Posted byLucySnow:
Why are people so ready to think that the next generation will produce a more evolved society that has eluded every other generation?
They don't always. My parents thought we War Babies were going to destroy civilization because our highest priority in choosing a job wasn't the quality of its pension plan. When our little brothers' (if my parents had had more, which thank the goddess they didn't) generation came along and started questioning authority, they were positively apoplectic.
I mean there will always be progress (especially scientific) but the underlying savagery of mankind isn't going anywhere.
As I have said in about six threads now, the underlying savagery of mankind is a vestige of our not-too-distant Neolithic ancestors, and I explained my reasoning in those places. I believe it is so vestigial that it is not impossible for us to keep it in check, and give it a healthy outlet in sports and those gruesome videogames you kids love. Most of the world's religions, however, do just the opposite. They fan that flame and bring supposedly civilized human beings back down to the level of Stone Age tribes, fighting other tribes to the death because they're "different." I do believe that if we can solve the problem of the Abrahamic religions and other relics of Stone Age philosophy having survived for about three thousand years too long, we will indeed be able to curb our savagery. If you want an assignment, help me figure that one out!
What happened to the members of the revolutionary 60's? They tried to change the world and dropped the ball somewhere between discovering wheat grass and SUV's.
What happened to us (I know I'm too old to have been a hippie but I'll be damned if I'll hang out even metaphorically with people my own age) is something we set in motion for a good reason that turned out bad. We rejected our fathers. Quite a reasonable thing to do, considering that they were the only people in history who though it was OK to deploy nuclear weapons against civilian targets. As far as we were concerned if that was masculinity we wanted no part of it. What that led to was that all of us, boys and girls alike, were socialized by women. We had no father figures in our lives because we turned their own curse back on them and said "From this day forward we have no fathers." Well it turns out that people need both a masculine and a feminine vector in their lives. Getting in touch with our feminine side was great, I can express my feelings and I have walls full of my own needlepoint art. But
not getting in touch with our masculine side was a big mistake. Mothers teach us all about love and peace and sharing and being safe. Fathers teach us about situational ethics and making hard decisions and what to do if the other guy isn't as loving and peaceful as we are and when it's right to take risks. We never learned those lessons. We've been conned by every man who had a nasty masculine streak going all the way back to Lyndon Johnson and continuing through Bill Gates. We can't believe that the Israelis and Palestinians won't just sit down and smoke some dope and end up hugging each other. We were shaken to find out that socialism really just flat doesn't work except in small Neolithic size communities in New Mexico where everybody knows everybody personally and cares about them. As for the SUV thing, that's just motherhood run rampant. Keep them kids safe but don't think about the kind of future they'll have if you suck up all the petroleum before they have a chance to buy their own SUVs. Did it ever feel like you had two mothers and no father? Taking risks today in order to have a chance at a better tomorrow, you never learn that from your mother. It's always the men who start revolutions, or uproot themselves and go off to look for a better life on the frontier. Their wives would just as soon have stayed in Europe and left America to the Indians, or learned to live under the Czars, because it was safer. By throwing our fathers and all our male elders into the trash heap, we of both sexes did ourselves some great harm that we didn't realize until much later, if at all.
posted by Filibuster
I just want to find one organization, one group or club that acknowledges these tenets that you seem to find so passe and pedestrian.
I did not mean to dismiss them as passe or pedestrian, please forgive me if I came across that way. I was just suggesting that you were overreacting to some of the stimuli in your life and possibly missing others that could provide some balance, because the milieu you've assimilated to is that of the "magicians," as Jung calls them, the people who question everything and see sinister motives behind every deed. That is a good thing, but as I just pointed out above, lack of balance is never a good thing because it impairs our ability to use what we've learned effectively.
I'm a member of Moveon, I subscribe to Adbusters, I vote green (I know, sorry Nader), and I chose my career based on the contribution to our world I could make.
