A Mental Exercise

I challenged myself to a mental exercise: “What is the root problem, the one thing that makes modern culture so immoral; the one thing which—if addressed—would put society on a better path?”

Of course there are the Seven Deadly Sins and much of our current predicament is the result of a combination of factors so I knew the task would be difficult—if not impossible—to narrow our present situation down to one overriding vice. But I had this feeling that if I kept peeling away the layers, I could describe in a single concept (or perhaps even word) what was “wrong with the world.”

I began brainstorming and initially wrote down 33 ideas fairly quickly. I then went back through the list, asking myself “but why?” for each subsequent proposal, digging deeper until I finally came to my underlying answer: Control. More specifically, the constant desire to control everything.

Control

Seeking control goes all the way back to Adam & Eve in the Garden of Eden. The serpent persuaded them to eat of the fruit of the tree of the knowlege of good and evil because they “shall be as Gods.” (With the dominance of relativism today, what has changed is not so much knowing as it is deciding good and evil…if evil is even acknowledged at all.)

Control is the hidden force behind sin in general. Misuse of power, tyranny, corruption, greed…any number of vices trace their roots back to a desire to control. But it is especially prevalent in the social debates of the day.

Social Issues

Tired of your spouse? Get a divorce. Want to have sex at any time while minimizing your chance of having children? There’s contraception for that: it is literally known as “birth control”. Still got pregnant? You can get an abortion because it’s more important to have control over your future than to be burdened with human life. Don’t like the parts you were born with? You can get new ones or at least “decide” which gender you are. Whatever the next hot-topic social issue becomes, I can just about guarantee it will touch on some form of control.

(On a side note, “same-sex marriage”—an oxymoron as much as a “four-sided triangle”—is exerting control over definitions.)

I believe sexual sin is one of the darkest areas of vice and it all comes back to control: pornography, fornication, masturbation, and other sexual sins are all on-demand “solutions” and just one area where conceding to instant gratification justifies the action.

But even outside the realm of controversial debates, we see an ever-increasing expansion of human control. Need a ride? There’s an app for that. Itching for a date? Swipe right. Want something in a couple hours but would rather not go out? Add to cart. Hungry? Your delivery will arrive in thirty minutes or less. Something physically or mentally unsatisfactory? Your prescription is ready for pickup.

Politics

Because youth sports are increasingly prohibited from having winners and losers (just “participants”), losses seem to make so much more of an impact. Just look at the controversies surrounding the election of the last three U.S. presidents according to the claims of their disputants: Obama wasn’t eligible to win, Trump didn’t win fairly, and Biden didn’t win at all. But this just proves the point that control is a malady affecting both sides of the aisle: it is the true pandemic of our times. (I’d argue that liberals, who tend to be less religious and also arguably suffer from more vices, manifest the ailment more however.)

When Trump was elected, people first completely shut down (often in rooms with coloring books) and then spent the next four years focused on trying to say he didn’t win fairly. They probably could have impeached him for any number of things, but they constantly went back to 2016. It was like nothing else happened during those four years. Their control-centric minds could not reconcile the fact that something happened that they didn’t want; it drove them mad—into a frenzy really—so that it was as if they were hyped up on drugs. They simply refused to reconcile with reality.

Technology

I believe one reason Silicon Valley tends to be made up of so many liberals—and particularly atheists—is because they are constantly used to playing God and having total control over everything to the extent that they feel no need for God. They are creating and maintaining worlds and within the universe of zeroes and ones; they are omnipotent. (But they forget that the true God is also omniscient, which they strive for but can never achieve.)

To a lesser extent, with the proliferation of technology and more of us living in worlds dominated by smartphones, streaming, and other purely technological work and entertainment, we also feel in control.

Comfort

The fable of the Princess and the Pea is entirely accurate: the more we are accustomed to comfort, the more the smallest discomfort makes an impact on our overall dissatisfaction.

Control and comfort both infinitely approach the limit (an “asymptote” in mathematics).

Some people tend more towards comfort than control, but this just lifts the control-centric people into greater power. Socialism is giving up individual control from the proletariat level in order to have more comfort (it never works out that way, but this is what people are doing; in effect, they are just giving even more control to those at the top).

Possible Solutions

I’ve always found it annoying when someone points out a societal or other ill but fails to provide any sort of remedy. In contrast to that vein, would like to provide a few possible solutions:

  1. Read books on abandonment. I highly recommend:
  2. Tangentially, consecrations such as True Devotion to Mary and Consecration to St. Joseph help with surrender
  3. Spend more time far out in nature to see the beauty of the created world far from human technology
  4. Spread this idea and bring the concept more to the forefront of people’s awareness
  5. Use fictional story to powerfully achieve the above

Other Answers

I asked my mom the same question and she said “lack of respect for life”.

Interstingly enough, I had ended my “brainstorming” list by asking the question “What is the root cause of mass shootings?” and then turned to this blog to look at the topics I’ve covered in the past (because obviously those are the societal ills I felt strongly needed to be addressed). The first post that jumped out was “Letter to Planned Parenthood” so I wrote down on my list “Disrespect for life/the culture of death.” Only later, after discussion with my mom, did I see that I had answered my own question about mass shootings on the line above with the same answer given by her!

I also ran this by one of my brothers who is a priest since I was curious what takeaways he might have after countless hours in the Confessional. Before I even finished asking the question, he cut me off with “Pride”.

Miscellaneous Thought

Not “Ctrl-Alt-Del”, but rather “Ctrl. Alt: Del!” (Control. Alternative: Deliverance)