As a parent, you may agree with the direction in which the world is headed - and especially the direction in which the United States is moving toward. If so, maybe you'll read this article out of curiosity for a different point of view.
However, if you do not agree, how do you manage the most delicate part of a necessary conversation with your kids?
How do you explain the absurdity and insanity of the world around us?
How do you paint a hopeful picture when the media all around us is pushing human suffering as the top valued commodity?
I'm honestly stumped. I find it impossible to justify the silent acceptance by the nearly 8.5 billion people of a way of life driven exclusively through fear and for profit - even in the most "civilized" of the countries...
How do you explain that the very concept of "profit" is directly related to human nature in the form of greed, and that the only thing that feeds this loop is also in our human nature - consumption, specifically fear-driven consumption.
We accept things the way they are, and then we teach our kids that this is how things are. Then, this mindset flaw traps everyone's destiny into a vicious loop of surrendering dreams and vision in favor of a life long struggle for fitting into a multi-layered mouse wheel structure called society.
Because this is how things are.
Ironically, we define our ascension from the innocence of childhood into the insanity of adulthood as "maturity".
In Biology, maturity "signifies the end of a growth phase, allowing for specialized functions like reproduction, and is defined by the attainment of adult characteristics that no longer change significantly with further aging." (1)
Socially, maturity also implies a stage when individuals are no longer changing, when they become an intrinsic functional component of society, more or less perfectly fitting within the norm cycle of production and consumption.
The definition AND requirement for being a mature individual is to abandon any ideas that would not fit within the allowed ideological range.
The more extreme the ideology of a society is or becomes, the more that range of allowed freedoms of thought and actions narrows.
The most extreme examples of such narrowing are the implementations of universal standardization (2) models where the ideology of uniformization is radicalized and applied at all levels of administrative functions of a society.
While some countries and cultures function on a more subtle level of ideological standardization, others have gone or are going to extremes, but the core essence of modern society is that a mature individual is useful to its society and in full productive participation for the remainder of their adult life. The variation occurs only based on the type of cultural and social contract in place, geographically and historically speaking.
Thus, merely because of the “luck of the reproduction draw”, each and every human eventually finds themselves in the predicament of figuring out what is expected of them versus what they are capable of becoming - or allowed to become.
From there on, humans survive through acceptance, resilience, adaptation, and often migration when possible. Because that’s just how things are…
For millenia, our species has accepted a narrative that moved further and further away from the natural sense of life itself. Also for millenia, wise men and women have tried to warn us of our flaws and the dangers that lurk in the shadows of ignorance. And yet we learned very little of true benefit on an evolutionary scale.
Separated by time and space, three sublime thinkers reflected on the nature of humans and the world we create.
"If we believe absurdities, we will commit atrocities."
— Voltaire
"Custom will reconcile people to any atrocity."
— George Bernard Shaw
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”
— Jiddu Krishnamurti
Expand your Research:
(1) Maturation Definition and Examples - Biology Online Dictionary https://share.google/MNvEf2B9kLnQOnjuL
(2) Mass Society
https://www.britannica.com/topic/mass-society
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