In reading The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events, which was delivered in 1979 and published in 1981, I find this at the end of Chapter One, which might have been written this morning:
The majority of accepted beliefs – religious, scientific, and cultural – have tended to stress a sense of powerlessness, impotence, and impending doom – a picture in which man and his world is an accidental production with little meaning, isolated yet seemingly ruled by a capricious God. Life is seen as a “valley of tears” – almost as a low-grade infection from which the soul can be cured only by death.
Religious, scientific, medical, and cultural communications stress the existence of danger, minimize the purpose of the species or of any individual member of it, or see mankind as the one erratic half-insane member of an otherwise orderly realm of nature. Any or all of the above beliefs are held by various systems of thought.
(pages 45-6)
Sound like any culture you participate in?