Thursday, January 1, 2004

We seem to have come to a unique place in our society, one where we have joined our brutal and primal roots with the ultimate expressions of our current culture and left little room for that which enables us to transcend to become better.

Our civil roots were planted deeply in power and the exercise thereof to further our own procreative exploits. Through the years, we created infrastructure to enable ourselves time to more thoughtfully pursue these ends if not transcend them as base modus operendi. Our families and extended families fulfilled the needs of the individual while enabling that same individual some time and physical wherewithal to expand the existential self. As tribes came together, they served the same purpose to both the individual and the extended family and tribe in a correspondingly expanded manner. And with time and experience, villages, towns, cities and city-states, and finally nations were came into being, often (but not always) enabling the individual more energy for self-discovery, education and relationships.

Not everyone afforded these luxuries took advantage of the opportunities for transcendence. Many chose to use this time and energy to expand their primal urge’s sway and power. Despots, raiders, brutes and general bad-guys pepper history like so much coal soot on newly fallen snow, but that is original to mankind’s nature. That is why we must work to develop other talents, and often it is difficult, even in the latest incarnation of society.

It seems though, our current culture is a hydra, swimming in its own offal and eating its own tail. We have invented a culture where those who have no real regard or investment in family, community or even culture have huge power and sway in creating public opinion and environment. We no longer need to keep up with the Joneses, the TV and movies have supplanted them as the paragons of material and social appearance and affluence, even creating the illusion that they have more ability to please and interact with us than our Jonesian neighbor.

Our culture is one that has gone from a neglect and oppression of sex to a overindulgence and obsession with it. It surrounds us in forums that were previously untouched by its direct influence. It is the main focus of forums only recently invented or revised, such as popular media.

Sex and power have become the main foci and raisons d’etre once again in our culture. From one side, brutal and primal, to the other, every bit as brutal and primal, but seemingly oppressed in its ability to tell the truth about its motivations.

That’s irony.

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