This mutated economic operating system of ours is doing two main things that are very, very bad:

It keeps accelerating too much.

It keeps Demanding too much.

Too much, and too much.

I can assure you that this is at least too much squared for this old timer. As ought to be obvious while it also increasingly trashes everything in its wake (because corners must be cut, and that because of the dangerous competitions for markets, and resources, combined with the need to dominate, and the ultimate big stick to do it with, that all of the major players are themselves consumed with now, demands it), giving back only when the few who own it are made to have their feet held in the fire; usually only to the degree you can more effectively outspend the very people who will always have more counters to spend than you; which usually means weak measures even when you do get the occasional victory, and ones easily open to further gutting when you can't manage a proper majority after your election cycle of success ends, and the other side's begins anew.

But perhaps most insidious of all is that it manages to put so many to deep sleep even more effectively when we are made to think things are improving, however marginally (and certainly not in any way that addresses core, causative issues); not only because we have also been made to be predisposed to want to drown out all of the external suffering, and the internal, emotional dissonance thus engendered, but also precisely because the owning few control virtually everything there is to control, now, regarding how you express, in total, who you are, let alone what you would like to be (which is also certainly, and unfortunately, more like a branded commodity, or endlessly re programmable machine tool, than a thinking, loving human being).

And, if that weren't bad enough for you, even this escape mechanism applying, naturally, only to those diminishing numbers of people not actually caught up in the floods, or the tornados, or the hurricanes, or fire storms, or toxic spill areas, or marginalized (politically and/or economically) zones, or radius of the latest rage bomb to go off, yet (those latter individuals being the final expression of the forgotten who will show you, one way or another, how they will force on us, at least one moment, when they matter; however murderously horrible that might be).

There is only one destination for this ride and it is abso-sadly obvious what that harsh conclusion will be. What else would you expect when cosmic amounts of social inertia meet irrefutable stopping points inherent in the limited carrying capacities of complex, vastly integrated systems. That is unless we can put forth some cosmic delta V to change the course vector human endeavor is heading in now. Now that we are at a cosmic pivot point that I believe all sentient meaning processors come to in their evolution eventually; as they become so much more capable, by ever more powerful extensions of their faculties; which is what you are talking about when you speak of ever greater instrumentality. Something else those dangerous competitions have bequeathed to us in ever more decreasing cycles of time.

Is it any wonder that wisdom, let alone humans being able to become what they are fully capable of becoming, is simply another corner to be cut. Another cost factor to be eliminated?

Will you wake up in time?

The choice is yours to make, assuming, naturally, that you can stir yourself enough to care at all about caring anymore.

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