| AMERICA: THE POLITICS AND CULTURE OF EMPTINESS - SEQUAL |
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| Robert Morpheal, Bob Ezergailis, Morphealism (morpheal@yahoo.com) |
2008/12/02 11:59 |
AMERICA: THE POLITICS AND CULTURE OF EMPTINESS - SEQUAL
This is a sequal to the original article, considering some further
issues related to the fundamental principle of emptiness and its role
in Americanism.
EDUCATION as emptiness. I have made the point before that when the
need for prisons is seen as ever increasing and the prisons are
increasingly full, education has failed. That failure is a part of its
emptiness. Partly this divide between what is seen as being good and
evil tends to be closely related to the peculiar belief in
predestination. People are still seen as destined, prior to education
and life experience, to be what they become. This takes away a large
amount of the responsibility that ought to accrue to education. Partly
predestination, though ascribed an absolute religious value, supports
national claims as to rightness and primacy of leadership, as a
divinely chosen emissary of national policies and practices, at home
and in the world beyond. It also supports the importance of ancestral
lineage for those who can trace back their pedigree to the founding
fathers of the nation (the Puritan extremists who came to America
fleeing from socio-political progress in England). Similar to the
lineage of a monarchy, a Puritan lineage can confer special privilege,
of far more significance than formal education is able to offer.
Determinism also means that learning something does not confer the
right to pursue what is learned in a gainful or more meaningful way
within the society and culture. It does mean that education of that
sort can be entirely wasted, and the individual redirected, often in
accordance with whatever the ancestral role happened to be. If a man
studies to be a writer, and learns to write, he may find that he is
made into a soldier, because his father and grandfather before him
were professional soldiers. The question of choice in an education of
emptiness becomes a vital issue and was an issue deeply questioned in
human potential movement oriented 1960s, but less and less considered
and acted upon since. The battle against that type of emptiness is
being lost, not won.
Education as emptiness is also about lack of relevance. It is unlikely
that most workers, working at what is considered a non professional
level, and many of those who are working at that level, will ever use
any more of their formal school education, from years prior to
college, than approximately grade 4. The years following that are
revealed to have been little more than an imprisonment in learning
routines of attendance, and some skills of classroom deportment, in
preparation for the structuring that is found in the world of work.
Nothing much is learned about society and how it functions. Even less
as to the truth of the system. The facts presented have to be taken as
true, and largely only serve the more trivial function of providing
relatively bland content, avoiding controversy and and any real
questioning. The facts of education merely serve as busyness,
emulating some prevalent aspects of later life, so there are fewer
surprises as to the essential meaninglessness of many of its
routines. We might add that in those years relatively little is
taught and learned concerning the law, ethics, society, the world
of customary practices and traditions, or even the truth about health.
Mostly educational emptiness nurtures ignorance and hurls its victims
into the school of hard knocks where if they were not secretly
schooled by more knowing and experienced family relations, they are
more likely predestined to fail.
ACADEMIA of emptiness. The matter of education only becomes worse as
you advance beyond the public high school, and having learned to march
to the same drummer as everyone else. Academia has become largely the
emptiness of follow the leaders. The higher you climb the more this is
true. It is a system of emulation rather than innovation. It is a
system of faith rather than questioning. It is about regurgitating
rather than originality. It is about assimilating what are presented
as facts, but it is largely not about real intelligence. Critical
thinking is far from encouraged in most instances. The fundamentals of
what constitutes real knowledge and its logical, rational, reasoning
analysis are almost untaught to most of the disciplines. Instead the
system is one of marketing subject areas, where each area tends to be
dominated by ever changing fashionable trends. What was in vogue there
one year, is gone the next and replaced by something else, in a
somewhat fickle and random juke box like selection of a limited range
of tunes that can be played. You put your money in and you get to
learn the lyrics. If you can remember them and repeat them you get a
certificate that says that you passed. It hardly matters what it was
that was repeated. While specific practical skills fare somewhat
better, it only means that a doctor in medical school learns the
rudiments of surgery, and an engineer might learn how to actually
assemble a machine, but those technical manipulations are far removed
from what we can refer to as being academia. Academia typically offers
as much or more disconnection of its ivory towers from the real world
beyond its perimeter fence. In some regards its content is not meant
to be disseminated beyond that fence and what is outside is largely
not allowed in. It is a privileged preserve of largely disconnected
emptiness. In some ways that disconnected emptiness leaves the world
outside the fence to is irrational beliefs, and its unchallenged
reliance on religion. The system is largely structured in exactly that
way. That does not indicate that the beliefs inside the fence are more
true, than those outside. In some ways that very difference is
destroyed by the dysfunction of the system inside academia where
follow the leaders is the ticket to an advanced degree. Ultimately
inside functions on the basis of belief, as does outside, even if the
beliefs are different. When the beliefs inside academia are shown to
fail, they leave the beliefs that prevail outside strengthened, and so
the tendency is always to that failure. Academia must never do better
than naive faith. In fact it must do worse, in the final analysis. The
tree of knowledge must be poison, or it might not be tolerated as
such. So it seeks to preserve its own viability, by failing to
struggle against its own failings and thus against its own emptiness.
