Where Are We, Then?

“Where are we, then?
The religionists are the enemies of liberty, and the friends of liberty attack religion; the high-minded and the noble advocate bondage, and the meanest and the most servile preach independence; honest and enlightened citizens are opposed to all progress, while men without patriotism and without principle put themselves forward as the apostles of civilization and intelligence.
Has such been the fate of the centuries which have preceded are our own? and has man always inhabited a world like the present, where all things are not in their proper relationships, where all virtue is without genius, and genius without honor; where the love of order is confused with a taste for oppression, and the holy cult of freedom with a contempt of law; where the light thrown by conscience on human actions is dim, and where nothing seems to be any longer forbidden or allowed, honorable or shameful, false or true?
I cannot believe that the Creator made man to leave him in an endless struggle with the intellectual wretchedness that surrounds us.”

Democracy in America, by Alexis de Tocqueville, 1835

Kinda says it all, doesn’t it?