Seen
through our own paradigm, we are the perfect society, because we use our own
gauges in determining exactly what the best society is. Likewise in the Soviet
Union the Communist Party saw their society as superior, because they could
more or less feed their people and everyone was more or less equal. Our
perception of freedom here is the ability to own a Harley Davidson, at least in
my neck of the woods. It represents to many the lure of the open road as well
as their ability to own something they truly love. But the image is a finely
crafted one and the poor saps who own one often work 6-7 days a week at a job
they hate in order to have their little chunk of paradise. I think owning stuff
is a very good thing, up to a point. But beyond that point it becomes a sort of
fetishism, a mass hysteria and a very limited view of what makes life worth
living. I see our society as one that is unhealthy and that is hurtling along
like a runaway train towards an inevitable crash. We have divorced ourselves
from every ethical belief of the past so that now we consider greed to be a
good, discipline bad, and caring for others as a weakness. We view age as a
sickness rather than a part of the life-cycle, and few of us ever really
continue to grow emotionally past the teenage years. Middle-aged men pop Viagra
when perhaps they should accept the calming of their urges in order to fulfill
the much needed role of guiding figures rather that randy old men. A quarter of
our society takes psychotropic drugs in order to cope with their existence rather
than take the journey towards making their lives meaningful, Almost everyone is
suffering under crippling debt, as is their local, state, and federal
government. And if you look at it fairly, you could make a good case that each
of these problems has at the root of it our consumer culture to blame.
I don't believe in a perfect system, just a
workable one. A consumer society is one that tells us we shouldn't wait to save
money for something we should buy it now. It is a society in which we don't
actually ask if we need something, but rather base our purchases on an
emotional rather than a rational decision making process. I don't blame the
consumers so much as those who propagate such a system, who believe that their
sole purpose in life is to make a profit and if we all just do our job of
selling and consuming we will achieve the best possible of worlds. We are
inundated with countless messages from every source of media, all of them
trying to sell us something. Even churches have let in televisions, giving to
them an elevated place. Count how many times today you are prompted to buy
something, be it from Facebook, television, your phone, radio, or billboards.
Then think of how often you are prompted to quiet introspection, work in the
garden, or visit an aging relative. I don't think any society in the world has
ever been asked to view life on a purely economic level as we are, except
perhaps the Soviet Union. And the Soviet Union could not dream of the
propaganda machine we have created.
I would like to see a workable system that
maximizes human happiness. I know happiness is something hard to define, but so
is freedom and nobody is afraid to mention that as a necessary goal. I think we
can both agree that it is not a fear of starvation that drives a Warren Buffet
or a Donald Trump, so why do we think the best way to motivate people is to
work or die? Yes, it motivates, but it is the motivation of the stick rather
than the carrot. It is the kind of motivation that causes some to become drug
dealers or thieves, corporate or otherwise. The market, like fire,is a
wonderful invention but we should treat it as a tool to be used rather than a
mysterious force too powerful to control. To suggest that the market should be
responsible for society is to suggest that we are not active agents in the
process, it is a way of surrendering our humanity to outside forces. In
primitive cultures, when a man mistreated his worker or his slave he was apt to
be kept up all night with the cries of anguish. In other words, employer and
employee had a closer association and the actions of either were more closely
felt by the other. Nowadays we have distanced owner from employee so that a
worker in Thailand can be beaten and worked 12 hours a day without the person
who gets the stock dividend even being aware of how they earned their money. We
need to maintain our humanity in our business practices rather than seeing
humans as merely numbers on a spreadsheet. Man is an inherently tribal and
social creature: if we isolate ourselves from one another and from the
community we live in, we will become dysfunctional. I'm not saying the solution
to our alienation from our own humanness has an easy solution, but if we do not
accept the reality of the situation, it will be impossible. We cannot expect
what is a simplistic economic theory to solve the complexity that is the human
situation. Government is a tool, and in the hands of an educated electorate, a
pretty efficient and powerful tool. To simply abandon it would not only mean
that we would not benefit from it, it would mean that others would pick it up
and use it as they saw fit.
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