“As a nation, we’ve lost our sense of altruistic and moral purpose, a collective will to do what is decent and right and, as sociologists like to say, ‘other-regarding.’ Instead, we’ve been living in a state benumbed and a benumbed state, in which nihilism prevails and corruption oozes from the very top. Another way to think about this might be to say that we’ve been living in a noir film. Or that we’re enacting the zero-sum values of reality television. What is it that contestants are so fond of saying? I’m not here to make friends, I’m here to win.”
“But the point is: Trump has normalized selfishness. This moral cynicism has not been healthy, and I don’t just mean this in the psychological or spiritual sense. Our lost generosity has cost American lives. A once-in-a-century pandemic strikes, our public health experts eventually tell us all to wear masks for the commonweal, but the president tells us that mask-wearing is one of those rules not to be followed (like paying taxes, like the emoluments clause, like campaign finance laws, like obstructing justice). And so we, an extravagantly wealthy nation, suffer from an extravagant number of deaths” – Jennifer Senior, writing on “Generosity” in the New York Times, as part of a series titled “What We’ve Lost” where each member of the op-ed team writes “on what the past four years have cost America and what’s at stake in this election”.