More than once someone has accused me of going off on a tangent; I can attest that thanks to this tendency of mine I learned that is rare the case when the cause lies in the problem, which is when it has no solution. I was also told that I “think too much,” as is normal today when anything that takes more than three minutes without monetary benefits is considered a waste of time. What's indeed a vicious tendency is this general thinking laziness, harmful at all levels.
Let's start with an example of “cause within the problem”: the specialization of economy has promoted specialization in all professions, a trend that formed whole generations of intelligent idiots, what Americans call “experts.” Once context is lost there's no turning back, the problem is already self-contained, problem and cause mutually feed, from then on cognitive development is artificial. This is a “vicious mind” strictly speaking, the cancerous cell of current society, a cystic thought that eventually bursts (metastasis) on prolific production of “castles in the air.”
These “lost androids of modernity” (as I called them in my first novel two decades ago) see little far from their noses; what happens outside their microcosm is alien to them. Following the dictates of fashion, they solve anything outside their area of knowledge by paying the respective expert (essential keeping at hand some ass washing expert's phone number!) and address what's in their field of expertise taking into account only the variables directly affecting the issue in front of them, of course prioritizing the monetary aspect far above the rest. These authentic “monkeys with machine guns” are the professionals of our modern world.
But specialization wouldn't have affected people up to that point without an early conditioning; to form individuals “adapted to society,” generally seen as a positive feature, means nothing but to breed them in captivity as farm animals. A totally controlled and regulated environment kills initiative, ability to think and to take decisions. A completely artificial environment disconnects individuals from the fundamental context, Mother Nature, actual main responsible for producing and maintaining not only lettuce and tomatoes but everything (including us) hence undisputed actual basis of economy over any human abstraction (money.) The main fuel for a fire is also the main fuel for our body (by the way, people don't see value on oxygen because they don't have to pay for it, so far) you can't expect independence, responsibility, maturity, awareness, from someone educated to be a lamb. As a result, we see that, for most people, life is just a bunch of habits learned by imitation. We see how adult individuals, supposedly in their right mind, don't distinguish a need from a whim or a vice, how they defend their alleged interests in a childish egocentric way, making decisions that, far from solving, make their problems worse (mostly debts they incurred fooled by the market) and how, for the same price, they keep feeding those who brainwashed them in the first instance.
Ask them why they do what they do, why in that way and, above all, why in such excess, given that, not by chance, it's in this third aspect we see the most serious failure. If it's the way they make a living, the excuse will be Money, end of discussion, otherwise they'll start vomiting nonsense implying that they need to do that or that they save money doing it in that way (rarely true) till eventually, feeling trapped, they'll employ the final argument:
But, it's what everyone does!
And if they find out that you don't do that and in the same way and extent as “everyone does” they'll hurry up to report you to the authorities (probably they'd already reported you before the talk took place,) sure to be heard, since governments, laws and rules are there only to take money and votes from the crowd, so even if the habit we're talking about is a mere vice whose practice harms not only those interested but also others around, just because, again, it's “what everyone does,” laws will definitely be on their side.
Someone could argue about the lack of values, in the moral sense. Moral is religion applied to practical matters. Reason has no effect on people, they're moved by fear, you need to use religion to modify their habits. Since they go through life without actual personal goals they don't need to plan, they don't need to “think too much,” just follow the rest. Any matter, be science, technology, art, all is interpreted and experienced from a religious point of view (eg ecology.) Fear is the boss. To reduce production costs to big companies or to simply recycle people habits to keep them producing and consuming (moving money,) it's necessary to resort to the modern religion: fashion. And, what else is fashion besides “what everyone does”?
Technological development is also primarily applied to optimize agriculture and livestock industries. TV and lately the Internet, are those magic windows that show us “what everyone does” (fashion) or, better said, what from money point of view is convenient to make us believe everyone does. Time to time people are re-programmed in this way, upgraded to a new, optimized, consumption-production machine version.
