AMERICA: THE POLITICS AND CULTURE OF EMPTINESS - SEQUAL

[Morpheal]

AMERICA: THE POLITICS AND CULTURE OF EMPTINESS - SEQUAL

This is a sequal to the original article, considering some further issues related to the fundamental principle of emptiness and its role in Americanism.

EDUCATION as emptiness. I have made the point before that when the need for prisons is seen as ever increasing and the prisons are increasingly full, education has failed. That failure is a part of its emptiness. Partly this divide between what is seen as being good and evil tends to be closely related to the peculiar belief in predestination. People are still seen as destined, prior to education and life experience, to be what they become. This takes away a large amount of the responsibility that ought to accrue to education. Partly predestination, though ascribed an absolute religious value, supports national claims as to rightness and primacy of leadership, as a divinely chosen emissary of national policies and practices, at home and in the world beyond. It also supports the importance of ancestral lineage for those who can trace back their pedigree to the founding fathers of the nation (the Puritan extremists who came to America fleeing from socio-political progress in England). Similar to the lineage of a monarchy, a Puritan lineage can confer special privilege, of far more significance than formal education is able to offer. Determinism also means that learning something does not confer the right to pursue what is learned in a gainful or more meaningful way within the society and culture. It does mean that education of that sort can be entirely wasted, and the individual redirected, often in accordance with whatever the ancestral role happened to be. If a man studies to be a writer, and learns to write, he may find that he is made into a soldier, because his father and grandfather before him were professional soldiers. The question of choice in an education of emptiness becomes a vital issue and was an issue deeply questioned in human potential movement oriented 1960s, but less and less considered and acted upon since. The battle against that type of emptiness is being lost, not won.

Education as emptiness is also about lack of relevance. It is unlikely that most workers, working at what is considered a non professional level, and many of those who are working at that level, will ever use any more of their formal school education, from years prior to college, than approximately grade 4. The years following that are revealed to have been little more than an imprisonment in learning routines of attendance, and some skills of classroom deportment, in preparation for the structuring that is found in the world of work. Nothing much is learned about society and how it functions. Even less as to the truth of the system. The facts presented have to be taken as true, and largely only serve the more trivial function of providing relatively bland content, avoiding controversy and and any real questioning. The facts of education merely serve as busyness, emulating some prevalent aspects of later life, so there are fewer surprises as to the essential meaninglessness of many of its routines. We might add that in those years relatively little is taught and learned concerning the law, ethics, society, the world beyond one’s own immediate neighborhood, business practices, the role of customary practices and traditions, or even the truth about health. Mostly educational emptiness nurtures ignorance and hurls its victims into the school of hard knocks where if they were not secretly schooled by more knowing and experienced family relations, they are more likely predestined to fail.

ACADEMIA of emptiness. The matter of education only becomes worse as you advance beyond the public high school, and having learned to march to the same drummer as everyone else. Academia has become largely the emptiness of follow the leaders. The higher you climb the more this is true. It is a system of emulation rather than innovation. It is a system of faith rather than questioning. It is about regurgitating rather than originality. It is about assimilating what are presented as facts, but it is largely not about real intelligence. Critical thinking is far from encouraged in most instances. The fundamentals of what constitutes real knowledge and its logical, rational, reasoning analysis are almost untaught to most of the disciplines. Instead the system is one of marketing subject areas, where each area tends to be dominated by ever changing fashionable trends. What was in vogue there one year, is gone the next and replaced by something else, in a somewhat fickle and random juke box like selection of a limited range of tunes that can be played. You put your money in and you get to learn the lyrics. If you can remember them and repeat them you get a certificate that says that you passed. It hardly matters what it was that was repeated. While specific practical skills fare somewhat better, it only means that a doctor in medical school learns the rudiments of surgery, and an engineer might learn how to actually assemble a machine, but those technical manipulations are far removed from what we can refer to as being academia. Academia typically offers as much or more disconnection of its ivory towers from the real world beyond its perimeter fence. In some regards its content is not meant to be disseminated beyond that fence and what is outside is largely not allowed in. It is a privileged preserve of largely disconnected emptiness. In some ways that disconnected emptiness leaves the world outside the fence to is irrational beliefs, and its unchallenged reliance on religion. The system is largely structured in exactly that way. That does not indicate that the beliefs inside the fence are more true, than those outside. In some ways that very difference is destroyed by the dysfunction of the system inside academia where follow the leaders is the ticket to an advanced degree. Ultimately inside functions on the basis of belief, as does outside, even if the beliefs are different. When the beliefs inside academia are shown to fail, they leave the beliefs that prevail outside strengthened, and so the tendency is always to that failure. Academia must never do better than naive faith. In fact it must do worse, in the final analysis. The tree of knowledge must be poison, or it might not be tolerated as such. So it seeks to preserve its own viability, by failing to struggle against its own failings and thus against its own emptiness.

