A Grand Unified Theory of Cultural Stagnation

In the following excerpt, Derek and Adam Mastroianni investigate the cultural stagnation theory through the lens of reductions in bad forms of deviance among kids and crime among adults.

Derek Thompson: So it seems like movies, music, architecture, branding, even science have all become, in your words, less deviant or less capable of producing ideas that meet a reasonable definition of novelty. Some people like to say culture is stuck. And I think what we should do is—sometimes the way this conversation goes is that people have these huge theories for why all culture is stuck, and they try to apply those big theories in individual categories like film or television.

I kind of want to go about this the opposite way. I want to talk about individual fields like film, music, science. And then as we discuss what’s going on in those industries, we’ll think, “All right. Are we hearing any ideas or explanations that are rhyming and resonating?” And then we’ll try to construct our grand theories out of those individual pieces.

First, you begin by pointing out that according to several measures, people, individuals, are less weird than they used to be. How so?

Adam Mastroianni: So let’s start with “weird in a bad way,” how people are less weird in a bad way. And this, I think, is where the data is clearest, the most comprehensive, and the most overlooked, and it comes from kids. They do these surveys every year of high school students about all the various naughty things that they could do.

And every year, they tell us they’re doing less of them. They are drinking less. They’re taking fewer illegal drugs. They’re less likely to bring a gun to school, which I think is really interesting. They’re more likely to wear their seat belts.

These trends, I mean, we don’t have data going that far back. It begins in the ’90s, but starting in the ’90s, you can see a steady decline in all of these—I think we can agree—bad forms of deviance, including teenage pregnancy, which is something we don’t have to rely on survey measures for because it’s hard to hide the fact that you’ve had a child. That has been declining even longer, where we have longer data to see. So compared to their parents and grandparents, kids today are kind of a bunch of Goody Two-shoes.

Thompson: One thing you discuss here is the decline of cults, which I think is really interesting, because I think most people assume that we live in a cultish moment with QAnon, random internet theories.

But the data, as best we can see, finds that cults peaked in the 1970s, 1980s, right around the same time that serial killers peaked. In fact, if you look at the graphs of serial killings over time and cults over time, they are damn near the same graph. I’m not suggesting that one is causing the other, but it’s just an interesting thing to note. What do you think is going on with the rise and fall of cults in the last 50 years?

Mastroianni: I mean, it’s part of a larger rise and fall of adult crime in general. So you can place those same graphs against the graph of violent crimes and property crimes, and you will find that those two have a peak in the ’90s and declined since then. So whatever’s going on that causes someone to leave their family and go join the cult compound might be the same thing that causes them to pick up a gun and shoot someone in a bar fight.

So I think that thing, that X factor, has disappeared at the same time. I can hold myself back if we don’t want to get to theories yet, if we want to get more facts on the table first.

Thompson: No. Jump in with theories. Don’t think of this as too organized a conversation. It’s Thanksgiving week. We’re passing around the stuffing and the cranberry.

Mastroianni: Yeah. We’re looking …

Thompson: We’re just having fun here.

Mastroianni: … for a way to scandalize Uncle Mike.

Thompson: Exactly.

Mastroianni: I mean, look, I think the same reason people are committing fewer crimes is the same reason that they’re killing fewer people, both in serial fashion or in cultic fashion. I think life matters more in a literal sense, in that when you ask people how much they would pay to decrease the risk of various bad things happening to them—and these studies have been done over years—people say higher amounts year after year.

They’re more willing to pay more money to reduce their risks more and more as the years go on, and I think there’s two reasons for that. One is they have more money in the first place, which makes sense, but this has increased faster than the increase in GDP per capita, so it’s not just that our pocketbooks are thicker.

I think the other reason is that the ambient risks of our lives have also decreased. It used to be there were all kinds of things that could kill you, kind of in unsurprising ways. You get an infection; we don’t have a cure. You die in a car accident; we don’t have seat belts. Your government tells you that you must get on this boat and go to a foreign country and shoot at the enemies of the state. This happens every generation except for the last few.

And if you live in a world where there’s all kinds of risks everywhere, then you’re not that sensitive to the optional ones that you might incur on a daily basis, right? If I have just gotten back from shooting Nazis in Western Europe, do I care that much about the fact that I’m not wearing a seat belt in the back of a pickup truck that’s going 35 miles an hour down a road that’s full of potholes? It just doesn’t occur to me. Do I care that much about the fact that the cigarette that I’m smoking maybe is going to take a few years off the end of my life? I mean, a Nazi might’ve taken a few years off the end of my life.

I mean, I think about the fact that both of my grandfathers died in their mid-60s, early 70s, and that was on track with their life expectancy for the year they were born. Imagine knowing that you have a good chance that you will never draw a Social Security check, how different the life would be that you live when you realize that you live sort of in a land of milk and honey, at least compared to our ancestors.

Then you start to realize, “Oh. Maybe I should wear my seat belt. Maybe I shouldn’t pickle my brain with alcohol. Maybe I shouldn’t take this unknown pill at this party. Maybe I should play it safe instead.” That’s my grand theory.

This excerpt has been edited and condensed.

Host: Derek Thompson
Guest: Adam Mastroianni
Producer: Devon Baroldi