(06-26-2018, 01:38 PM)beechnut79 Wrote: If this is today's society, can we change it?
If we don't change it and we survive, then either it will change us in ways that we do not choose, or else our society will go on some disastrous course that brings about its ruin.
Quote:Is it time for us to reassess how we've been asserting ourselves in life? Do we know what it is we really want?
Advertising and propaganda exist to make people think that they want something... without contemplating rational causes to support what the advertiser or propagandist suggests for us.
Quote:We have become more self-obsessed, more narrowly focused, as the public domain seems increasingly dangerous. This despite reports that incidents of personal violence have been decreasing. Seems like the opposite has happened as news programs are chock full of stories of mass shooting and murder-suicide incidents.
Bad news travels fast. Thus the mass shootings which are obvious outliers of human (or inhuman) behavior become national news. Of course, in a country with thoroughly-controlled media that exclude all else, the predictable message might be "the potato crop is in".
This said, the decay of civility in American politics bodes ill. A similar decay preceded the American Civil War between people who thought slavery abominable and others who thought it was a wondrous institution necessary for settling the western frontier and bringing about economic progress. Abusers and exploiters, whether slave-masters in the Old South or the now-disbanded (and disgraced) pedophile group North American Man-Boy Love Association, often delude themselves into believing that their abuse and exploitation is benefice and that they can convert others to their side.
Quote:It is harder to help others than it used to be, and doing so in any structured way has become fraught with bureaucracy and barriers, so that where altruism still exists it is harder to express. Was this attitude originally fostered by the classic Smokey the Bear commercials? ONLY YOU can do it obviously applies to much more than just preventing forest fires. We have been thoroughly brainwashed to believe that we need to be constantly acting on our own behalf. We are also brainwashed to believe that we constantly need a purpose--something to strive toward. Leisurely pursuits seem to be more and more looked down upon, helping to make liars out of so many futurists who once predicted that the advanced technology most of us now kneel at the feet of would create increasing amounts of leisure time. Too much emphasis on work and productivity, however, can be aggressive and combative, and this in turn leaves us feeling weak and tired. Too little time and energy to explore what really turns you on and the higher purpose it can serve.
We need to find ways of avoiding bureaucracies that will never serve our moral objectives. If you dislike giant, bureaucratic corporations with their low, rigid, impenetrable glass ceilings, then start your own small business even if it is nothing more than a food truck. Local food pantries may be more reliable than the food stamp apparatus once the Hard Right does to it what it wants. Because the post-modern economy can no longer support the need for workweeks lasting 60 hours or more, we will have either leisure or idleness, and the difference between fulfilling leisure and unfulfilling idleness is that one has the resources (including money and learning) to find something worthy of doing. Remember: bureaucracy is good only at controlling people and creating paperwork, which suggests employment for the right sort of person -- but Ludwig van Beethoven didn't need any bureaucracy to tell him how to compose his symphonies, Thomas Alva Edison didn't rely on a bureaucracy for inspiration and methods for his inventions, Albert Einstein needed no bureaucracy (except for his income as a patent clerk in Switzerland) to overturn much of the common knowledge in physics, and Pablo Picasso needed no bureaucracy to help him paint. It is telling that the finest works of Dmitri Shostakovich (his string quartets) were the ones least under the influence of any bureaucratic entity.
Don't forget that there are plenty of local opportunities for volunteer work where there is too little money involved to tempt bureaucrats to join in.
So if you can start a small business, then you are quite possibly the true hero of capitalism -- a capitalist! If you can create, then create!
Quote:We increasingly devalue older people, while we live in an increasingly ageing society. Ageism still exists in employment despite laws that have been in place since the 1960s or 1970s. Employers have vast ways of getting around this so that any potential lawsuits can be very difficult. We have also devalued those who don't have high incomes despite the fact that racial or sexual slurs can cut off your livelihood as Roseanne Barr has found out along with many others.
I have a good memory of times going back to the 1960s, and I paid attention to people who were old when I was a child, so I have memories or at least recollections of others' memories going back to the 1890s. I knew some people who were the in the last (but failed) wave of western settlers. Had there been a little more water in western Nebraska, then I might be writing this material there and not in Michigan. I remember hearing a story that a sister of my great-great grandmother was a "Miss Kitty" in Deadwood, South Dakota. I saw her obituary, and the praise of her as a sophisticated Christian woman was ludicrous for being overdone. I know what she was doing operating a saloon in a vice-laden city.
If we have enough prosperity, age is not a bar to work that depends upon creativity and imagination. It might be to heavy physical labor or to any work that requires 70-80 hours of work in a weak, as for a medical intern. I'm 62, so I am old enough that advertisers consider me trash... but I also know how to get along without dependence upon the consumer society for my self-gratification. Culture enriches life, and mindless entertainment blunts it.
As for racial and sexual slurs... yes, we need to be careful about what we say about minorities -- ethnic, religious, and sexual. Rosanne Barr might have gotten away with calling some dumb black crook a dumb black crook, but calling Valerie Jarrett an 'ape' is stupid because Valerie Jarrett (connected to a brilliant and unusually-honorable politician whom Rosanne Barr derides) is anything but stupid*. We all know about prominent people whose careers have ended because they have been linked to sexual harassment or even borderline rape... a prominent person who depends upon personal fame or at least recognition for doing one's job, then one might as well live honorably as must a bank clerk and have neither the means for abusing power to the detriment of humanity nor mass-familiarity that can be turned against one, as with Harvey Swinestein.
Part of our current distress is that we have political leadership certifiably worse than what our society expects of us. We usually elect people that we perceive to be better than we are, people who fit our ideals even if we can't achieve those ideals themselves. Donald Trump wallows in the ethical gutter. I would never talk about grabbing women by their crotches, I would never mock people with disabilities, I would never praise despots or dictators at the expense of democratic leaders, and I would never smear great chunks of humanity. Doing so in the job that I have most recently held would get me fired. Another part is that our economic elites act as if they are the ones whose satisfaction is the measure of goodness that they insist that we all recognize.
Soft standards for out economic and political elites who act as if they have the right and duty to treat us badly alienate me -- and I am one of millions who cannot believe otherwise. The way things are going we may be headed for some apocalypse that destroys much of our wealth and destroys many of our institutions so that we must start over from scratch. Think of Japan in 1945.
*That is not to say that brilliance excuses everything. There are wayward intellectuals who deserve our disdain, shysters able to overpower our best interest, and terrorists like Ted Kaczynski. William Shirer particularly lamented the 'intellectual gangster' character of several Nazi figures in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Brilliance is worthless unless it does good for humanity.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.