Amerika

Always seeking new blogs to read, since forums are defunct and etexts are of things published long ago, I found this insightful little excerpt:

Few want to face the fact that the world is in a bad way, even less offer anything of value, just the usual new “green” initiative which will sustain life and prolong the suffering for another 50 years so we can spread like diseases. The mindset that humans are naturally of quality has become devastating to us, now quality and quantity have become the same and we have flourished beyond our means, nature has been plundered and we have imprisoned ourselves in a world of industrial slavery, devaluation, monotony, the suicide of the self on a scale never seen before. These are things people don’t wish to hear about their bright and vibrant new age however, we’re posed with so many threats, so many problems and questions awaiting an answer few are willing to provide.

Shorter showers and driving hybrid cars is well and good, but it won’t help repair the horrendous impacts we’ve had on our planet, let alone the fact that hybrid cars are built around the world (pollution, travel etc.) and their batteries require rare metals and resources. We need to consider the fact that 97% of the worlds water is in the ocean and a further 2.4% remains in ice caps and glaciers, leaving 0.6% of the worlds water as fresh and drinkable. Now also bear in mind the population booms of recent times and the issues with draught, water restrictions, pollution and a variety of other issues and we start to see that the future doesn’t look as promising as some would like us to think. Regardless of what’s needed most people aren’t able to comprehend the world needing to lose precious humans. What needs to be realised however is that shunning an answer doesn’t make the question disappear and this is not a situation that well-wishing and empathy can fix. We face a bleak future where humanity will be lowered to the most basic and animalistic it has ever been; this world is condemned to become a wasteland over which the human species in all its glory will be fighting over the scraps like vultures over offal.

Tradunt

For a moment, I think this blog should be taken at face value, and we should hypothetically accept his figures. There’s an environmental apocalypse coming.

We don’t find that hard to believe because we’ve noticed signs, both anecdotal and statistical, that such a thing is likely.

We all want to look toward something external we can blame. System of government, money itself, or the greed of people in certain roles. How about the simplest answer?

If someone ignored trash piling up around their house for a decade, we’d say they were dysfunctional.

Why, then, don’t we point out that modernity is defined by our shifting authority and blame to external entities so that we can preserve our lack of obligation to reality, on a personal level?

A dumb man piles up his own garbage. A smart man sets up a city authority responsible for getting rid of it, but because getting rid of it correctly costs too much, they dump it somewhere. It still piles up, but elsewhere. That way the smart man looks good, even if there’s a rotten underbelly of the system which is that it’s not doing what it claims to do.

Our literature for the past 200 years has been warning us: we have separated social reality from actual reality, and we live in social reality where we manipulate others to help us — by looking good by hiding our trash elsewhere, passing the buck on down the line.

Now think about life in general in these modern times. We are held up in traffic, in lines, at work, etc. by other people acting stupidly, but we cannot criticize them because it’s how they want to do things. They have absolute authority over how they conduct their lives. So we all wait. And many people responding to a slowdown is a glacial shockwave of dysfunction.

Our society is ugly. Our daily tasks are stupid. The interfaces on our tools, computers and bureaucracies are frustrating to anyone but an oblivious idiot. Nothing works as advertised or gets even close. These are the signs of a species in dysfunction.

And what’s the cause of this dysfunction? Individuals not responding to reality because they have the socially acceptable choice of denying it. That, in a nutshell, is what defines the modern time: the triumph of many granular individuals who act like cancer cells because they are selfish, oblivious, and insincere.

It’s not the government, the corporations, the fascists or the commies, or any other external bugbear. The problem is within. The problem is a social system that denies any need for personal responsibility, morality, and thinking about consequences, especially regarding “social” ownerships like our shared stewardship of nature.

The root of that problem is in turn that we feared death so much we forgot the most important love — a reverent love of the whole, as the poetic Kamal S. from Kali-Yuga blog notes:

If Love is the urge and desire towards some sort of union with another, then love is the very force holding the cosmos together. A blind will, or perhaps something greater still.

but we understand it so little, and thus, the cause of our collective misery as men, and women.

Kali-Yuga

We know how to love objects, but can we learn to love context… especially the default context that underlies this thing we know as life?

With that kind of attitude that holds life to be sacred, we must think through the consequences of our action. We know then that we are not isolated, and cannot any more cut ourselves off from obligation to reality than we can stop breathing. We are part of the world, not the other way around.

If this attitudinal change were effected, most human problems would lessen to manageable levels. But it is taboo because it ranks one person above another in some way other than the bureaucratic methods of money, elections, popularity, etc. And so in each of us the fearful monkey — who fears death more than he loves life — starts to resist in twisting fear.

Tags: cognitive dissonance, crowdism, overpopulation