If we wonder how wrong the accumulation of facts and their interpretation can become, inside the fence, versus the reality of outside, and how this connects with the question of beliefs, we need only consider a matter such as Soviet Studies in American Academia as it was in the 1980s. Subsequent intelligence, analysis external to academia, overturned most of Academia’s beliefs as to the Soviet Union. Of course, only those not indoctrinated into those beliefs, and not from inside the academic system, could break the deadlock.

WORK as emptiness. The absolute importance of earning an income, from work, tends to preclude any questioning and critical analysis of the nature of work in America. Whatever it is it tends to be accepted. The history of work in the 20th century was one where that very questioning and critical consideration were labeled communist, leftist, and we have seen the rise and decline of the big unions, as corporations found ways to reduce union power. The idea that work comes from God, not from humanity, as a gift of divine grace, not as something earnable by effort still has a strong role, and in some regards that role has covertly increased since the 1960s. Work has become a means of social control, in many instances, but mostly a mechanism to eliminate dissent and to discourage questioning the system and its core beliefs. Work made into a political weapon has become an increasing problem, but it has become a problem that has tended to deny the right to question it as such, in terms of its own evolution into the system that it has become today. Most of the changes that have taken place, as to work and the environment of work, have proven negative. Social interaction of workers has become more and more formalized and limited. Depersonalization is the rule, not the exception. Sameness, often disguised as fitting in, has become an increasing worry for most, and offers little opportunity for any self expression. Personalized social relations are largely frowned upon, or punishable. The working social environment is no longer seen as an appropriate place to form personal relationships extending outside the formalism of the working environment. Consistent with that it has become increasingly unacceptable to date and mate with co-workers, in any area of work, and that increasingly seen as an extreme of unprofessionalism. Workers increasingly avoid even the most superficial casual discussion of anything pertaining to their personal interests and lives outside of work, increasingly afraid that even the mere mention might be a potential work threatening conflict, or a source of fatal unpopularity. These trends have begun to take over non paying areas of what could be considered work, as much as the paying areas. The paying and non paying areas are becoming made more and more similar. More formal. More rigid. More limited to non personal, professionalized and quasi professionalized interactions.

It has become so extreme that some, and believed to be a growing portion of those with power over the nature of work in today’s Americanized societies, believe that uprooting from any social connections and relations, inclusive of any established relation to any community outside of the formalized work environment is desirable or even a necessity. The destruction of difference between outside of the work environment and what is inside that environment seen as a means for destroying perceptions of that difference, and in a completely depersonalized, formalized, socially unattached and disconnected world, the world of work is largely unquestionable as to its practices. After all, when there is nothing else, then that social regimentation has no contrast to be measured against. The emptiness outside made even more severe, then the emptiness inside gains some primacy. This is consistent with the religious trend to emptiness and depersonalization, believed to be the counterpoint to increased attention to the afterlife and its absolutes, in an emphasis of otherworldliness, as the only available alternative to the alienating and depersonalized experience of this world and its increase in emptiness.

