I'm tired of commercialism.
So tired, that it got me to thinking. It got me to thinking about how we think. What I mean by that is I believe that each.... era has its 'personality' for lack of a better word. And this personality is like a lens that the majority of people view the world through. It shapes our thoughts, our perceptions, our conclusions about what is going on around us. And sometimes it outright blinds us to signs that are right in front of our faces.
I heard a story once that when some native tribe in the Americas looked out and the ships from Europe were in the bay in front of them, they couldn't see them...
Is that a true story? ...[let me go check the infernal internets....]
I just looked it up, and most people agree that's just a dumb story, but there IS a concept illustrated by it, and that is when we are presented with something so new that we have NO references for, our eyes will of course register .... an object, but we will not have a clue what we are actually looking at. Well, even if that story is just a metaphor, it's a good one because I think that this kind of thing happens in a psychological way all the time.
In our era everything is seen through the eye of business. It's not healthy.
Neither was it healthy back in the day to view things through only one lens.
In other eras, say Egypt, Rome, or the monolithic effect the Catholic Church used to have... remember? They used to tell KINGS what to do. There is a sort of overriding mind set that dominates the thinking of humans, and it is hard to break out of that mold.
There was an era of the birth of democracy, where the entire population had strong opinions about what freedom meant. How about the Industrial Revolution? Some people embraced it as saving men from drudgery, but there was a price to pay for that revolution. There was an age of exploration. In that time men and women to, crawled all over the planet going to inhospitable places and telling us about them. Can you imagine the excitement that must have generated in the people of the day? 'Just THINK, there are places on the planet where hardly ever a man has trod... let's go check that OUT!'
Then we came to the next dominate lens. The lens of Science. We were going to be the masters of the elements. That is a powerful paradigm right there.
Computers fit in there somewhere if we are going to be semi-chronological about it, and the concepts of computing have infused themselves into our psyche..... even I say things like.... "I don't have room for any more information on my hard drive." And I'm really talking about my mind.
But I'm sticking to my theory though that the main thing that is driving the lenses of today is the almighty business sector. And of all the eras I have mentioned, this one seems the most shallow.
I mean in other ages, men thought great thoughts and wrote great writings about religion, what it meant to be human, should men stay locked into the social class they were born into, or do they have the right to forge a new path for themselves, how much religion should play a part in politics, are objects made by hand somehow intrinsically better than ones made by machine, or the other way around, what is the meaning of freedom, and what are its responsibilities ?
Those all sound like WAY bigger ideas than.... What is the best refrigerator for the money on the market today?
Besides we are completely dishonest about our view of financial success. We hold it up as a worthy and desirable goal to be rich. But beware. If you become TOO rich, then we hate your slimy guts and you become a pariah.
But back to my original point. The lens. If we are looking at our world through this one lens, okay not EXCLUSIVELY mind you, but let us say it is the dominant one. Then what are we overlooking? What are we totally missing? What iceberg are we steaming toward at top speed? What ships are out in the bay that we are squinting at and wondering.... What the heck are those things, and should I be worried about them in any way?
I'm not sure.
Do you have any ideas?
I'd like to hear them.
And I would like to take off all the lenses for a while and see things as they really are. Not as I am being influence to by the age I live in. I dunno. Maybe I would go mad if I did that.
Do you think that is possible?
(That you are mad? Oh yeah. It's totally possible, believe me.)