This is a major issue in my (so-called...) Life!
I think 'things' are very bad indeed - but hardly anybody agrees.
And I know exactly why: because we have been inculcated since birth with the idea that 'things' amount to current material conditions: and the idea that an Evil regime is one that deliberately causes excessive suffering and death.
Clearly that is the general idea of a bad life; all the future dystopias that are so popular nowadays in movies, on TV, in adult and - especially - teen fiction; are dystopian precisely because the rulers deliberately imprison, torture, and kill people in large numbers - often without reason (or, at least, the nastiness is disproportionate to the reason for it).
The usual villain is someone who enjoys inflicting pain and killing people. Also - modern villains are, almost always, depicted as snobbish, racist, sexist... (so-called...) Right Wing. Hence the idea of Hitler as the archetype.
The idea of Evil as socialist, feminist, and favouring the historically repressed - is off-the-map. hence the fact that Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot (ie. the vast majority of Evil totalitarian dictators of recent memory) are down the memory hole.
The idea of a spiritual dystopia is off-the-map.
It is literally incomprehensible that an Evil society (much like Huxley's Brave New World) might satisfy all material needs, might refrain from tormenting its citizens, and keep the population distracted and pleasured.
For a Christian, this means (so far as observable, public life is concerned) that Satan has won. Not that Satan is win-ning, not that Satan will win unless...
But that Satan has - here and now, and as things actually are - has won.
Past tense. Done.
In public discourse; the idea that Evil is primarily spiritual - that is that Life is about salvation and damnation, about souls rather than bodies, about eternity rather than now-and-next - that idea is not merely omitted, not merely suppressed and excluded: it has-been and is sense-less, literally incomprehensible.
That is the current situation.
Hope resides in the fact that public discourse does not represent private thoughts and feelings. Not yet, at any rate.
But, as the mass media and especially social media continue to expand - we are getting ever closer to that situation: I mean when public is all.
In sum: Satan has won in the public realm - and the current spiritual war is over the private realm.
Yet this isn't much of a war, so far - it is only being fought on one side, on Satan's side
Since the public - en masse, by their revealed preferences and behaviours - want, ASAP, to fuse their once-private thoughts and feelings with the public realm.
From where I stand: that's how bad 'things' are.
