You could make a similar argument about capitalism. We _should_ have grown past it by now, but we haven't, and every time we try to invent a replacement system we end up making things worse.
You can see the ethical decay unfolding in real-time as societies turn replaced the old, rigorously tested system of religion with shiny new secular ethics.
The Nordic countries are all among the least religious countries in the world, yet they seem to have some of the most ethical societies on the planet if you consider human rights, democracy and low violence to be the result of an ethical society.
The most religious countries in the world are all at the very bottom of rankings taking into consideration any of those factors.
I think your example is not a good one. Nordic countries have the concept of Jante law. If you can verbalize such a concept and also recognize that it exists in your society, by definition it makes your society more intolerant than a culture that has no such concept (such as the USA).
In fact, I would argue the open-ness and tolerance of nordic culture is specifically exploitative of the cultural expectation that you do not raise concern or object and are expected to be in agreeance with everyone else that "this here is a tolerant society". It's a valid theory that the fastest culture to adopt any philosophy will be the one that has the population with the greatest number of people who don't disagree.
I think a case could be made (although I'm struggling to do so myself) that the growth of mercantilism, and then capitalism, could be understood as direct challenges to Abrahamic-religion-based ethics, especially as capitalism directly discourages altruism.
I think this is a thesis I need to do some work on to either reject it or let it mature, but I think this is an interesting starting place. It is worth noting that the early Christians frequently practiced collectivism and rejected the concept of individual property rights, although that was ~2000 years ago, the faith has evolved sine then.
All of this to say, I do not believe its that secular ethics per se are the cause of the decay, but rather that the religions of the world have not made a compelling enough case to sway people away from rejecting altruism in the name of personal enrichment. The situation is made considerably worse by the fact that a fair number of the global religions see the spoils of personal enrichment as evidence of righteousness, and altruism as at least adjacent to sin.
I can't read the link but we've the same thing in Ireland. I've always assumed it stemed from shops being family owned. e.g. We have a stationary store that was originally called Eason and Sons which when said quickly sounds like Easons.
There'a s few other examples but that's the one that always stood out to me
>It sounds like men should either not get married, or if they do, then endeavor quite seriously to keep their wives happy.
I'm happily married, and in the sense of being counter-cultural would be in completely the other end of the spectrum (very conservative about family, intend on having 6-8 kids that I will cherish even when they're adults).
That said, I think you've hit the nail on the head about "happy wife, happy life".
It's important to basically dedicate your life to being in service to her, but on the flip side it's important for her to do the same.
This level of dedication is almost counter-cultural in a sense, because you're not putting yourself first, but it's absolutely worth it in the long run.
On a visceral level, you feel always loved, always important, always worthy.
That's great, but you should realize that not everyone is wired the same way, and that's fine - you'll have a hard time catching me criticizing anyone's choices here. All I can really offer is my own feelings and observations as someone who's been around the block a bit these days.
> intend on having 6-8 kids that I will cherish even when they're adults
There's a wonderful Mike Tyson quote that everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face. I assure you that it's quite a rare individual who gets married and has kids with the intent of despising their spouse and estranging themselves from their children. Sometimes it works out, and other times it doesn't.
You are apparently speaking from a Christian perspective. What do you do when after childbirth your spouse exits that reciprocal context and begins consuming you as a resource, but not before experimenting with narratives that maximize sympathy for her, which, as you can probably guess, make you the Disney villain.
It’s true. I’ve talked a lot of guys off the edge of a cliff. You try to warn the new generation but they don’t listen, guys always got to learn the hard way.
Condensing GPs wall of text, I think the overall point is that Aspies are bad at ascribing motivation and mental states to neurotypicals, but much better than neurotypicals at ascribing them to other Aspies.
It's more a case of speaking different "emotional languages" than a strict deficit.
What was stopping someone from cutting and pasting the celebrity heads on the hardest-core, most shocking porno imaginable? I don't see the difference, but now you add "in space" or "as quaternions" to a prompt, potentially creating something accidentally great.
You can see the ethical decay unfolding in real-time as societies turn replaced the old, rigorously tested system of religion with shiny new secular ethics.