Degradation is always bad. Exactly so, what can be good in the obvious signs of the disease? And degradation is practically the same disease. Or, in a scientific language, the dynamics of reverse development, regression, generalizing the name of the process of decline and gradual destruction, which can be applied to a wide variety of areas and spheres.
Here, for example, is the term “soil degradation” that is widespread in agriculture.
This in this case means that once fertile land becomes unsuitable for exploitation under the influence of various destructive factors - salinization, dust storms, improper plowing, excessive chemicalization and many other causes and effects. For the most part, people themselves are to blame for such an outcome, which, in turn, indicates their loss of agricultural skills - and what is this, in turn, if not a degradation of human thinking?
There are many examples in history of how flourishing states and seemingly omnipotent empires gradually fell into decay and desolation, losing their former power, and, in the end, ceased to exist because their internal structure, figuratively speaking, was struck by metastases of degradation. The lack of fresh ideas, the reluctance to change the old, already obsolete order, the rejection of the transition to new forms and methods of socio-economic relations - this is what creates the prerequisites for the process of degradation of society to gain strength and become more and more irreversible.
But most often, degradation means the moral decay of an individual who ceases to reckon with generally accepted moral and ethical standards and puts his selfish desires above the interests of others. Having succumbed to harmful drives, such as drug addiction or alcoholism, these people lose their moral and spiritual guidelines, degrade both physically and mentally. However, spiritual degradation is not always the result of obvious defects alone. You can lead a completely respectable lifestyle, but at the same time do not care about raising the cultural level, satisfying your spiritual needs at the expense of the most base samples.
Moral degradation today is largely a consequence of the lack of control and commercialization of the media, including the Internet. Propaganda of permissiveness, bad taste, kitsch, outright vulgarity, delivered to the masses in abundance, corrode consciousness, etching out ideas about true values from it. The negative impact of the so-called "mass" culture is manifested even in such seemingly trifles as the habit of inaudible (and most often out of place) using borrowed words. This is not only a sign of clogging up the vocabulary, but also an indisputable proof of spiritual impoverishment.
So, degradation is a pathogenic process, the result of which is known in advance: decline and complete destruction. Only the will and desire for purposeful development on the scale of both a single individual and the whole state can stop him.
