What are the main problems of our society and what are the main difficulties faced by individuals? In order to identify both, we must, based on the characteristics of the major trends of the modern age, answer the question of what values people share but are at risk, and what values are preserved and supported. In both cases, it is necessary to find out what structural contradictions may lie behind these processes.
When people adhere to values and do not feel threatened, they are in a state of well-being. When people share certain values but feel threatened, they experience a crisis, either as a personal problem or as a social problem. And if people feel that all the values to which they are committed are in danger, they may be in panic.
But let's imagine people who have no common value and feel no threat. This is a state of indifference, which, having spread to all their values, leads to apathy. Finally, let's imagine the situation, the nature of the situation, risking a lack of common values when acutely aware of the threat. This is a state of anxiety, anxiety, which, having reached a certain threshold, turns into an unrecognized deadly disease.
It is precisely this time of indifference and anxiety that we are experiencing, which is not yet mature enough to give appropriate work to the mind and freedom of feeling. Instead of defining our misfortunes in terms of values and the dangers that threaten them, we often only suffer from vague anxiety; there are no well-defined social problems and no worries in our hearts that everything around us is somehow wrong. And since we are not aware of what we care about and what exactly threatens our values, there can be no concrete solutions. There is even less reason to talk about raising issues in front of social science.
In the 1930s, except for the illusions of certain business circles that were in captivity, few people doubted the existence of economic problems that gave rise to personal difficulties. Among the arguments about the "crisis of capitalism", Marx's formulations and his many unrecognized followers probably contained the most correct interpretation of these problems, and some people began to present their personal difficulties in Marxist terminology. It became clear that values shared by all were threatened by structural contradictions, which were also evident. Both were deeply felt by many. This provoked political action. In the post-war era, however, many of the values threatened ceased to be seen as values and felt threatened.
A variety of personal concerns was barely resonated; social ills and important issues that were of great importance to the structure of social relations were never discussed by the public. For those who still recognized the intellectual values and freedom inherited from the past, anxiety itself was a personal problem and indifference was a social problem. The state of anxiety and indifference became the hallmark of our era.
All of this is so striking that researchers often speak of a fundamental change in the nature of the problems that need articulation. We constantly hear that the solution of the key problems of our era has moved from the external environment of the economy and is now associated with the quality of life of the individual, that is, with the question of how soon the time will come, the most favorable for individual development of the individual. The problem of comics, not child labour, not poverty, but the problem of mass leisure are now in the spotlight.
Often it seems that many major social problems, along with private ones, are described as "psychiatric" because of the touching desire of sociologists to get rid of the discussion of the underlying problems of modern society. Without taking into account the plight in which the family finds itself in relation to the newest social institutions, it is impossible to problematize the concern of parents about the impact of comics on children.
Neither leisure time nor its harmful forms can be understood as a problem, without taking into account how social diseases and indifference affect the relationship between people and the climate of modern American society as a whole. In this climate, no "private life" problems can be put forward or solved without recognizing the value crisis that has engulfed the labor activities of people in the context of economic expansion of corporations.