the only easy day was yesterday

Sunday, August 19, 2007

You Want The Truth? YOU CAN"T HANDLE THE TRUTH!

No, seriously.

I put up the thought here for discussion that among such a heavily influencing culture (by that I mean we are constantly bombarded by moralities and advertisements and social norms and social and aesthetic human perfections) that a human mind by the age of 20 is nearly entirely void of any un-influenced humanity. We live by so many social norms and so many accepted behaviors that we don't give thought to. Our minds may be so polluted that we cannot actually think for ourselves (if we ever could in the first place), we may always be subconsciously influenced by the social conditioning that we've been put through. We percieve love to be something in particular , we percieve friendship to be something different, we percieve emtions to be this this and this, not mixed and complicated feelings inside of us. It seems far fetched, and it may be. But I know people, we all meet them every day, that are totally oblivious to the FACT (as far as fact can ever be used) that if they were born in the middle of a jungle that they would still be yearning for a starbucks at 6 p.m. My point is that people have no idea that the world is not the way it is for a reason, it's not like this because it's best for everybody, and either way that the correct thing is not to go with it but to exercize ones ability to change his physical surroundings and others lives. The world is like this because a handful of greedy people in history saw that if they treated people like you in a certain way that you'd act just like this and let them bask in meaningless comfort and fiscal stability. I mean, I love football, don't get me wrong, but talk to an NFL player, he'd have a hell of a time wrapping his mind around it if you told him that if he was born a plain and simple human being somewhere "natural" that his calling wouldnt be throwing a funny shaped ball around. A better example is people who I used to swim with (and this was one of the reasons I couldn't stand them); a common response to this sort of this is this is what i like to do why cant this be right: and my answer is: because it is what you're good at and its been told to you that its an okay thing to do, the chance of you being born into a random place in a random year and suddenly discovering the secret to human happyness and satisfaction is infinity to one, you have an obligation to your fellow human beings to be a real huma being and get off your ass and look at the world from a position of distrust and questioning instead of in your comfortable little place where other morons tell you that your life is going well; I know that words cannot portray thoughts and that getting a completely honest answer if only for that reason is impossible, but I know that no matter what a person like this does or says there is a gnawing uncomfortable feeling about life sometimes, that shows like greys anatomy and reassurance from other people that american morals that you've been fed all your life are in fact right fill right up. There you go, that may not have been very coherent, sorry. But i open the floor for discussion:

how human are people who are participating in american commercial culture, the worker ants? Eating up the commercialized social norms and spitting them right back out into the cycle - how human is a person who does this and doesn't ever question it? How do you reason them out of it - regardless of the actual extent of the damage?

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

"We percieve love to be something in particular , we percieve friendship to be something different, we percieve emtions to be this this and this, not mixed and complicated feelings inside of us."

Language as an institution: One would think by the strength of the emotions behind friendship and love, that allow for someone to illogically be attracted to another person, to provide motivation to fight together, to walk the dogs together, to come up with strange and unique imaginative situations, that the language of friendship and love is a bit minimal and misleading. The american language seems to go hand in hand with its culture. American english came pretty late in history so by the time it was created there were many of oppertunities for it to be influenced by other languages and to expand and model more closely human expression. English by the time it got to America had seen the outskirts of africa, of india, parts of asia and had participated in many exchanges with oppertunity for growth of the language...but it seems when it got to america it was filtered instead of expanded, ennuie and boredom became simply boredom, the many words to describe a variety of relationships seemed to be lost in translation, and from a skeptical point of view it seems like expression continues to be pinched...

this is incomplete but i'm getting zombie like. I want to talk about conscience at some point soon if anyone is interested.

The W said...

Surely people who are participating in american commercial culture are in fact worker ants. Despite this, they are still just as human as you and I, just theyre more ignorant and lost.

The question: "How do you reason them out of it - regardless of the actual extent of the damage?" is a very difficult one. Forming community based institutions would be an obvious answer, however today communities for the most part are not that tight knit. Americans are taught to be apathetic towards and defensive against the "clutter" of a bunch of organizations out to "help" them. The best we can do is propagate our ideas on alternatives and hope that they catch on in the correct way. Unfortunately, without a complete deconstruction of American culture beforehand, our ideas will only be misinterpreted and commercialized if they were to catch on. Culture and knowledge knows no other way to spread to the masses in America other than commercialization.
Such a deconstruction will require us to destroy the institutions that make wo/man worker ants of a currupt way of life, not the murder of the idiots that run this show. They cant hurt people if they have nothing to hurt them through...

The W said...

I was just reading a autobiography online and i came across this line "I don't exaggerate one bit. Johann Most could so mesmerize his listeners that they would at any time go with him should he call them to man the barricades. He could bring the apathetic person to tears with his hypnotizing power." What we need to reason people out of American culture's cycle is more great orators. Can you think of anyone today that "could bring the apathetic person to tears with his hypnotizing power"?

Anonymous said...

i was just thinking about power complexes mostly in reference to police. The institution of american culture really puts people in a place of paralysis. I hear so much police hatred all the time (and why not, they use their power as an excuse to be assholes) and whenever i hear it i think: wow most people don't see past police. They don't understand that individual police are not the end, that police are figureheads in a larger system. These people ae confused about their reality. There are police theories, and police guidelines, police conditioning schools where more people are taught to hold up the american tradition of policedom. These police- the figureheads are just as confused about their power as the people that they torment because there is no doubt that they gave into the idea that the people they are hunting down and hasseling are in fact "bad" characters. This sets up individual against individual in a very disguised manner and keeps people dumb with the powerful toold of ego, fear, and anger.