The Human Boulder of Passivity
If the information we're receiving about the
world, even from such sources as wiki leaks, merely substantiates what some
people already know and doesn't affect the majority enough to make significant
changes, then there is something wrong. It may be that human nature really
doesn't respond to "knowledge" to affect changes in human behavior.
If so, it must be in our nature to always take ourselves to the edge of the
cliff, like lemmings, and depending on the circumstances, who’s leading, who’s
pushing, either making the plunge or pulling back at the last minute.
Whichever path is taken, self-destruction or
self-preservation, under those circumstances, learning from the mistakes that
initially drove us to the point of such a drastic, final decision, cannot be a
factor in making future decisions since no one will really know what brought us
there in the first place.
So humans, being like Sisyphus eternally rolling
a boulder up a hill, over and over again, we're more like the boulder itself
mysteriously rolling up and down rather than the pusher, we're the pushed, the
passive player, not the active.
Intelligence is relative. Intelligence doesn't
guarantee success. In our society, intelligence is only appreciated when it
comes to establishing a monetary value or inventing something that makes money.
Anyone who wants to change the current paradigm of profit, consumption, and
humans as commodities, no matter how intelligent, is merely seen as an anomaly.
Any person knows what problems there are, but most are powerless
to do anything about them because there are those who dominate the answers by
controlling the resources for change. Everybody knows that too. All the
problems and resolutions are what push us along in a random manner, we’re unable
to take time for resolution because the pusher, the controller of resources,
continues pushing. The pusher controls the time it takes to resolve. Humans are
continuously being pushed through time at whatever pace set by those who
control our time. Authorities control when, or how fast, or what priorities
there are. Governments and corporations, those who control our time, suck us
dry. Just as when we age, our body begins to be sapped of energy and sags ever
so slowly from gravity, the natural pressure on us, necessary and natural,
governments and corporations squeeze our productivity and intelligence by
making us useless and unnecessary, by making us commodities, by making us consume.
If we're going to allow international corporate hegemony of world
resources and profit as the motivating interest in that hegemony, thus assuring
that hegemony will continue its control over governments by always influencing
the rules and regulations that govern standards of economic behavior, then
we're doing more than just sitting back, we're rolling over and playing dead.
Grover Cleveland said, “corporations, which
should be carefully restrained creatures of the law and servants of the people,
are fast becoming the people's masters."
I keep going back to the notion that there is
little that hasn't already been observed as to political and social behavior,
yet we are constantly inventing new, artificial and faux technologies that give
us the impression there are new ways of doing things or that experience has no
value, just rapidly changing technology, mostly geared to some sort of
entertainment.
Nothing really changes.
We can send rockets to Mars and send cameras to the edges of our
solar system, but the fact remains, we are earth bound. Ask why we haven't had
a manned mission to the moon or nearby planets for many decades?
If diversity means we divide up the problems into ethnicity, race,
sexual orientation, class then we'll never get anywhere. Watching the various
segmented news from msnbc, a black commentator, a working-class commentator, a
woman commentator, a gay woman commentator, a panel of young commentators, I'm
aware that we are just where they want us to be. If we say black people have a
different set of problems than gay people, or women, and the only way to
resolve these various issues is by piecemeal legislation, we'll never go
anywhere. It's true that slavery presented a variance of the work/peasant/indentured
servant/migrant worker, but to this day we still have slavery, though not black
slavery, because we still have the system that promoted slavery. When black
slavery could not be counted on, then recruitment of
immigrant/Chinese/Mexican/Indian slavery took over, so each group in turn had
to begin the long, lonely road of becoming freer by becoming more economically
liberated. But no one stopped the landowners, the corporation heads, from going
anywhere unimpeded. Isn’t it the main premise of citizenship to have a certain
number of people who will be the focal point for economic oppression?
Fiction, like real life, rarely has assured
positive outcomes. It's only Theory that gives us templated results,
finalities, easy going down platitudes, ideas we can grasp, even when distant
from real, practical, common-sense thinking. We pride ourselves on believing we
are so extraordinary in an ordinary world. Actually, it’s the opposite of that.
The incestuous relationship between democracy and capitalism has
brought us to the point of an irrelevant politic and fascistic economic system
that essentially runs the governments that adhere to it's precepts, as well as
economically punishing other members of the world community who don’t adhere to
the dominant economic principals. In fact, it’s only economic differences or
similarities that make a difference in who is foe and who is friend. Nowadays,
democracy is such a cliché, that we are such friends with Saudi Arabia, one of
the most backward, yet richest societies, that we go overboard whenever the
Saudi’s propaganda machine tries to make itself look even remotely democratic,
while Venezuela which is much more democratic than the Saudi’s (who, by the
way, were much more behind 9/11 than Iraq), gets put on the equivalent of a
national watch list.