The basic set-up of the modern world: isolating people, inducing them to yield to temptation, then ensuring that they do not repent

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The basic set-up of the modern world has been well-designed to induce people to choose their own damnation - which is actively to reject the salvation that Christ has already won for each of us.

It is not easy to do this, because any and all sins can be repented, and in that sense anybody can be saved.

Yet it certainly looks as if a lot of modern people do not want to be saved - that they will reject salvation because they have been persuaded that good is evil; and vice versa.

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The situation is most extreme among the ruling elites. And the situation is mediated by the Mass Media.

The basic set-up is to ensure that young people leave home without getting married and without any commitment to the church - that they leave home, typically to go to college - and that the environment they live-in is meaningless, purposeless, and lacking in any real human relationships.

Instead, there is a pleasure-pain axis of discernment - and an expectation that those who are of high status are those who experience pleasure; and high status pleasure is mainly about sex, travel and intoxication. 

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When somebody leaves home to go to college they seldom have any commitment to the subject they study - in fact they study a smorgasbord or smattering of subjects which by definition cannot have an overall meaning. So work is ruled-out as a source of meaning and purpose. Work is meaningless and merely passing exams and getting grades does not substitute - that cannot possibly be the primary focus of a life.

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And because marriage is ruled-out, and celibacy is despised, there is no meaning to relationships except pleasure - at least diversion, but the aim is ecstasy.

So the sexual life becomes a purposeless, meaningless search for emotions - fighting against the tendency of humans to habituate to pleasure - to get used to pleasure and stop responding.

Thus relationships become serial exploitations - perhaps mutual exploitations (that is supposed to be the 'moral' type of relationship), perhaps attempts to get what you want - a lot of it and frequently and with variety - without giving anything away (this is the high status form of modern relationship).

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Travel has become a vital part of the currency of modern youth life - it offers variety, stimulus, it promises to overcome habituation - and it includes hope of sex with new people and of intoxication without consequences. 

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Sex and travel are rare, expensive, hard to attain (which is why they function as status symbols) - and because euphoria is available in bottled form and as pills, intoxication becomes de facto the actual aimed-at hope for more and more people. People spend their lives anticipating obliteration of their own self-awareness, and recollecting previous successes in this area.

But it is difficult to make this out to be a high status and admirable thing to do, but fortunately the mass media have provided the necessary resources. And so long as intoxication is fun, and no higher purpose than fun is regarded as real - then intoxication becomes a kind of bottom-line.

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So, modern people live in an environment in which they are:

1. Existentially alone. Not married and no family, no (real) friends, no church, not even any aim to get these.

2. In a world where the highest value and hope is to travel, have sex with multiple desirable partners, and beomce intoxicated.

3. In sum - they are empty yet surrounded by temptations, utterly isolated, and having no reason not to yield.

In a nutshell, everybody does yield - sooner or later: 'everybody' falls into this hedonic and meaningless and purposeless life.  

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AND THEN, the mass media does its most important work, because none of this would matter if it was repented. If the futile, comfort- and sensation-seeking life was recognized as evil and rejected.

But what actually happens is that the futile life of desperation is depicted as good, cool, fun, the best - in a million media outlets.

So to recognize futility and separation as evil; and to restore meaning, purpose and marriage and family relations as the proper purpose of earthly life and religion as the proper purpose of mortality; is regarded as the only real evil.

In sum, the basic set-up of the modern world is that the evil, futile, meaningless life of self-subversion is depicted as good; and therefore the only recognized evil is to subvert the life of self-subversion.
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