If you’re pinpointing a time when America became less serious, it’s around the same time when America began sacrificing communal responsibility in favor of individual pursuits. Though it’s unfair to pin everything on the Boomers, the concept of finding oneself did not exist during the German Blitz. As the sociologist and Freud scholar Philip Rieff wrote in The Triumph of the Therapeutic, “the psychological man” emerged as the dominant moral type in the Western world in late 1960s, replacing tradition and community with the idea of “himself and his own emotions.”
— Read on boyle.substack.com/p/on-seriousness

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