-Importance of the individual is once again starting to be recognized. For the past several decades the culture has continually decomposed and chipped away at the power of the individual, by implying your only “important” if you contribute to the culture, a culture of waste and destruction. It denounces our appearance and makes you continually strive to look like someone else, tells you to fuel a major corporation that crushes the small person, and says you need a 8x12 sheet of paper to give you any intellectual merit. Recently though, through drug culture and the increase in psychology and neurological fields suggests we are once again starting to value the beauty of our minds over knowledge of other worldly contraptions. We know how to fix cars, how to maintain electronics, and how rockets work but barely anything about how we operate. Hopefully we realize it’s better to be able to manufacture and repair your own mind instead of handing it over to the nearest greasy haired mechanic.
The pursuit of money is a never ending chase, With more to spend there’s more to spend on, With more to spend on there’s less to be happy about. True riches are in satisfaction with your position in life, whatever it may be.
We live in a consumer culture, where we might have the greatest thing ever today, only to be overshadowed by the next invention tomorrow. Those 200$ sneakers you bought today are only cool until next week those 50$ shoes become the new trend. And the more money you have the more you can afford to adapt to these changes for social acceptance and temporary personal satisfaction. But if you have nothing you have the gift of not being a week long fad. Consuming is a addiction (and shopping’s already shown to be), if we have freedom of choice you have freedom to purchase into the culture as it changes continually. And since being broke is never in style there you are once again chasing to attain more paper, to start the cycle all over again.
My thoughts on religion have changed quite dramatically over the past couple of months, which Is both a good thing and somewhat a bad thing for me. I’ve come to one revelation though, that most modern day religions preach more an ideal of isolation and a means of differentiation (since it would help people strengthen their beliefs to not be exposed to external influence), rather then a ideal of acceptance of people. Now I’m all for being on the “winning side” and all but really what kind of game is being played here? I now realize that if you wish to become a religious man you must learn to become a peaceful and humane person first, because you may never know what your creator looks like or is, but you can be damn sure he wanted us to be a peaceable culture, and not use his word to justify murder or to use as a difference from people. Religion is twisted, taught subjectively and selectively, and preached in the way that appeals the masses, and when you learn religion you will learn it the way it is meant to be viewed by the teacher. Unless you’re a Satanist (in which case you’re out of luck) then learn to be good compassionate and “nice” people before you chase god.
Everlasting happiness is not happiness. Permanent bliss is not very blissful at all. I love money, and cars, and interesting people, and the lazy Saturdays and unproductive Sundays, because they can all be taken away and come to pass. I love my temporary paradise because occasionally I get a peek at the world outside, so I can be sure it really is a paradise. So don’t preach me ancient proverbs and inner happiness ideals that I can purchase for a couple cents on the page, I’m satisfied with my false happiness and my material goods, I’m happy living good the one day and laying in misery the next because it gives me a taste of the “varying offensive” that is life.
Evil is rampant in our society. But justice is an epidemic. Let me start by saying I don’t believe anyone is truly a “bad” person or a lost cause; corruption is only skin deep. I don't believe in punishment, and I believe that goodness in man should be created the same way evil is grown, through influence. No one is born bad or is irreversibly evil, just more intricately wired for that purpose, with circuits that can be disconnected and correctly attached with the right kind of tools.
Firstly, to understand a solution you must understand the problem. What makes a person do things of a destructive nature? A man is not born a criminal, nor born to be a criminal. A man can only be bred for corruption. If I may dwell in some psychology here, we are essentially slaves to our sub-conscious mind, an area we have little to no control over the development of and yet it controls all of our actions and helps the conscious mind make up stories about us being in control of our thoughts. It’s also a area that is developed through influence, through everything we’ve seen, heard, tasted, and been taught. And according to today’s society it’s quite apparent we give more value to bad events then the good, because goodness was always a given but evil is always oh so shocking. Media is saturated with horrible tragedies of humanity and at the end of the day how many car wrecks do we need to see before we’re satisfied? “We all feed on tragedy, Frown out your one face, but with the other you stare like a junkie into the TV, stare like a zombie while the mother holds her child and watches him die”.
In a culture where violence is fed to us like (and often with) afternoon tea, maybe we’ve grown cold to the idea of suffering, without even realizing it. But then again every middle-aged man who spends his afternoons watching CNN is not a murderer, and there is a sure contrast between being indifferent to pain and causing it. Various studies have shown that serial killers have the same area of their brain (located around the frontal cortex) altered, and if you take into account neuroplasticity (the idea that brain matter is actually altered according to influence) these people all had some relatively similar seriously negative things going on to push them into horrible acts of violence. You can call it madness, call it the flaw of the human design, but we’re a species designed to listen and follow, and those still clinging to free will are only kidding themselves. If you’re raised in a world where violence is the means to an end, can you still be blamed for your actions? Cut the moral goodness act and realize that when our bad influences outweigh the good we will essentially become a product of those influences. The virtuous characters of fiction would have been cold-blooded killers in the real world.
Now if there’s one thing that’s always got under my skin is the condition of the justice system, not only in the U.S, but in most developed countries it’s the same charade. Let them rot in a cell, shock their brains to mulch, inject them and watch them squirm, or just put them behind a curtain and fire away. It might not be the correct thing to justify murder with murder but if it makes the public happy then it must be the right thing to do. An eye for an eye and tooth for a tooth, hell it’s even in the bible. Just another catalyst to feed our angry minds, satisfy our craving for violence by justifying it with our losses, when we would’ve done the same thing in their situation. We must improve these individuals, as much as it goes against every revenge filled and vengeful urge in our body, or we might never improve ourselves. Violence breeds more violence. We can’t let go of our selfishness, may the whole world burn but our losses be repaid. Our justice system is the equivalent of a 6-year old sweeping his junk under the bed so the room appears clean when his mom comes in.
Because of this the solution might sound simple but is brutally hard to enforce for most. Counseling by knowledgeable people with good intentions would be much more efficient then throwing an individual into a hellhole of worse influence. When a person can be “brainwashed” into being evil, that same kind of force can be used to flip the equation. Call it manipulation if that’s what you prefer (since it seems to be the word of choice for moral enthusiasts) but the human mind is a fragile thing meant to be twisted and turned, and if it’s not molded the right way then violence comes about. We have the love, community, and ideas to create a human paradise if we just learn to control our violent urges. It’s not the strongest that survive, we’re smart enough to realize that we can help people in need instead of push them deeper into the abyss, but yet we continue to do so and even go so far as to label these people “evil” when we’re most certainly saints in white clothing. Well turn around and take a closer look, because you’ve hung the guilty with the innocent.
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