by evilgenius » Mon 06 Nov 2017, 14:01:16
I've been thinking about this after watching the new Thor movie at the theater yesterday. Wow, comic book relief. Yes, and no. In the movie Thor falls from where he was and winds up in this place where the leader is so stricken with a desire to see winners that everything is about winning. The first thing that Thor is asked when he lands there is if he is a fighter or food. The whole society is arranged around winning and absolutely everything else has no value. If it isn't junk, or dead, it might as well be. In that place there is enough junk all around for any creative person to do great things with, but nobody is. All they want to do is discover the next fighter.
Using another myth might help get to my point. In the garden man's downfall was taking from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Basically, his downfall was coming to the point of choice. It's easy to simplify that choice by celebrating winners, and considering everybody else as food. We do that every day in the world. The US is a good example of it. Something like the evolutionary paradigm permeates everything in the US. Science is celebrated, except the part of the method that must always remain unsure of its assumptions. You don't have to look any further than go die in a ditch healthcare to see that. You don't have to see any further than I won't pay for somebody else to have a thing (national defense excepted), not in my backyard naysaying to see that. Alright, kumbaya, that still doesn't mean we are all in this together.
I think choice is the key. What we have today is a world built around saying yes to every whim that comes upon us. As such we are easy prey for those who use the power of the group, through advertising, to define us and, thus, to define the group. The group has become the size of our collective wants. We are constantly bombarded with the object of winning, as in either getting rich or otherwise following some example of success. People aren't free necessarily to think for themselves and either accept or reject choices. Political correctness is just a means to keep everything on the table, and eliminate somebody becoming a loser so that the group can remain strong. Worse, the wisdom we do develop, that could come to the aid of individuals in the midst of such choices, is denigrated. If it doesn't help us win, then people easily deny it. I think it is somewhere in the reality of each of us truly becoming individuals, and those not based upon outward designs upon some more common idea of success, though it may pick from that, that success, in the form of becoming a real person, comes.
Another example that gets at what I am saying is how the human brain develops as it gets older in youth. What it actually starts with amounts to far more connections than it ends up with. Along the way it has to pare down the number of connections in order to become something. You can't get to there from here without giving up the idea of having everything.