This essay is from a surprising person. A congressmen from California whom I know very little about. He looks at the increase in violence and gives a list of things he thinks why its occurring.

Its an interesting read. From my perspective he hits a lot of points on the head but circles around the real central issue that all of his points tie into. He never gets to the heart of it.

For an example when he talks of the violence in society. Kids played cops and robbers, cowboys and indians... and other violent games from the beginning of time. The violence in movies and games is just a manifestation of the violence we have had in play. Whats different today? In the past the person/creature being killed was bad, they were evil from the perspective of the hero of the imagination.

Today we have games where you play the evil person and kill the good person; or even worse the person who is portrayed as the hero initiates force in many ways and the player is rewarded for it.

The cause of the increase in violence and the decay of our society is that in both game and life we reward evil and punish good. We call evil good, and good evil. We need movies with Hero's and Heroins again, not screwed up people. Make the star larger than life, something to look up to. Some would say that character is boring, I would say they are awesome. Atlas is full of them and its one of the reasons the book is so good.

We give breaks to people who racked up credit card debt, and by so doing force the banks to raise rates on those that were responsible with there credit cards. Then turn around and say debt is bad.

Within our culture we put people at odds, in conflict with natural law and that in turn creates more crazies. This root cause seems to evade even those who are looking for it, yet it seems so blatantly obvious. How do they miss it?