Fractured Realities; 6-1-2010; 6-24-2010;
As humans, we all have egos, and we all believe that our thoughts are the correct thoughts. Also, we live in a society of extreme specialization. The combination of these two circumstances has resulted in an illogical situation, each of us believe that our skills are the most important.
Those serving in the military, or with military tendencies, believe that the military is the singularly most important aspect in society. Their logic insists that all else exists because of the military because, they assert, without the military anything can be taken away or destroyed by others.
The economists are confident that without an economy there would be no military and without finance society would not exist to begin with. Those who live in a world of the engineer are just as sure that nothing would exist without engineers.
Lawyers, doctors and teachers all also claim that they are the foundations of society, that without their own vital profession society could have never formed and would not be sustained. Of course the blue collar worker feels that they are the foundation of society and know that they are responsible for building civilization.
Our human arrogance and our unwillingness to cooperate, our pride in our independence, inhibits any actual human progress. Much of society feels that they have 'done it on their own' and that they are completely self made, discounting the doctor who helped in their birth, or the teacher who helped them learn to read, or the workers who built the hospital or the school or the roads, or the tax payers who paid for the roads or schools or hospitals.
Obviously one could think about this and realize society is like a car, all four tires are equally important and all four tires are required to allow the car to function correctly. The engine and the frame and other items all also have roles to play and no one item is the most important part.
But everyday there are debates and arguments from members of each congregation pointing out their own perspective and their own central role concerning any particular circumstance.
It has become a massive cognitive dissonance on a societal scale.
Cognitive dissonance allows people to act in ways that they know are illogical. Individuals act on their beliefs, not on logic, not based on the facts they have accumulated.
In the classic example of the Native American believing that killing a buffalo will bring rain, it was actually possible to quietly speak to and reason with the hunter and the hunter would admit that is illogical to believe that killing a buffalo would bring rain, yet the very next day the hunter would continue slaughtering buffalo and, unless rain came by chance, eventually the entire tribe could starve among a herd of rotting buffalo.
In the same way our society is dysfunctional; without cooperation competition cannot exist. Whether in the military, or sports, or finance. Without teammates, and adversaries, and well-enforced rules and regulations there would be nothing. Imagine the opening of a football game and one team starts to take the field, and an adversary takes out a machine gun and kills all of the opposing team members, and then starts jumping up-and-down in the center of the field shouting "I win! I win!."
Without cooperation there is no competition; in the previous example you and I clearly see that the player with the gun did not "win" the football game, though that individual may continue to insist that the opponents "lost".
But this societal cognitive dissonance, this societal lack of logic, is only one aspect of our fractured realities, a few other aspects are our overly emotional and vicious partisan politics which no longer have anything to do with leading the country but only with destroying the other half of our own body politic; rampant corporatism which no longer has anything to do with nourishing our communities but rather with strip-mining them; our educational system which, at the elementary level are little more than prison style babysitters with archaic curricula, and at the post-secondary level are social networks to place only the wealthiest students into the most powerful and highest paying corporate positions.
Why is bi-partisanship dead? Why don't we teach high school students accounting and basic finance and the importance of building their credit score? Why don't we amend our living constitution to outlaw lobbyists from bribing our public officials? Why do our states fight with each other to give hundreds of millions to nearly monopolistic corporations, who only wish to hire us as cheap labor for their own profits, instead of using those hundreds of millions of dollars to finance and encourage our own citizens to innovate and build businesses that draw from the communities and build those communities?
I don't know the answers; I am a seeker.