As an illustrative real life example let's take a fashion leisure activity; in the few places where still some piece of nature survives (here in Europe there are left only what they call “natural parks,” that looks as nature from a big distance) you won't see people going there to take a break from noise and pollution, on the contrary they go there to practice motocross and quad almost exclusively (I live in a small urbanization right next to one of these natural parks, so I know what I'm talking about.) For the reasons already explained this happens all around the world, except for those places without uncensored media or purchase power (if moving to a smaller apartment and feeding your children with fast food you still can't afford some of these expensive toys it's because you're surely suffering the “unhealthy” economy of some “undeveloped” country.) It's obvious that people have been “programmed” to consume oil in any activity, the more the better. If you ask those idiots damaging the little forests still standing with their quads why they do it they'll respond that it's their “favorite sport.” How can someone be convinced he's doing what he wants when he can see everyone around the globe doing exactly the same? Undoubtedly, the first people resource is denial.
We can venture a psychological analysis. To totally ignore your own senses, your own understanding and life experience at time of making decisions and limit yourself to follow the cattle there must be a deeper breakage. A castration at affections level; your mother's love (constituent of authentic “home”,) your friends' love, love for your family, love for your profession…, nobody has time today for these pretentiousness. Good citizens aren't people but gears on the system. Their cognitive disconnection is first an affective disconnection.
Countless times I've repeated to my loved ones: there are three essential points in any relationship, love, trust and respect. Interestingly, from all the philosophers, sociologists and psychologists I've read, the first and only one who I heard to say this, and using exactly my very words, was a Mexican dog trainer in an American TV show. First you must love, trust and respect yourself. When the lack of these qualities is severe the individual becomes self-destructive and harmful to everyone around. Life taught me this the hard way, my father and brother were two acute examples of this “lack of self-esteem” pandemic. Not by chance, in this article I'm doing nothing but to insist in the main subject (and motivation) of the three novels I wrote.
All that said, what is the origin of the problem, then?
As for me, you can tie me to a chair in front of a TV set, put in my eyes some contraption similar to the one in the Mechanical Orange film and bombard me for a week with car announcements that, once the treatment is finished, I will jump on my bike without feeling that I'm giving up anything. This is not frugality but the ability to recognize the authentic value on things and to establish priorities, I wasted lots of energy and work in what I considered worth of sacrifice. I've known very few people like me in this sense, I don't know to what extent a few exceptions can refute a conspiracy theory (also fashionable today), specially because in the long term conspirators suffer the consequences as everyone else. For example, is family breakage part of the plan? Let's take the New Yorker “modern” woman they sold us in movies and TV shows, wearing her fitted male suit, even pregnant; is to abandon her children education to institutions (and to TV, of course) part of her “emancipation”? By the way, since when who works is the boss?! You know “mother fucker” is an international insult, though this doesn't corner the cause either. I grew up in what in the '70s was formally understood as a conventional middle class family, a married couple with two children living in a house in the suburbs, car, TV, dog, etc. My father worked in a factory, my mother was a homemaker (she was the boss, of course,) so I enjoyed her love and attention along my whole childhood and teenage years. Besides loving me she trusted me and respected me, it was the only relationship in my entire life that fulfilled the three important aspects I mentioned before. While my father and brother also loved me in their own way, they significantly failed in the two other aspects, suffice it to say that living with them was hardly bearable. But the question related to the subject is: would my personality evolved in a different way if my mother had also failed in those aspects? Did I learn these values from her or they were already part of my temperament? Let us remember that my brother, who as I'm suggesting had severe self-esteem problems, grew up in that same environment, so the only we can say for sure is that with love, trust and respect happens as with other aptitudes, who is not willing to learn won't do it, even in front of the best teacher.
The original cause is elusive, this is a “chicken or the egg” dilemma, does the environment condition individuals or vice versa? Is loss of affection a consequence of the conditions that humans themselves have created? Is humans' a “cause within the problem” case, hence it has no solution? Or is humans' destructive tendency also part of Mother Nature plan? Perhaps there is no plan (God?) Perhaps this is just an essay.
©2018 - Walter Alejandro Iglesias