09-07-2022, 09:14 AM
(09-07-2022, 03:05 AM)JasonBlack Wrote:(09-07-2022, 02:14 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: Knowing the subtleties of great literature has little direct influence on how one records debits and credits on a ledger or sells widgets on the road, but on the other hand the graduate of a liberal arts program knew that there was more to life than pop culture and boozing-and-whoring. There were technical schools for those who had the passion for engineering or accounting.
Unfortunately, "boozing and whoring" seem to be what most people specifically go to college to do these days. Many middle and late wave millennials and early wave homelanders have a hedonist-masquerading-as-idealist and moral-relativist-masquerading-as-intellectual approach to life that is most apparent during their college years. I don't think there's much hope in this regard for the middle wave millennials of this ilk (my age cohort), but the late millennials and early homelanders are still young, so they may have some time to correct course.
Surely you exaggerate about the proportion of college students to go there for "boozing and whoring". One of the strongest non-financial correlations to dropping out of college is alcohol consumption. I think we can figure that one out.
Due to the high cost of such basic necessities in life as property rent and (for about forty years) low real wages, one can easily understand why people get greedy and materialistic. Greed and materialism have been typical hallmarks of the peasantry, the people least successful in material achievements and usually damned to poverty no matter what they do. The young Jewish women of Anatevka (Fiddler on the Roof) express who their ideal husband is -- and he is rich by the standards of the community. That is what they wants in their dealings with the match-maker: someone who will be well-off enough to make life something other than grinding poverty. (The gentiles don't have it so great, either -- they just happen to be on the right side of the regime when a pogrom happens). Imperial Russia was a horrible place in which to be a Jew. It was also a horrible place in which to be a Russian.
I come from an antisemitic family that kept telling me how greedy, materialistic, and crass the Jews were. When I went on a corporate-mandated move from rural America to a large urban area I met lots of Jews. They were the people with surnames similar to mine (basically any German-sounding surname 'can be Jewish'). I found most of those that I met civilized, sophisticated, and moral. They were close to me in culture and moral values. Greedy, crass, and materialistic? Such described the stupid people that I met.
...People have gotten greedier and more militaristic as economic life becomes harsher and more precarious. The Corporate wants people to be like that so that they can more easily control them and so that they can market all sorts of schlock merchandise and entertainment as salves to hurt feelings that will never be resolved. This applies even to college students who know what awaits them. They may have a four-year degree and still hold on for dear life to the dreadful job that they had while attending college. "Suffer for my all-holy greed", says the plutocrat and the executive who exploit the worker -- "and always remember to smile!"
When the shopping mall lost its charm, then along came the casino. Is that a coincidence? One way to waste money quickly replaced another, and the casino may be even be more efficient because there is no merchandise.
Quote:I'm not saying this out of some moral contempt for the more sensory pleasures of life. What gets me is the way it wreaks of a giant cope, a coverup for crippling anxiety, nihilism and lack of self-regulation and ambition.
The problem is that the instant delights that come from drugs, alcohol, speeding, gambling, impulse spending, sweets, reckless promiscuity, and other bad habits are intense, costly, and ephemeral. For people who rely upon those for bliss, life is a series of long, dreary times between rare bliss that may result in poor health, injuries, fights, poverty, legal problems, bad teeth, and a vile reputation.
Some people have learned to take delight in the signals of a build-up. Maybe we need also learn to abandon conspicuous consumption as a wasteful, empty, and even destructive bad habit.
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.