Of course the worker is increasingly encouraged to build and maintain even more such depersonalized, formalized, relationships, even outside the confines of the actual environment and duties of the work performed for an employer. In such formal association the same social limitations are extended nearly infinitely, offering no alternative from their emptiness.

Of course there is the strand of thought that no one has any potential outside of the definition of potential afforded to them by corporate culture, and corporate association. That too is beyond comprehension by any individual, but something to be accepted as a given, without consideration of any rightness or wrongness from the individual viewpoint. True wisdom, and the power to label and define, is from above, emphasizing the similarity to religion where all such defining is considered as coming from God, and requiring total submission without questioning. The very validity of one’s own understanding of one’s self, as opposed to what is imposed as given, is put into doubt. Destiny and choice are no longer one’s own locus of control, but that too remains outside of dispute by a science that has largely succumbed.

Added to this is the belief in stark, militarized, essentially shades of battleship grey, work environs as the correct way to appoint and decorate a work place. The work of sociology and psychology on this subject has largely been discarded since the 1960s. The motives of that ignorance of the truth of scientific research on the subject, are clearly political and religious. They are willing to sacrifice worker contentment and well being for the sake of promoting other worldliness.

Factor in the increase in lack of job security, increased effects of more rigid hierarchical “pecking orders” within structures filled with increasingly insecure management, the increase in fear, the growing lack of benefits, no holidays, few days off, long hours, to the increasingly forced disconnection from place and anything personal that is personally valued outside of work itself (whether outside interests, personal achievements, other personal potential, non work related talents, familiarity of geographic place, and ownership of whatever might impede radical upheaval and dislocation from social and geographic community contexts), and the emptiness is greatly increased. The trend, despite a pool of workers out of work, has been for those seeking employment to sign away most of what were once their entitlements, including any limitations as to amounts of overtime and statutory holidays. These sign offs of what were once “rights” have gained legal force and are gaining in acceptability. In fact I recall one American corporation that openly had the motto “your vacation is your vocation”. Nevertheless, the necessity of financial income is a souce of blackmail in that it must take primacy above all else in a society where nothing is possible without sufficient money. So the losses can be made so severe that the gains are largely negated in terms of the imposed conditions required of the individual to achieve a condition of work being given, and achieving that gift, privilege, and ultimately ascribed to divine grace. The religious language and its application to what are often actually only the victimized and systemic abused, becomes the justification valued above science and any humanism of work.

COMMERCE of emptiness. Shopping as a pastime, encouraged for its own sake is a made in America diversion. Even psychologists have begun to teach patients that they should go shopping and buy themselves something as a reward system. However, the personalized element of human interaction has largely been eliminated, in favor of a depersonalized experience. A lot could be added on this subject, concerning the social evolution of the marketplace into more and more depersonalized commerce of emptiness, diminishing the role of traditional social interaction, and personal knowing. That and the radical change in values that that tends to bring. The thing takes on more value than the personal association with others which becomes diminished by the extreme shallowness and formalism that have replaced more satisfying social interaction. Personalizing becomes unacceptable there too, as it too is a workplace for many, and the shopper is as if a worker along with the staff. The work of shopping, assigned to all who have money to spend, is made into a responsibility as important as any other career or employment responsibility. To shirk it means an imposition of guilt as to not acting responsibly. Psychologically it becomes wrong to fail to reward one’s self for work, and that means buying something with one’s income. This has tended to take the place of all other forms of reward within the needs and wants hierarchy. Divine grace ultimately means you can shop. If you cannot shop you are socially marginalized, socially uncompetitive, don’t rate, and have no status. Shopping itself is a competitive task, and the need is further excerbated by the fact that styles, fashions, trends, what is in and what is out, are changing so rapidly that ever more money is needed to be spent to keep up or gain status and social place. The very meaning of gift, or talent, becomes the acquisition of the things that are shopped for subverting its other meanings in a redefining of value, and thus of belief. Prevalent religion has evolved to accomodate this.

