I agree.

Ok, thank you for your efforts to make your points more clear.

During any age, there is always an ethos, an ethic by which that age develops its political character and social personality. While certain ages had more prevalent and identifiable characters, ours is one that hides its nature, and maintains its values in a sub-active manner, that is meant to say without a title, or a movement, or party representation. In fact, the greatest and most powerful attribute of this age’s ethic is its invisibility. — EdwardC

I think I agree with this by and large, but I probably come at it from an opposite angle. If our culture has an ethos, it's a secularized protestant Christianity pushed to its furthest extend in its concern for individual victimhood above all other values.

This is basically the thesis of philosophers/historians like Nietzsche, Tom Holland, John Gray that I'm reiterating here. Since the dawn of civilization until Christ you basically had strength/power as the highest value. This was understood and made very explicit by, among other things, monumental architecture that served to emphasize the strength of the ruler in various ways.

Romans initially hung criminals and defeated opponents on the cross to signal debasement and humiliation... to signal the worst of the worst. Christianity took this symbol of utter humiliation as the central symbol of their movement, and inverted the valuations that came before by turning good/noble into evil, and bad/base into good... the meek shall inherit the earth, the last shall be the first etc etc. As the Roman empire was degenerating further and further, Christianity took hold of the empire and became the state religion.

Fast-forward a good millennium after Christianity had consolidated itself and basically had become synonymous with European culture, you get the renaissance and a couple of heresies developing out of that, like Protestantism which put even more emphasis on the individual and his personal relation to God. This eventually turned into the enlightenment and secularism, which did away with God but still kept this basic value of elevation and emancipation of the individual above everything else. Those heresies focused more on the individual became dominant especially in the Anglo-Saxon world (unlike most of continental Europe), which later became the dominant empires spreading its ideologies all over the world.

Out of this also came the currently dominant political ideologies like liberalism, socialism and communism (all of them concerned with the emancipation of the individual), which are not in opposition to religion (as it is typically construed), but a secular continuation of the valuations of a very particular religion that arose in the middle East out of Judaism, and further developed in Western Europe.

So the circle back to your point, if every age has an ethos, than I would say our current ethos is something like secular liberalism/Protestantism which is the implicit religion of the current hegemon in a globalized world, the US. You could easily make the link to Wokism/identity-politics and the like as the pinnacle of this elevation of victimhood, but I don't really want to open that particular can of worms here.

But yes, it is invisible insofar people don't even see it as an ideology, as a faith of a particular group in some value, among possible others, but as universal objective morality itself... morality construed as the avoidance of all suffering as its only goal.

What Tom Holland for instance observes is that we in the West periodically have these religious revolutionary emancipatory movements because of this Christian inversion of values that is inherently unstable and self-undermining. This is how we presumably could arrive at this secular hyper-individualist ideology, because it continuously has the tendency to erode its own institutions that seek to propagate their powerbase.

So to circle back to another point you made, I don't think these private actors deliberately seek to undermine traditional values or inject a sense of "hypersexuality" or tribalism into the collective conscious, as much as they just opportunistically make use of tendencies already present in current culture or make use of the void that has been left by a religion that has eroded its own institutions over the millennia. Bread and circuses... appealing to the "baser demons of our nature" is always a good bet to sell something.

Indeed. But we do seem to live in an era which is consistently selling the idea that this is the amongst worst eras imaginable and that deep state or secularism, liberalism, the Left or the lizard people are to blame. It seems we need to return to a golden era - for Trumpists it's the MAGA fantasy, for some philosophers it seems to be Platonism or God. — Tom Storm

Yes, and for socialists it's a workers utopia, for enviromentalists it's a pre-agrarian garden of eden...

I do think the idea that we are living in the worst possible eras imaginable sells itself to some extend because of certain ecological and social issues we have.

I do think the idea that we are living in the worst possible eras imaginable sells itself to some extend because of certain ecological and social issues we have. — ChatteringMonkey

What, like glaciers and islands disappearing, 50C heat and widespread extinction, while Putin waves his nuclear missiles around like an angry baby with its rattle?

What, like glaciers and islands disappearing, 50C heat and widespread extinction, while Putin waves his nuclear missiles around like an angry baby with its rattle? — Vera Mont

Yes, something like that :-) ... fire-apes with weapons of mass-destruction on an overheating globe is definitely a concern I would say.

I'm pretty sure the advanced aliens are not coming to rescue us from ourselves. For much of the last century, that's what science fiction writers considered our best hope.

But specifically to the 'worst' imaginable part, we used to just move to some other part of the globe when faced with ecological problems... the problems we are facing now are global and from a human perspective almost eternal. There is no escape... it's almost metaphysical what we are facing.

Well, if we learn, we tend to learn from adversity... so maybe we can find something positive somewhere on the way down.

Well, if we learn, we tend to learn from adversity... some maybe we can find something positive somewhere on the way down. — ChatteringMonkey

I'm rooting for the handful of survivors. I imagine a quite different future for their descendants. But that's easy for me to make up; I don't have to go through the interim. Other people, more forward-looking than the average corporate CEO, have been very busy storing up knowledge, seeds and DNA samples for those survivors.

I see where you’re coming from by attributing the over-emphasis of individual liberties and personal freedoms (in their contemporary forms) to Christianity. I also think that the Christian ethic helped allow for the one I described (to an extent), even though Christianity and hedonistic violence seem opposed.

As you mention, the tolerance of complete degeneracy and all encompassing sense of equality that result from excess liberalism - i.e. identity-politics - can also be said to have eroded the institutions, corrupted the establishment, democracy/republic.

This doesn’t exactly explain how an untouchable elite is capable of profiting off of the destruction of the democracy, although it points to an inverted link between power and degradation as you mention.

I understand what you mean. You seem to be coming from a Nietzschean perspective, colored somewhat by conservatism as a result of contact with the current age. However, Christianity, in my opinion, is only enough to describe the tendencies of the masses. The core ethic, which informs the masses but which is not formed by them, I think, is more obscure and derived from an older form of spirituality - one which would have been in a form of sinister aversion to the civilization of ancient Greece, especially to the democratic and intellectual freedoms of Athens. It is at once powerful and totalistic while remaining passive, relegated to the realm of spirituality and emotions. That’s why I mentioned Mesopotamia, pop-culture and music, because of how these notions are expressed with emotional backing or through libidinal processes.