Starting at the Beginning
Now might be a good time to begin at the beginning.
We are stuck with inappropriate expectations of ourselves. This is because our expectations are handed on down to us by the people who raise us and the society in which we are raised. We are each individually like landscapes formed over time, with the the obvious processes of landscape formation taking the most of our attention, if any. But when plates collide we may learn that there are larger forces which play a crucial role in shaping us.
And I feel that the pressure has now built between our plates to unprecedented levels.
And lets end that analogy there, because people are ultimately not like landscapes. The main problem with the world today is that we have failed to build an adequate education system. An adequate education system would be based around the goal of transmitting wisdom from one generation to the next, and it is obvious that that goal has been distorted beyond all recognition over the last 100 years. And intentionally distorted.
Few of our people are idiots, but most of them are idiotic. Specialisation has caused the slow death of wisdom in our world. Specialisation is but the most innocuous term available to describe an educational paradigm based upon need-to-know imperatives. Specialisation talks the talk of "in depth knowledge" but walks all the while upon an open path of secrecy. And most of us are too idiotic to comprehend the implications of this.
But I'm getting off track - what of our "inappropriate expectations of ourselves?"
It is not wise to let the people who possess the bulk of the power and money to control all of the most crucial aspects of the structuring of our human world, yet this is what we have. This world is destined to fail, because only a society based upon wise decision making (apologies - I like to think decisions are made, not "taken," so that is the way I write it...) has a hope of prevailing. So we have two broad possibilities once this world fails - some version of utter chaos, or a slow but sure application of wisdom in our affairs.
And this latter project will be all to do with discovering appropriate expectations of ourselves. The collapse of the world we have come to know over the last 50 years will provide countless opportunuties for us to reassess things. Everywhere entire personalities are grown based only upon this bizarre 50 year old hot house flower.
What if we lived in a world where 90% of all child rearing was done, lovingly, by non-parents, but one where "Day Care" as we currently concieve of it, is a shrunken industry? How would that affect young Oedipus? What if they started building 7 and 9 bedroom dwellings - or rather 5 bedroom, 4 sleepout dwellings?
Searching for further examples I cannot avoid Marx's dictum that material conditions determine consciousness, and the conclusion that we will only start changing when our material conditions force us to (read: "when the oil starts to run out"). The only point to thinking what we can through now, before the event, would be to reduce the extent to which we experience necessary changes as harrowing. That's all.
We are stuck with inappropriate expectations of ourselves. This is because our expectations are handed on down to us by the people who raise us and the society in which we are raised. We are each individually like landscapes formed over time, with the the obvious processes of landscape formation taking the most of our attention, if any. But when plates collide we may learn that there are larger forces which play a crucial role in shaping us.
And I feel that the pressure has now built between our plates to unprecedented levels.
And lets end that analogy there, because people are ultimately not like landscapes. The main problem with the world today is that we have failed to build an adequate education system. An adequate education system would be based around the goal of transmitting wisdom from one generation to the next, and it is obvious that that goal has been distorted beyond all recognition over the last 100 years. And intentionally distorted.
Few of our people are idiots, but most of them are idiotic. Specialisation has caused the slow death of wisdom in our world. Specialisation is but the most innocuous term available to describe an educational paradigm based upon need-to-know imperatives. Specialisation talks the talk of "in depth knowledge" but walks all the while upon an open path of secrecy. And most of us are too idiotic to comprehend the implications of this.
But I'm getting off track - what of our "inappropriate expectations of ourselves?"
It is not wise to let the people who possess the bulk of the power and money to control all of the most crucial aspects of the structuring of our human world, yet this is what we have. This world is destined to fail, because only a society based upon wise decision making (apologies - I like to think decisions are made, not "taken," so that is the way I write it...) has a hope of prevailing. So we have two broad possibilities once this world fails - some version of utter chaos, or a slow but sure application of wisdom in our affairs.
And this latter project will be all to do with discovering appropriate expectations of ourselves. The collapse of the world we have come to know over the last 50 years will provide countless opportunuties for us to reassess things. Everywhere entire personalities are grown based only upon this bizarre 50 year old hot house flower.
What if we lived in a world where 90% of all child rearing was done, lovingly, by non-parents, but one where "Day Care" as we currently concieve of it, is a shrunken industry? How would that affect young Oedipus? What if they started building 7 and 9 bedroom dwellings - or rather 5 bedroom, 4 sleepout dwellings?
Searching for further examples I cannot avoid Marx's dictum that material conditions determine consciousness, and the conclusion that we will only start changing when our material conditions force us to (read: "when the oil starts to run out"). The only point to thinking what we can through now, before the event, would be to reduce the extent to which we experience necessary changes as harrowing. That's all.
posted by Erosoplier at 9:55 PM
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