Cogito ergo sum . spirits with parents - parents which odds say cannot provide more than food and shelter for a violent childhood , if that . So how does value emerge as a fiction in a world drawn in such bold relief by poverty, despair and violence, or put more simply - how do you constantly fool 7 billion human beings into believing what they see on the screen is more real than what they experience in their lives - when the maintenance for the car which was supposed to be parked by 'nightlife valets' bankrupts single fathers; the tropical cruise to find the right husband costs half as much as a semester of school, or the evening of Reality TV becomes 24/7 for which the cable costs more than preschool, much less, time away from family. We are now facing a "turnkey tyranny" which requires little more from you than brand-name loyalty paid for with your freedom, health or possibly even the future of our species.
The people yoked to this unrelenting screen of corporate marketing are not stupid per se; however, we live in a world where the consolidation of data into the hands of a tiny number of people renders a massive disconnect between the real world and market concepts based on nothing more than Return On Investment ( ROI ) - The game of "Money Ball" writ large. Unfortunately for the human race, and commerce in general, these corporate objectives utilize the infinite growth paradigm which commandeers everything in service of "The Economy" which in turn guts eons of human craftsmanship; rules of conduct; even that minuscule shard of personal time dislodged from the shackles of our former royalty by that spark of Free Humanity we'd been, for a heartbeat. The hitch, and irony for our new masters, is we are also the consumer fodder. People, beasts crafty enough to climb out of the crib; avoid chained pit bulls or pissed-off camels while making their way to and from school dodging bullies, their knives; a teacher's corrosive rebuke; or regional war and then find work enough to pay for that time it takes to memorize all their favorite sport-hero's data oblivious to the fact that as humans they will spend the largest part of their lives and disposable income floating the elite on a film of opalescent opulence barel dreamed of by the wealthiest of the early pharaohs. When old these same persons are pharmaceutically rendered into a steady-state decay yielding the last farthing of insurance profit and preserving enough flesh for the morticians' final tally - 'blood' from you, the turnip.
How is it possible that so many of the intelligent, feeling, decent humans I've met, and hope still to meet are effectively prevented from achieving a better life? Not only prevented but effectively diverted into a spiral of increasing pitch and agitation blunted by fatigue, entertainment and sensory stimulation. At what point did our 'vision quest' become a trailer in the movie theater, and our 'rite of passage' the nightmare of cyber bullying? We are sickened by our own desires - The inclination for belonging and relatedness is tuned to coercion and exclusion because we are so much more easily managed apart than together. Of our ineffable instincts is the reflexive search for good have morphed into - beer, sex, and profound bass decibel pulses substituting for music. Our ancient multitude of modalities for touching and being touched are lit up today like digital Bacchanals out of Dante's lowest rings. Food and family are now defined in the aisles of our "Supermarkets" which didn't exist 75 years ago - the same thing a Walmartarian will be saying about today's Supermarkets 18.75 years from now as she shifts her colostomy belt to make sure there's enough intravenous antibiotic to quiet the bacterial lesions pulsing close to the surface of her bare midriff .
Those who have "awakened" are little better off living on the fringes of a deteriorating culture and casting about for venues of approval marked by dress and orthodoxy of an often more strident tone than the insidious hum of the empire apparatus. But still the thread of value seems lost like a door whose key has broken off in the lock. Our knowledge is pinched and caught on the fly - snippets of sense; out of context and cast out like so much confetti or scribbled on a gutter with paint bought from the world's wealthiest chemists. We search for what has always been the human instinct - love, but our tools are no longer born of loving application and lack the quality necessary to build loving things , or even defend us from naked hatred . That we have forsaken the wonders of understanding from each other for the silicon siren out of the illusional internet aether may foreshadow the inscription for our species' headstone of our radioactively luminescent, thrice removed from the G2V star at the center of our fringe solar system:
"Here lie remains of a sentient life form animated by wavelengths of their G2V hydrogenfusionsphere - able to stride upon their closest satellite using buckets of ignition and oxygen to propel and protect their delicate biomass. This brief intercommunicating animation drowned itself in radioactive oceans, lit by hubris - oceans believed to have once been the origin of their life force. Rest In Peace"
Our requiem is well-described by Bob Dylan in his 'Song to Woody': "seems sick an' it's hungry, it's tired and it's torn, It looks likes it's a-dyin' an' it's hardly been born." However paradoxical, it is we humans who define value, not some glib capitalist stratagem scribbled on her/his cocktail napkin by the drunken industrialist whose greatest legacy would be the systemic neutering of that remarkable human capacity for growth. The universe may or may not care whether our damp blue ball becomes a dank dead slab sizzling in orbit around a dying sun, but as certain as hate is weak, we are doomed if we do not stand up on our hind legs and do as we've always done - climb out of the crib; shake off the mad dogs; dodge bullies and take their weapons; lovingly build much and find heroes to love - hopefully heroes looking more like each of us than those pasty-faced cranks floating on nothing more than oceans of opalescent opulence.
jts 21 October 2013
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