old to be aware of it, but my work says that women will be the ones that decide the future of humanity. If they chooce survival, the men will go along. If not, we're out of luck.
"Let’s call it the Great Paralysis. Something’s numbed us. Paralyzed us. Pacified us."
"And so something, my friends, needs to explain: what broke our spirits, minds,"
Ahhh, this I think I can answer and it might shock you. Science did it. As a student of human survival, I thought the recent population decline in developed nations seemed the perfect thing for me to study. The commonest reasons given for why people don't prioritize families is the economic difficulty and concerns about the future. Some people mention the availability of birth control, which is probably the most accurate answer. (I listed 35 reasons to start my analysis with.) To make it short, what is missing is moral instinct. Why? Well it used to be that while humans don't start out with a great deal of well developed moral instinct, they really do have an instinct to have sex. That leads to pregnancy and the release of moral instincts (ala Conrad Lorenz). Since removing birth control is not a very reasonable option, is there another release for moral instincts? For various reasons, there should be. World War 1 demonstrated the power of science. It also solidified the power of science to create wealth. In about the 1930's, around the time of the Scopes trial, science pretty decisively won the ancient war between science and religion. All other knowledge was pretty much a casualty too, particularly the king of knowledge, philosophy, that the civilization was built upon. To illustrate the degree of victory, philosophy is currently largely considered dead knowledge. It's not and the need for critical thinking skills is becoming quite obvious in this time of disinformation. Unfortunately, like a religion, science has claimed universal authority over knowledge and anything not science is to be discarded. So can philosophy release moral instincts? Well, parts of it can, but it's like a lot of things, the basics get skipped, because they are, well, basic. Take Stoicism and Buddhism, both developed to contend with the horrors of war and the rest of the horrors of life that used to be even more common. Nope, those are advanced topics. We largely develop our moral attitude before our late teens. What about Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics or the Tao? Great stuff but still a little bit too advanced for grammar school when philophy used to be taught. So where will you find the real basics of philosophy that form our moral instincts? I'm working on it. I'm finally writing my (human survival) Strategy book (following the Genetics book). The knowledge exists. From the Maxims carved on the walls of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi to the words of Benjamin Franklin, there are the basics of philosophy that humanity needs to embrace to support and develop our most basic survival instincts. ... Science cannot tell you why to have a family. It cannot even tell you why to live, though it can tell you why not to. Ultimately it must be your moral instincts that tell you how and why to survive. Without those, the alternative is largely some form of logical, nihilistic insanity or another. Very basic philosophical premises can release those instincts. Even science is starting to admit to its limits.
