dmitridbThu, Mar 13, 2008 No, I completely agree with you. Idleness and misanthropy go hand in hand, and although paranoidmystic seems to think that the 50's were the ultimate low point of materialistic philosophy holding power over the populace, I think that now is way worse. How come? Well, I'm not speaking for everyone in the world, but I'm talking about those who are still here in the western world who really know about everything going wrong in the world and just give a smirk, shrug their shoulders, and say "we're fucked lol oh well". I think that these kinds of thoughts hold a fair amount of people's minds if not a majority of them. I don't blame them, since they face a fair amount of cognitive dissonance over two ideals, one of which is screaming "if we don't do things different (without specifying very clearly or in ways that sound materialistically satisfying what needs to be done) we're fucked" and one which is "no, things are cool, nothing is fucked, go buy things to distract you because it's worked since you've been a little kid and it will keep working for the rest of your lifetime". One ideal is supported as a part of the definition of our culture and one is supported as an auxillary ideal that's perceived more like a chore that needs to be done rather than a matter of life or death.
Did the baby boomers suffer from this dichotomy of purported truths and fuck everything up? Fuck yes! It's the whole reason neocons and yuppies were spawned. (etymology of yuppie: from yippie, the definitive anti-establishment group of the sixties, corrupted into "young urban professional" somewhere down the line as things went). They lived lives of believing that materialistic self-indulgence was the way to go as children, and of course as young adults they applied the same behaviour patterns when it came to doing drugs, which caused most of them (who really had nothing to do with the peace and love ideals and more to do with partying) to do too many drugs which caused even more cognitive dissonance which caused them to retreat away from peace, love, and the age of aquarius or whatever and back into their materialistic self-indulgences - The shift from favorite drugs as defined by popular culture being psychedelics to those favorite drugs being cocaine and speed for the go-getters to heroin for thee no-getters.
I think that something which could help is convincing people on psychedelics that their materialistic bullshit is what's driving the world down, making each of them feel personally responsible for both the mess and the chore to clean it up, by making it not into a chore ordered by purported authority figures who are not perceived as authorative but a matter of a life and death, making them tear their eyes from winamp visualizations while going "whoa man that's trip yo" and getting them to instead have thoughtful conversations between themselves about the state of the world and what to do with it. It sure worked for me when I was about 16 to 17 along with a bunch of other events which transpired around that time that I won't discuss on the internet, but I bet it could work on a mass scale if someone put some real thought into it, couldn't it? Like, for a quick example off of the top of my head, a psychedelic videogame which focuses on a creative plot that tricks people into working towards one thing and then ending up not attaining that thing and instead learning the lesson of their follies which they are enacting at that very moment. The people who lament over never attaining that thing will be ridiculed by those who realize the message and its worth, and if they want to continue wasting their time smoking dope and playing videogames, so be it, because at least some others will break themselves out of the loop due to it all, right?
No, I completely agree with you. Idleness and misanthropy go hand in hand, and although paranoidmystic seems to think that the 50's were the ultimate low point of materialistic philosophy holding power over the populace, I think that now is way worse. How come? Well, I'm not speaking for everyone in the world, but I'm talking about those who are still here in the western world who really know about everything going wrong in the world and just give a smirk, shrug their shoulders, and say "we're fucked lol oh well". I think that these kinds of thoughts hold a fair amount of people's minds if not a majority of them. I don't blame them, since they face a fair amount of cognitive dissonance over two ideals, one of which is screaming "if we don't do things different (without specifying very clearly or in ways that sound materialistically satisfying what needs to be done) we're fucked" and one which is "no, things are cool, nothing is fucked, go buy things to distract you because it's worked since you've been a little kid and it will keep working for the rest of your lifetime". One ideal is supported as a part of the definition of our culture and one is supported as an auxillary ideal that's perceived more like a chore that needs to be done rather than a matter of life or death.
Did the baby boomers suffer from this dichotomy of purported truths and fuck everything up? Fuck yes! It's the whole reason neocons and yuppies were spawned. (etymology of yuppie: from yippie, the definitive anti-establishment group of the sixties, corrupted into "young urban professional" somewhere down the line as things went). They lived lives of believing that materialistic self-indulgence was the way to go as children, and of course as young adults they applied the same behaviour patterns when it came to doing drugs, which caused most of them (who really had nothing to do with the peace and love ideals and more to do with partying) to do too many drugs which caused even more cognitive dissonance which caused them to retreat away from peace, love, and the age of aquarius or whatever and back into their materialistic self-indulgences - The shift from favorite drugs as defined by popular culture being psychedelics to those favorite drugs being cocaine and speed for the go-getters to heroin for thee no-getters.
I think that something which could help is convincing people on psychedelics that their materialistic bullshit is what's driving the world down, making each of them feel personally responsible for both the mess and the chore to clean it up, by making it not into a chore ordered by purported authority figures who are not perceived as authorative but a matter of a life and death, making them tear their eyes from winamp visualizations while going "whoa man that's trip yo" and getting them to instead have thoughtful conversations between themselves about the state of the world and what to do with it. It sure worked for me when I was about 16 to 17 along with a bunch of other events which transpired around that time that I won't discuss on the internet, but I bet it could work on a mass scale if someone put some real thought into it, couldn't it? Like, for a quick example off of the top of my head, a psychedelic videogame which focuses on a creative plot that tricks people into working towards one thing and then ending up not attaining that thing and instead learning the lesson of their follies which they are enacting at that very moment. The people who lament over never attaining that thing will be ridiculed by those who realize the message and its worth, and if they want to continue wasting their time smoking dope and playing videogames, so be it, because at least some others will break themselves out of the loop due to it all, right?