If we wonder how wrong the accumulation of facts and their
interpretation can become, inside the fence, versus the reality of
outside, and how this connects with the question of beliefs, we need
only consider a matter such as Soviet Studies in American Academia as
it was in the 1980s. Subsequent intelligence, analysis external to
Union. Of course, only those not indoctrinated into those beliefs, and
not from inside the academic system, could break the deadlock.
WORK as emptiness. The absolute importance of earning an income, from
work, tends to preclude any questioning and critical analysis of the
nature of work in America. Whatever it is it tends to be accepted. The
history of work in the 20th century was one where that very
questioning and critical consideration were labeled communist,
leftist, and we have seen the rise and decline of the big unions, as
corporations found ways to reduce union power. The idea that work
comes from God, not from humanity, as a gift of divine grace, not as
something earnable by effort still has a strong role, and in some
regards that role has covertly increased since the 1960s. Work has
become a means of social control, in many instances, but mostly a
mechanism to eliminate dissent and to discourage questioning the
system and its core beliefs. Work made into a political weapon has
become an increasing problem, but it has become a problem that has
tended to deny the right to question it as such, in terms of its own
evolution into the system that it has become today. Most of the
changes that have taken place, as to work and the environment of work,
have proven negative. Social interaction of workers has become more
and more formalized and limited. Depersonalization is the rule, not
the exception. Sameness, often disguised as fitting in, has become an
increasing worry for most, and offers little opportunity for any self
expression. Personalized social relations are largely frowned upon, or
punishable. The working social environment is no longer seen as an
appropriate place to form personal relationships extending outside the
formalism of the working environment. Consistent with that it has
become increasingly unacceptable to date and mate with co-workers, in
any area of work, and that increasingly seen as an extreme of
unprofessionalism. Workers increasingly avoid even the most
superficial casual discussion of anything pertaining to their personal
interests and lives outside of work, increasingly afraid that even the
mere mention might be a potential work threatening conflict, or a
source of fatal unpopularity. These trends have begun to take over non
paying areas of what could be considered work, as much as the paying
areas. The paying and non paying areas are becoming made more and more
similar. More formal. More rigid. More limited to non personal,
professionalized and quasi professionalized interactions.
It has become so extreme that some, and believed to be a growing
Americanized societies, believe that uprooting from any social
connections and relations, inclusive of any established relation to
any community outside of the formalized work environment is desirable
or even a necessity. The destruction of difference between outside of
the work environment and what is inside that environment seen as a
means for destroying perceptions of that difference, and in a
completely depersonalized, formalized, socially unattached and
disconnected world, the world of work is largely unquestionable as to
its practices. After all, when there is nothing else, then that social
regimentation has no contrast to be measured against. The emptiness
outside made even more severe, then the emptiness inside gains some
primacy. This is consistent with the religious trend to emptiness and
depersonalization, believed to be the counterpoint to increased
attention to the afterlife and its absolutes, in an emphasis of
otherworldliness, as the only available alternative to the alienating
and depersonalized experience of this world and its increase in
emptiness.
Of course the worker is increasingly encouraged to build and maintain
even more such depersonalized, formalized, relationships, even outside
the confines of the actual environment and duties of the work
performed for an employer. In such formal association the same social
limitations are extended nearly infinitely, offering no alternative
from their emptiness.
Of course there is the strand of thought that no one has any potential
outside of the definition of potential afforded to them by corporate
culture, and corporate association. That too is beyond comprehension
by any individual, but something to be accepted as a given, without
consideration of any rightness or wrongness from the individual
viewpoint. True wisdom, and the power to label and define, is from
above, emphasizing the similarity to religion where all such defining
is considered as coming from God, and requiring total submission
too remains outside of dispute by a science that has largely
succumbed.
Added to this is the belief in stark, militarized, essentially shades
of battleship grey, work environs as the correct way to appoint and
decorate a work place. The work of sociology and psychology on this
subject has largely been discarded since the 1960s. The motives of
that ignorance of the truth of scientific research on the subject, are
clearly political and religious. They are willing to sacrifice worker
contentment and well being for the sake of promoting other
worldliness.
