The Superior State of Being
People have the amazing ability to create their own worlds. A few hundred years ago, this process was conscious. Everyone had his own ideas of what a better world would be like – and he was involved in making that world.
But then society became convinced that an entirely new way of being was possible, one that was far superior to any other kind, and it decided to switch to that new way of being. This posting is about that switch.
People decided they would become perfect. Why be anything else – when becoming perfect was so easy? All they had to do was decide they were perfect – and they were!
At first, problems were involved – because other people would not agree. People of Islam, for example, would not agree that Christian principles were better. But this was overcome by Globalization - where Business became the universal religion. Business was simply the reign of Power – and who could argue with that? Success was simply the acquisition of Power. And any religion could easily accommodate itself to that.
But something more fundamental was going on also – in the minds of people involved. Here we get into tricky territory – because telling what is going on in people’s minds is not easy. We will have to guess what people are thinking – but this is nothing new, smart people have always done this.
We cannot just ask them what they are thinking, because they usually do not know – or they make up some excuse for their behavior. We all do this, but seldom are aware of it. We have to form our own opinions of how (and what) they are thinking. Any politician does this – and if he is successful, he can intuit what is going on – and enhance his own power, using this knowledge.
Now, after this short digression to explain some basics, I will return to my main trend of thought – which is a description of the Superior State of Being. And how we got there.
We cannot ignore the increasing importance of the machine in human affairs – especially in the 19th and 20th Centuries. People gradually realized the advantages of being like machines – especially thinking like them. They were much better than people – because people served them.
The right way of being was obviously to be like them – superior to people.
But people were not completely convinced. It still seemed to them – sometimes – that being people had its emotional advantages. This was where my parent’s generation were – they identified with their automobiles, and they did not especially like people. Their primary entertainment was the Movies and the Radio.
Then they got hit with Television – which turned them into Consumers overnight. They had no idea what it was – for them it was just an entrancing image on a screen. When in fact it was a business network (an enhancement of the Radio Network) concentrating on controlling them.
What happened internally here, in their minds? I can only guess – but my guess is this – they intuited (correctly) that a new powerful force was at work here – and they changed how they thought about themselves – to be compatible with it.
This was a staggering development – but because it was an unconscious development, it was not noticed. But that was only part of the story. People became convinced they were now Superior Beings. When in fact they had become nothing at all. The Human Mind has always been prone to this problem – opposites seem identical!
But the story was not over – not hardly. Along came the Computer.
This was nothing but a programmable machine, but it could be made to seem like be anything we wanted! If people were entranced before, they were even more entranced now.
But hard-headed Business types saw something more important – the Computer was the perfect tool to make Business all-powerful! This became known as Globalization.
And this is where we are now. Power has shifted from the people right back to where it was originally – to the Rich and Powerful. All made possible by a series of innovations eventually resulting in the Computer.
No trackbacks yet.