Excellent choice of career. I've fallen into corporate training and there's nothing like watching that light of recognition go on in someone's eyes. But as for your political leanings, I think you're perpetuating the mistake we made in the 1960s, which was a continuation of the ones our parents made in the 1930s. (Well not mine, they were union-busting Republicans even then and made a different set of mistakes.) We forget the maxim that power corrupts. We think that the only way to accomplish the changes that we want is to create a big strong government that can shortcut most of the social engineering that would otherwise occur on an individual or small group basis slowly. Instead what we end up with is an organism with a life of its own that's bigger than all of us put together and has accumulated so much power that it just reeks of corruption. Every single goal that we naively turned over to the government has been perverted. Freedom of speech became reverse censorship. Equal opportunity became Affirmative Discrimination. Helping the poor turned into a welfare industry creating families on welfare for so many generations that they were completely disconnected from real life and we had to give them classes in how to use an alarm clock. (My wife was a social worker, I'm not making this up.) The socialist governments that we championed in other countries rotted out even faster than ours, and we watched our dear communist friends in China gobble up our dear Buddhist friends in Tibet. Boy was that a nightmare for anyone with a conscience! Like many disillusioned American left-liberals, the wife and I discovered classical liberalism, (now known by the ugly moniker "libertarianism," since the socialists co-opted the word "liberal") which simply says that if you leave the power with the people they are far more likely to use it for good than if you hand it all to an institution that already has a questionable record of integrity. "Socially liberal but fiscally conservative" is the shorthand media description of our movement and party.
None of it is enough. Nothing can appease my frustration at the ignorance and barbarism that permeate my country. I love this country, and because I do the past two years of human history have broken my spirit. I can't believe what we've become. I am incensed and, more importantly, agitated beyond words. Most of my students were shocked to find out that Jeb is gov. of Florida and hired the vote counters himself. We are so, so, so fucked.
This is hardly the first time in recent history that we've seen the Eve of Destruction. (Hint hint, we had a very popular song by that name forty years ago.) Personally I felt much more ill at ease during the Cold War. The Cuban Missile Crisis alone had us pooping our pants. I know that the war on secular Christian consumerism that the Muslim terrorist groups may or may not be about to launch is not going to be pretty, but at least civilization will survive no matter how many individuals die. The nukes that the U.S. and the Soviets were aiming at each other had far more destructive potential. I know that some terrorist might be able to steal one from the government of Kirgyzstan and use it, but it's not as easy to do as people think and he's far more likely to blow himself up several thousand miles from U.S. soil.
They know Spongebob, though.
There you go, there is hope for the world!
posted by Fafnir
Are too many people more obsessed with securing their place in our world of today, instead of planning for a world of tommarow?
Yes, that's what happens when people don't have father figures. It's the yang in each of us that thinks about the future while the yin focuses on the present. Without a well developed masculine side, neither our men nor our women seem very well equipped to tackle the future.
Is it too late to pull our society out of this struggle?
Not at all. As I said, things looked far worse 35 years ago.
Would anyone beyond a few idealists even care?
Yes, but only if they are taught to. They need father figures, or something that will reanimate the yang in men and women alike. We (of both genders) need to inject some traditional "masculine" values back into our culture, not just "The Man Show" and football.
If you published a paper on how we can raise ourselves to a new level of cooperation and understanding, how many people would read it? If anyone did?
I think what's important and reassuring is that the people who would read it are the young ones. They crave a solution to these problems. Sure there is plenty of vitriol on SciForums, but it's balanced with a lot of good, caring stuff. The six o'clock news is nothing like this. Why does everybody from the editor of The Nation to Bill O'Reilly appear on the Daily Show? Because polls show that that is where the younger generation gets its news. If you want to reach them you have to go through Jon Stewart.
How many execs of major companies have you seen in church, or know of going to them? In a power based world, do they get their power from a religious standpoint, or from themselves?
I've already leveled my salvo at religion. It often masquerades as divine goodness, and certainly plenty of people manage to get in touch with its righteous and honorable side and they tell us to leave them alone with their faith. I can't do that because I can't find any way to stop that same faith from corrupting a huge proportion of the faithful so we keep getting these wars and holocausts thrown in our faces courtesy of the god-fearing "good people."
If you want to control the majority, you have to have a belief system in place, that gives them faith in themselves, and others.
OK, I don't like your model very much but you speak the truth. My point is that faith in ourselves should motivate us to
bring down the Government Monster so that we ourselves can start launching some effective solutions to the world's problems. All governments do is find clever ways to scare us and take away more of our money and more of our rights and get us to say thank you for doing it! Did you see the motto that the Washington Post came up with for the Department of Homeland Security? "If you feel safe, we're not doing our job." That really sums up the strategy of today's despotic governments.
So if you want to make a change: Work at being a father figure, a real one, not just the kind that spanks kids for being bad. Devolve government back down to the people; the Green Party will be just as corrupt as the Republocrats after two terms in office. "Power to the people" means just that, not "Power to a newly elected batch of different sleazeball bureaucrats and the new Department of Eternal Synecure they will create." And watch Spongebob Squarepants. Into each life a little levity
must fall.
Peace.
