“Paradox of choice”

What the guy in the video down there says, basically, is that with so many choices available to us, we build very high expectations and they are hardly ever met, let alone exceeded. In relation to the usual perpetuated within this blog, this paradox of choice, where less really is more, is only an affluent problem, a Western one. A problem of too much of a good thing, a paradox.

I suppose that’s good for me, because, otherwise, I couldn’t sit here with my wireless keyboard staring at a 37″ LCD listening to big headphones. Or tell you all about it. The privileges of being white. Louis CK had something on that, once:

What do you do? Apparently the lady friend asked a question in her psych class today – are people depressed for non personal reasons? Nope. None of her classmates could imagine it, either. It could be existential, however. What would you call a perceived human “inflation” where, with exponentially more people being labeled “consumers” and your only attainable purpose seems material? Personal? Existential? Non personal? All of the above?

Which makes ya wonder, as a white person, with existential dilemma…what’s the scientific solution? What if a career move is the only move you can make other than therapy or drugs? What if you can’t find existential meaning in a paycheck and don’t believe it is a “…measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society”? These are the hurdles of whiteness in today’s world.

I suppose religion is the default answer in a lot of cases. I have no answer. Science and religion both offer an explanation of something from nothing, a free lunch, having your cake and eating it, too. Another paradox. Both try to explain everything about everything and therefore, as “reality” is “truth” there should be no real choice in the matter. Does Truth always tow Should. Is the DSM a guide to morality? Do we only accumulate knowledge that coincidentally seems to prove how little we really know? Once the center of the universe, for all we knew, and with all of scientific progress we now know, we are merely mustached monkeys in a barely visible drop of a 14 billion year old ocean which was once “nothing.” That’s not the only paradox, as the only thing with the quality of perfect is “nothing” as it is perfectly, uniformly, 100%, nothing. It took a (literal) quantum fuck-up, some imbalance of “virtual particles”,  to start the chain reaction of imperfection which coalesced into us. Scientifically speaking…

Nothing is perfect. Truth.

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A number…or two…

Not counting any other forms of energy but oil…

…which is here because all life on this planet died and cooked under our feet for hundreds of millions of years…

We use 90,000,000 barrels a day. Roughly 1,000 barrels a second….

…one barrel is 42 gallons, which can be converted into about 20 gallons worth of gas…

…one gallon of gas is 500 hours or so of human labor…

…a 75 year life span is 657,000 hours including sleep…

500 hours x 20 gallons x 1000 barrels = 10,000,000 hours of human labor…

………meaning, allowing for sleep, the life’s labor of 22 human slaves is consumed every second  to make the clock of capitalism tick and, as a special bonus offer!!!— it’s required the clock ticks faster or else debt (=money) doesn’t work…

(For a total of 900 billion [/7 billion = 128 per capita] hours of labor a day…thus putting us ‘beyond our means’ of what we could produce with our hands alone, as in our evolutionary past, by a factor of 8:1, if the entire earth slaved from wake to sleep. Then, since I’m an Uh-Merrican, I use 25% of the energy as 5% of the population….and ‘full time’ couch potatoes work 40 hours, so that jumps to 112:1 in this country.)

….hmmmm…as a side note, I wonder what this kind of exploitation does for the ego that developed in those world made by hand days of yonder?

Say, did you see the new episode of 16 and Pregnant on MTV???????OMG YOU HAVE 2 SEE IT!@@@#!!! 

Ruh Rohs

New Adam Curtis doc

Brain food

(part 3 fails – full movie here: http://www.archive.org/details/AdamCurtis-ItFeltLikeAKiss)

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5631882395226827730#

The foundation of “freedom”

 

I’m not sick, but I’m not well

…13

Authority

It doesn’t exist.

It is simply a shortcut to self-built totalitarianism – but we believe it is a favor done on our behalf.

As if we have been let in on some secret, be it the “American Dream” or religion. You are made to follow rules before you can speak…parents, the ultimate evil…just kidding. Our instinct to bow to authority as a kid, some more than others, some longer than others, was most necessary in our evolutionary past.

But how does a child raise a child? Or more succinctly, how does an American raise a child? To compete with them. As if we’re all on the playground shoving our resumes and credit scores in each others faces to prove … what? I hear it from my parents, my girl’s parents, anyone older than me. They all focus on the wrong numbers.

As if age alone grants you seniority of fact, or authority, funny how we come back to that. As if a credit score or a W2 box proves your worth. To who? To the real big kids on the playground that started that whole game in the first place, and they sit back and make bets on who white, repressed, religitards will hate more – blacks or browns.

Gullibility is the only path obedience to authority leads. But like everything else, we are in total denial.

It’s not gullibility, it is purpose – prescribed purpose. Like an empty vessel stuffed with credentials so you can pass the torch of homogenized automation of human spirit to your, let’s not call ’em children, but trophies if you are a lucky boomer – stains if not.

Fuck that.

The suckers that fall for religion or crony capitalism are on a fool’s errand. The men behind the curtain get theirs, I guar-an-fuckin’-tee it. They guran-god-damn-tee it themselves to with the little pyramid scheme of hierarchical authority that funnels money and power their way.

Let me try to attack this from a separate angle to try to add some dimension…

Your brain, statistically, is no different then that authority figure. Every religion, every myth, every bubble, every paradise that awaits after paying your dues is a lie. Knowledge is power. People with the knowledge and political power play the numbers game, knowing everybody wants something for nothing, and that we’re all xenophobic pieces of shit thanks to our individualistic society.

But, if they aren’t any better than you intrinsically, if we’re all basically the same, then how is authority anything but faith? A faith based on the very tone, or appearance of authority, which I have just proven has no real substance.

It has real results, though. Authority, being what it pretends to be, will absolve you from your own authority over your own life – which is the only kind that exists – but that’s simply free will. They will pretend they are doing a favor for you. Your reward is either a desk job and viagra, or to praise Jesus forever in Heaven for all eternity. Simply sacrifice the very thing you do have, that is so yours you take it for granted, your free will and present moment – so that those in power can continue to ostentatiously and unethically enjoy their free will in the present.

And by continually pumping “faith” into an idea, into some framework for life designed with malintent, you’ll continue your addiction to hope, optimism, the great, bright, beaming future. The ultimate payoff in your investment in authority.

It never pays off.

We’re dying one day at a time, and all we care about is that we look good doing whatever it is we are doing. We are so skin deep it makes me fucking suicidal.

But I am just 25, and I have no pats on the back from accredited authorities, so those that disagree completely (most) continue to out of personal attachment to convenient fantasy, because without pretty sounding bullshit to tell everybody – who would you be? Who would I be? We are nothing but mirrors of marketing. What point is communication, and our neocortex, 70% of our brain, the thinking part, if it’s just a file cabinet of spoon fed authority regurgitated by popular opinion?