I don’t think there’s a decline in deviance at all. Just a normalization of deviance (no, not that kind. Go back to sleep, Rich. It’s not Halloween just yet).

It’s just easier to be weird and find other similarly weird people and to build a community of weirdness that is socially self-sufficient.

> Here’s some similar data from Northern Ireland on “anti-social behavior incidents”, because they happened to track those

I mean, I get what they're trying to say, but "anti-social behaviour in a place which was basically in a low-level civil war from the late 60s to late 90s fell in the noughties and tens" is not at all surprising, and not a useful comparison with the US.

NI is such a weird case that you should be very cautious about reading anything about broader trends into it at all.

I do like the illustration that they chose for the article. Jazzercise; the ultimate manifestation of deviance.

> There is no comprehensive dataset on cult formation, but Roger’s Bacon analyzed cults that have been covered on a popular and long-running podcast and found that most of them started in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, with a steep dropoff after 2000

I also don't love this as methodology. By its nature a podcast on cults is going to be biased towards covering the most _documented_ cults, and those will be older. Take something like the Zizians; did anyone other than compulsive 'Rationalist'-watchers even know they _existed_ until those murders? There are likely cults forming today which won't _really_ be noticed for a while.

(I'm not saying they're wrong that fewer cults are forming; I think they're probably right. But the methodology they're using to get there is questionable.)

> CULTURE IS STAGNATING

I don't buy this one _at all_; it likely _is_ true of movies and video games, for financial reasons, but pretty much nothing else. The sheer volume of music and TV produced today is vastly greater than previously, and that's even before getting into fan works and original internet creations (again, I think there's a measurement problem there).

> Every new apartment building looks like this:

AIUI the look that they're talking about is basically a consequence of common US planning rules; other places have their own apartment building archetype. All the apartment blocks built in a given place in a single year always look pretty similar; it's largely dictated by the rules.

I read somewhere that the USAF has been captured by officers with very conservative Christian expectations. To the point that junior officers don't even drink in public lest its held against them.

The author using the 90s as a reference point strikes me as odd, as though that was a normal period.

The 90s was peak "binge", the West was on top of the world with no challengers. People felt they could relax. Perhaps they relaxed a bit too much.

this post which mentioned in the OP has far broader examples

https://www.alexmurrell.co.uk/articles/the-age-of-average

The word choice is strange. The author is listing the decline of risk-taking and experimental life choices like: pregnancies, crime, joining a cult etc. He is talking about people making safer / more conservative life choices. He also noticed that the monetary value assigned to people's lives has risen dramatically (over 12 million USD compared to 4 million USD a few decades ago). It is not the decline of deviance; it is decline of risk taking. That doesn't mean it is good or bad. It is just a fact.

You can’t afford to risk being weird anymore. Housing is too expensive. Too many weird steps in non-pecuniary directions and you’ll end up on the street or your mom’s couch.

Seems to correlate with the increase and decline of lead poisoning. I guess the plus side of lead poisoning was an interesting world. We need more deviants than ever now, given the authoritarian push we are seeing. Too many obey.

> people don’t seem to be joining cults anymore

I think the shape of cults has changed. There is a vast army of social media influencers exploiting e.g. “new age” concepts to take advantage of vulnerable people, sometimes with devastating impact. Research just hasn’t caught up yet.

Even the natural world is becoming more same-y, with specialist species going extinct and generalists thriving, and the same invasive species becoming prevalent the world over.