The most recent fall from gratitude.

I wondered yesterday, why people stopped being nice. It was not entirely by accident. First off, being nice is the same as being grateful, you will not find the one and not the other. Now, I have written a post that explains in the most general terms how gratitude dies, namely Dankbarkeit, Darstellung und Eitelkeit, i.e. forms of government that rely on people's display of an ideal of reason, matchedness or power channel gratitude into the relief that the display is flawless, which causes gratitude to die in the shadow of vanity.

This process did according to my considerations already start some 500 years ago. But in the case of the United States it didn't touch the mass of the people before 1950. I observed that fact yesterday, but I didn't explain it. The explanation is however given by a number of films from the era, e.g.

• The Apartment,
• Lover Come Back,
• The Thrill of It All,

i.e. the necessity to integrate the American public into the modern working environment. And the way that was done was by way of displayed grandiosity (of which the listed films are all somewhat critical).

The German ingratitude has other causes. But you see that systemic tendencies finally get through.