INFORMATION of emptiness. The flood of unfiltered, unverified and often unverifiable information is an ever growing tidal wave of emptiness. Misinformation, disinformation, mislead and eat up time to the extent that finding anything out that is or might be of importance tends to become a gargantuan task more daunting than Hercules having to clean out the Stygian stables. Unless one is particularly intelligent and trained in critical thinking, the matter is becoming largely a lost cause. It cannot be done. Thus it is emptiness. The tree of knowledge is now more poisonous than ever before. There is increasingly no way to find one’s way through the quagmire of ever increasing data, inclusive of a never ending and always increasing flood of deliberate scams, frauds, and con trickster solicitations. The personal element having largely been removed from the scenario, there is now only the depersonalized, pretense of the personal, attempting to lure with lies, as if the entire system has become possessed by the demons of hell themselves. The tendency is to want to give up in utter hopelessness, leaving the bog of data, feeling poorer, more lost, and more empty than when one arrived there. The muck is too deep to wade through. The stench and soiling from it tends to infiltrate every other form of relation, where it is regurgitated, in near to academic style, by trivial pursuit players, who have no idea, for the most part, as to truth or lie, but feel a necessity to fill dead air time, with sounds filled with any type of information gained from the new media explosion of endless data. So there is no real escaping of that same emptiness. The social context, such as it is, even in its increasingly depersonalized form, is saturated with the same emptiness. Values and truths tend to be the first victims, even in technical as well as the most vital matters pertaining to life. The flood simply washes away the last semblance to any real knowing.

CONCLUSION as to emptiness.

While we have not delved all that deeply, or all that thoroughly into the subject of the increasing emptiness that comes from Americanism, there is enough of a mustard seed in each segment of the two articles, to lead a vast and critical inquiry, putting into question most of the assumptions, presuppositions, and what is taken increasingly for granted as given truth. There is enough of a mustard seed to reconsider how all of the emptiness of Americanism, as it has evolved to being now and in terms of its evident trends as to potential future evolution, along that same path, is affecting values, and reducing human relationships to merely randomized, shallow, formal interactions of depersonalized commerce. How that emptiness is changing how people understand themselves, and each other, within the context of the “Brave New World” and “1984" of Americanism. (I highly recommend reading Aldous Huxley’s and George Orwell’s writings.)

I am sure there are other areas of inquiry, but this concludes my attempt to create a catalyst for renewed critical thought, and for questioning what has happened, what is happening and where it is headed, so that we can change the course of humanity to a better future.

[truedelphi]

1. True education is a life long process. The schools are

Often merely incubators for industry - those who succeed at the school game are often those who will perpetuate the "New World Order" As a reporter I have talked to those who are paid experts at higher institutions of research, and they don't know the basics of what they are hired to study (Nancy Balter, PhD, for instance, had been well funded to research MTBE - she did not even know what her counterpart but more independently funded colleague John Marchand knows - that MTBE emits formaldehyde when it undergoes combustion.)

It is also interesting that as time goes on, less time in the classroom is spent on books and reading. The average college sophomore reads only nine books a year. And often if you were to talk to people in middle management, they don't read at all.

One hundred fifty years ago, those who were educated had a real education. They knew two foreign languages, read the classics, they knew math, they were required as small children to learn five to ten page poems and recite from memory, reading a dramatic fashion. All these activities hard wire the brain so that the person can reason and use logic in a decent fashion.

Nowadays a "well-educated" person is merely a technician. They know more about software programs. I remember watching a video on peak oil, and when the more elderly oil men were talking, they started bashing the younger people in that industry. "They no longer know geology -they rely on a computer program to tell them where oil can be found. And if that information is not programmed correctly - they have no way to tell, because they aren't taught properly any more."

We now have an entire generation of kids who are growing up and don't know that there is fifty cents in a half dollar. Is it any wonder that our economy has been stolen out from under us, even at a time when affluent Americans paid beaucoup dollars for the advice that has recently destroyed themselves?

I find myself turning more and more to things like Alan Watts and his seminars (now on YouTube) to find out the things that the classroom did not want to mention.