As these attacks take their toll, society has difficulty coalescing around common goals. People stop believing that social progress requires social discipline. Any public effort that requires collective discipline encounters withering controversy. Wars are awkwardly fought and badly remembered afterward. A euphoric enthusiasm over spiritual needs eclipses concern over secular problems, contributing to a high tolerance for risk-prone lifestyles.
People begin feeling guilt about what they earlier did to avoid shame.
Public order deteriorates, and crime and substance abuse rise. Gender distinctions narrow, and child-rearing reaches the point of minimum protection and structure. Eventually, the enthusiasm cools having left the old cultural regime fully discredited, internal enemies identified, comity shattered, and institutions delegitimized. Many Americans recall this mood on the campuses and urban streets of the Consciousness Revolution . Earlier generations knew a similar mood in Greenwich Village around 1900, in utopian communes around 1840, in the Connecticut Valley nearly a century earlier, and in the Puritans New Jerusalems in the post-Mayflower decades.