Saturday, April 22, 2017

We Can Do An Amazing Amount Of Whatever We Can Imagine Doing Now...

...And that is both our blessing, and our curse.

Amazing kinds of new flying machines. Amazing kinds of everything that can just be printed. Inching closer to genetic solutions to a host of very serious physical maladies. Experience retrieval systems that would seamlessly allow anyone, in virtually any situation, to understand what to do next, if called upon to do so (married with the right kind of combined vision glasses, or contact lenses, bone conduction sound processing, and perhaps some kind of haptic latex layer over the skin). Maybe even true faster than light travel.

Interestingly enough, that really isn't the issue any more. What is at issue is what feeds into the making of our imaginations, and consequently, what is then more likely to come out?

I ask this question now, having just recently posted on the proposed march for science, because not only scientists, but the rest of us as well, ought to be thinking about this sort of thing precisely because so much depends on it.

If my imagination has been stoked a great deal more for the receipt of fantasies along all of the lines of our base instincts, you can imagine as well just the kinds of excess that web porn today, and sci fi, have only started to rev the engines on. The extra incentive here, unfortunately, is that there is also the nitro that this hothouse environment we call Capitalism feeds on, and sweats out in grand profusion: Money.

In a sense, you could see this as an economy driven in ever greater degree by an underlying, and unbelievably profitable, addiction as a path to power. Is that really the ever more structurally self perpetuating direction you want society to head in?

We can't get rid of our base instincts, any more than we can simply forget the mind sugar diet we've already been fed on. We can, however, work to emplace a quite different structural imperative. One that can at least remove the hothouse environment that feeds into addiction so easily. One that would take away the commercial aspect of message so that the incentive to continue to manipulate base instincts would be greatly reduced. And one that would make working with more of our neighbors a natural part of community life. A life direction therefore more mutually involved, and organically supportive.

Call me crazy but it just seems like common sense to see that, if you want citizens able to make good decisions you first need to get back to the basics of what makes a person confident, well adjusted, and self motivated. All things that require a sense of meaning, worth, and a host of ever more demanding cognitive skills. If you think that's going to work continuing down this path of commercialized fantasies as commodities then it's already too late for you.

All of you need to think long and hard about these things. You need to be demanding the very same thing of everyone you know, and that they pass that along to all of their acquaintances. We are at an unprecedented moment of decision here. A very big moment of choice. Which direction will humanity go in? Who will lead the change if we make the right choice? If you've been thinking at all, in your heart, and in your head, you know that business as usual has to stop. The sooner the better.


Images For Amazing New Inventions

See also:
Netflix’s ‘13 Reasons Why’ Carries Danger of Glorifying Suicide, Experts Say





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