lol@consumerism

All forms of education should be free public goods. There is a necessity to educate the masses. It favors the capacity to achieve progressive movements through the questioning of policy, the ability to comprehend and analyze the effects and outcomes of government decisions. An educated society leads to properly managed nations (Norway’s Finance Minister: “We see that a strong welfare state, together with free education and healthcare, has acted as a buffer that stabilises the economy”, commenting on why the nation hasn’t succumbed to the Great Recession). 

In the United States, as well as in Canada more recently, tuition costs are rising, effectively reducing the availability of higher education to lower socio-economic groups. We see this trend occurring in the United States as a shrinking middle class gives way to a division between an educated elite and an alienated working class. Education in North American societies is becoming a luxury good. 

The question then arrises, why would governments seek to decrease access to education? Simply, elections in North America are won on emotional cleavages, not intellectual debates. (Santorum: “They shouldn’t go to college, they’ll get the wrong ideas” - he’s polling at… 30% in some instances?) A thinking electorate does not maintain the status quo. A thinking electorate can become self-aware, conscious of their condition, able to rebel against the strongholds put in place multi-billion dollar media owners and government influencers. 

Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation. 

Oscar Wilde

Mankind should consistently strive to improve upon previous generations in all realms and fields of knowledge. Yet societal forces continue to impose outdated thought, willfully keeping mankind within the bounds of ignorance. Leaders, governments, churches have motive to do so; to accept the word of authority as truth is to allow for manipulation and dominance. We have forgotten to look to the truth as authority, rather than authority as the truth. Humans are perfectly irrational creations when led by emotion, our irrationality manifests itself in adherence to the great farces that are organized religions. 

We are consumers of religion. In the words of Napoleon Bonaparte, “Religion is excellent stuff for keeping common people quiet. Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich”. 

Cheap oil is the backbone of modern societies. It sparked the creation of the metropolis and access to a quality of life our ancestors could not conceive. The relations between the oil industry and the political realm spawned the mismanagement of the commodity, manifesting itself in deliberate planning to leave the present and future without an alternative to the product. We’ve achieved a level of (ever-increasing) demand requiring the near depletion of the world’s reserves to match the unreasonable and unsustainable expectations for energy and petrochemical products in Western society. Yet mainstream media and politics fail to convey the urgency of the tightening supply, and the immediate drastic measures that must be undertaken to slow a seriously devastating supply shock. Our ability to rely on oil is over. Peak oil has happened, yet the subject does not receive the attention it deserves because it’s easier to forget about problems of the future and focus on trivialities of the present. Emotional and consumeristic distractions keep us contemplating our individual realities in place of societal welfare.

The officially sanctioned mainstream knowledge base of Western societies has removed and demonized social morality to such an extent that our societies consistently reward capitalistic individualism over collective consciousness. The showcasing of entrepreneurs and corporations that publicly promote consumerism and privately sponsor it through the degradation of humans and the environment have brought about what is the irony of the human condition in the modern era. In an effort to secure the future for their children by amassing wealth and resources, the generations of industrialization have jeopardized the future of mankind.

The leaders of humanity have set on course it’s suicide, brought on by gross disregard for our host organism. The paradox of the present is an interesting one: slipping into the passiveness with which the future is approached because it’s easier than standing firmly against the mainstream laissez-faire approach behind the end of humanity.

Every society, every organic entity, experiences the cycle of birth, growth, maturation, decline, and death. Our collective arrogance through the advancement of technology leads us to think that because we can master nature, we have permission to exploit it. Conquering nature has served as a license to its destruction. We’ve forgotten that humans lived symbiotically in nature, as opposed to the alienated from it in the metropolis, for 99% of human existence, and that our survival remains directly tied to understanding, preserving, sustaining, and respecting our natural environment. Because of the way we’ve mismanaged finite resources and irresponsibly approached the necessary and immediate transition to sustainable energy sources, I’m doubtful that global geography as little as 100 years from now will resemble that of todays, and of the planet successfully harboring the projected ~9 billion of us.