The most charitable interpretation of "broken culture" would be America, across all slices of society, has trended towards selfish shallow values, less intellectual interests and value on hard work, more aggression and an empathy defecit.
I think this has frayed the fabric of society by damaging the reciprocity that binds families and communities, and encourages divisive and antisocial, short-term behaviors over long-term, collective decision-making.
This varies across our rich tapestry of subcultures, but I see it everywhere. Especially among government and business leaders.
An analogy I heard is that there is no single American culture. Or even an "American Culture" at all, and that there probably shouldn't be one. And that various powers/forces/etc have tried to homogenize America into a shared American Culture which can't possibly exist. So, the analogy is America is like a soda machine that has many different flavors of soda and each of them is different and unique and loved by different people. Some flavors disgust some people too and they don't want it. However, we've decided to mix them all together anyways and no one actually likes that. So instead we'd be better off leaving each other alone, allowing different communities with different values to do things the way they want to and to rely less and less on Federal government oversight into social issues. Give more power to the states and in turn the states give more power to localities.
Wholeheartedly agree with your analogy. Americans share a federal political system, but not much of a collective culture, at least not too far beyond that shared by liberal societies around the world. It's one of the best thing about the states. You're 100% right that the Federal govt should step back to allow local government to handle issues differently. Local people care about local people and understand their needs/concerns.
That's it's considered acceptable for kids to be born into situations like this. This is "broken" because it reliably leads to failure and undesirable outcomes.
You’re making a lot of strong assumptions when you say that it’s considered acceptable. I strongly doubt that it is normal for anyone to want to be a single parent (there are of course anecdotal exceptions to this, but not on a cultural level).
This is great, and it made me realize I had started doing something similar recently: when I become anxious about something, say money, I ask myself: are my kids healthy and safe? The answer, so far, has always been yes, and that calms me down immediately.
"Frequency illusion, also known as the Baader–Meinhof phenomenon or frequency bias, is a cognitive bias in which, after noticing something for the first time, there is a tendency to notice it more often, leading someone to believe that it has a high frequency of occurrence" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion
I'm not saying that it's your case, but it could be :)
Funny this is on the front page, as I just finished Solaris last night. But I honestly was not entertained by it. I found the character actions and dialog to be strangely unmotivated and confusing—why are they doing and saying these things? Is it a cultural, time period or translation difference? Some of the ideas are definitely interesting—I mean, you had me at "sentient ocean"—and I appreciate the historic value of the idea that an alien might just be simply not understandable by humans. The descriptions of the vast, frothing, living architectures were vivid and memorable, but most everything else seemed surprisingly tedious. I haven't seen either of the film adaptations but I can't possibly imagine what the story would be since there's so little story in the book.
I don't think Solaris is Lem's best book, although that is the conventional wisdom.
I highly recommend Fiasco and His Master's Voice. Fiasco starts with quite a long intro vignette that has little to do with the rest of the story. If its too boring just skip it. (Although I think it's well worth reading).
As someone once wrote about Lem's heritage and making it into cinema: Solaris is the only one with enough sexual context to show to the viewer, other works just do not have enough of it.
I'm just rephrasing this from memory. The audience may be different now and possibly can accept less sex (this is supposedly a new trend in cinema).
Errmm...The Cyberiad certainly has plenty of 'sexual' content, but it may be considered too bizarre or disturbing for a mainstream audience, especially the story of the HPLDs.
About 7 months ago I started writing a role-playing game because I loved the premise: you play an android who has spontaneously and mysteriously developed consciousness—but android manufacturers are actively hunting down these "Awakened" robots and suppressing knowledge of the phenomenon.
I'm about 60 pages into the core rulebook and still working on the design and playtesting. Sign up on the homepage if you're interested!
I'm working on Swymm.org, an interactive, crowdsourced timeline of all history. I would love to find a collaborator who sees the potential and can help out with software development. Check out the proof of concept at beta.swymm.org. If you're interested, please get in touch with me at t3db0t (that's a zero) [at] gmail!