Factor in the increase in lack of job security, increased effects of
increasingly insecure management, the increase in fear, the growing
lack of benefits, no holidays, few days off, long hours, to the
increasingly forced disconnection from place and anything personal
that is personally valued outside of work itself (whether outside
interests, personal achievements, other personal potential, non work
related talents, familiarity of geographic place, and ownership of
whatever might impede radical upheaval and dislocation from social and
geographic community contexts), and the emptiness is greatly
increased. The trend, despite a pool of workers out of work, has been
for those seeking employment to sign away most of what were once their
entitlements, including any limitations as to amounts of overtime and
gained legal force and are gaining in acceptability. In fact I recall
souce of blackmail in that it must take primacy above all else in a
society where nothing is possible without sufficient money. So the
losses can be made so severe that the gains are largely negated in
terms of the imposed conditions required of the individual to achieve
a condition of work being given, and achieving that gift, privilege,
and ultimately ascribed to divine grace. The religious language and
its application to what are often actually only the victimized and
systemic abused, becomes the justification valued above science and
any humanism of work.
COMMERCE of emptiness. Shopping as a pastime, encouraged for its own
sake is a made in America diversion. Even psychologists have begun to
teach patients that they should go shopping and buy themselves
something as a reward system. However, the personalized element of
human interaction has largely been eliminated, in favor of a
depersonalized experience. A lot could be added on this subject,
concerning the social evolution of the marketplace into more and more
depersonalized commerce of emptiness, diminishing the role of
traditional social interaction, and personal knowing. That and the
radical change in values that that tends to bring. The thing takes on
more value than the personal association with others which becomes
diminished by the extreme shallowness and formalism that have replaced
more satisfying social interaction. Personalizing becomes unacceptable
there too, as it too is a workplace for many, and the shopper is as if
a worker along with the staff. The work of shopping, assigned to all
who have money to spend, is made into a responsibility as important as
any other career or employment responsibility. To shirk it means an
imposition of guilt as to not acting responsibly. Psychologically it
of all other forms of reward within the needs and wants hierarchy.
Divine grace ultimately means you can shop. If you cannot shop you are
status. Shopping itself is a competitive task, and the need is further
excerbated by the fact that styles, fashions, trends, what is in and
what is out, are changing so rapidly that ever more money is needed to
be spent to keep up or gain status and social place. The very meaning
of gift, or talent, becomes the acquisition of the things that are
shopped for subverting its other meanings in a redefining of value,
and thus of belief. Prevalent religion has evolved to accomodate
this.
INFORMATION of emptiness. The flood of unfiltered, unverified and
often unverifiable information is an ever growing tidal wave of
emptiness. Misinformation, disinformation, mislead and eat up time to
the extent that finding anything out that is or might be of importance
tends to become a gargantuan task more daunting than Hercules having
to clean out the Stygian stables. Unless one is particularly
intelligent and trained in critical thinking, the matter is becoming
largely a lost cause. It cannot be done. Thus it is emptiness. The
tree of knowledge is now more poisonous than ever before. There is
increasing data, inclusive of a never ending and always increasing
flood of deliberate scams, frauds, and con trickster solicitations.
The personal element having largely been removed from the scenario,
there is now only the depersonalized, pretense of the personal,
attempting to lure with lies, as if the entire system has become
possessed by the demons of hell themselves. The tendency is to want to
give up in utter hopelessness, leaving the bog of data, feeling
poorer, more lost, and more empty than when one arrived there. The
muck is too deep to wade through. The stench and soiling from it tends
to infiltrate every other form of relation, where it is regurgitated,
in near to academic style, by trivial pursuit players, who have no
idea, for the most part, as to truth or lie, but feel a necessity to
fill dead air time, with sounds filled with any type of information
gained from the new media explosion of endless data. So there is no
real escaping of that same emptiness. The social context, such as it
is, even in its increasingly depersonalized form, is saturated with
the same emptiness. Values and truths tend to be the first victims,
even in technical as well as the most vital matters pertaining to
life. The flood simply washes away the last semblance to any real
knowing.
CONCLUSION as to emptiness.
While we have not delved all that deeply, or all that thoroughly into
the subject of the increasing emptiness that comes from Americanism,
there is enough of a mustard seed in each segment of the two articles,
to lead a vast and critical inquiry, putting into question most of the
assumptions, presuppositions, and what is taken increasingly for
granted as given truth. There is enough of a mustard seed to
reconsider how all of the emptiness of Americanism, as it has evolved
to being now and in terms of its evident trends as to potential future
evolution, along that same path, is affecting values, and reducing
human relationships to merely randomized, shallow, formal interactions
of depersonalized commerce. How that emptiness is changing how people
understand themselves, and each other, within the context of the
I am sure there are other areas of inquiry, but this concludes my
attempt to create a catalyst for renewed critical thought, and for
questioning what has happened, what is happening and where it is
headed, so that we can change the course of humanity to a better
future.
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