Thank You. This may seem like an obscure way to initiate my first post but
it is neccessary. I am 21, live in New Zealand, and study economics and
sociology. My struggle is the complete and utter unwillingness of almost
all my peers to consider subjects such as MoQ and any other concepts that
involve "free thought". I have tried on many occasions to discuss a broad
range of philosophical ideas with a particular emphasis on MoQ and am met
with the combined weight of consumerism and its subsequent homogonisation of
large portions of my own commercial demograph. I suggest this as I believe
that this is the biggest threat to genuine mass understanding of the concept
of quality.
I am a child of consumerism. I have been taught (told) time and time again
that I must go to school so that I can get a good job. I questioned the
purpose of a good job when I was 14 and was given the response "so you can
earn a comfortable living", I then asked what constituted "a comfortable
living" and was given the enlightening answer of " so you can afford the
things you want, like a nice house and car and stuff". I now realise, as I
am sure I did to some extent back then, that there has to be something more
than being able to buy things. At the end of 6th form (about 16yo) we had a
careers guidance counsellor come to talk about careers. I asked why it was
necessary to have a career and was given an almost identical response as the
teacher gave me. I then asked if we should have a career that we enjoy "of
course" was the reply "what do you most enjoy doing?" "soccer and thinking"
I answered "about what?" "all sorts of things, I never think of just the
same thing over and over again, depnds on what interests me" "well what
interests you?" "everything I suppose" and that was it. Our careers
counsellor couldnt recommend me any job, she needed me to be more specific
and told me that without a definate goal I would struggle to get a "good
Job" and to have a goal I needed to know what I want. I said I did have a
goal and that was to enjoy myself, the counsellor took this as gross
naievety and said that I needed to have a good job to enjoy myself. I said
that I enjoyed thinking the most and that requires no job. She asked me to
stop getting cheeky and proceeded with the rest of her "lesson".
It strikes me as perverse the fact that thinking has to be associated with a
career to give it any merit. What strikes me as even more perverse is the
fact that I have never been asked at school to come up with an original
idea, with the exception of perhaps art and english (even then though choice
is almost always limited). This links in very nicely with the dualism
depicted in Zen, scientific classical thought on one side and artistic
romantic on the other and further that to achieve quality both are
required. This is very different from what I am taught at school. I use
the word taught loosley as I believe we are told more than taught and
somehow noone seems to realise the ramifications of this. This massive
division in romantic/classical thought is shown most strongly I believe in
my own and subsequent generations Very rarely do we think freely or even
have the need to think freely. This, I believe is because of consumerism.
People around the world are jumping on their bandwagons in opposition to
"Americana" I used to consider myself one of those people, however further
thought has changed my view. People obviously realise that something is
amuck in the way we are doing things. Americana is the scapegoat and for
justifiable reasons, however I dont believe that Americana is the problem,
and I think that peoples opposition to it is merely diverting us from the
real problem. When I question people as to why they see something wrong
with americana the response is always similar, that is that people perceive
america as an arrogant bully that has nothing to fear and as such feel free
to do what they please. I perceive this as being reasonable, however I
looked further into the cause of this arrogance. The reason is clear and
simple, they (america)have the most resources, both in military and economic
terms, and these two things are bed partners. You need money to build
defense so the core question is how do you make money. Americana spawned
the most effective device to do this, capitalism and this itself evolved to
what we are currently experiencing, consumerism. To make money in a
capitlistic environment you need people who are willing to buy the things
that are produced and this willingness to buy is based on 2 things. Quality
and societal value. Unfortunatley with the advent of industrialism and the
subsequent mass production mentality people started to become seperated from
quality and societal value started to become more and more important as
people worked (in these new factories) with a far greater number of people
than they had mixed with in the past, and as a result, people became more
aware of others and this (as i have been taught in sociology) leads to self
awareness, which spawns self doubt. Self doubt is a big gumption trap.
This self doubt makes people behave in ways which minimises the effects
which usually ends up with near homogonisation of values (if everything is
the same, then self doubt is minimised). This effect has been exasperated
further by another spawn of americana - mass media. The history of media in
america is fascinating and gives much light to the way things have evolved.
Basically from what I have read media came about almost soly to cater for
entertainment - something which becomes more and more popular as less time
is spent at work - and this is exactly what happend with the industrial
revolution. more people have more time so more entertainment is required.
voila mass media. With the advent of television (another product of
americana) the situation that happened in the factories multiplies itself
exponentially as more and more people become aware of more and more people -
more and more self awareness, more and more self doubt and more and more do
people wish to fit in. This fitting in is what produces the societal
values, which makes sense in an evolutionary way as (as the production line
proves) more people can do more things - as long as they can share common
goals (the values), in many cases with positive returns to scale, and
therefore things can advance quicker as well as obvioulsy giving protection
to the society (or superorganism, as howard bloom explains in "the lucifer
principle") or, in short to achieve greater quality. what has happened
though is this new form of media was quickly realised to be able to make
money - advertising products, and advertising is a sure fire way of
increasing sales, a capitalists dream (remember tv shows are products also)
Through this advertising, people are subjected to all sorts of claims and
counterclaims and confusion takes hold. What do I buy? X, Y or Z. Panick -
free thought has started to be eroded by this stage because of mass
production limiting its need - what to choose. Self doubt... I dont know
what one, solution, the same as always, homogonise - do what everyone else
is doing, that way you know you are not gooing to be too different and
therefore stand out and therefore have people look at you and therefore have
self awareness and therefore have self doubt - same cycle - and funnily
enough a cycle that lends itself quite readilly to the attainment of quality
- when quality is the deciding factor as to why to choose something. This
however is not the case now. Because of factories people now have money,
money has no value unless it is spent, and as such people spend their money
on food shelter and entertainment. the people responsible for the creation
of money - the factory managers. these people are not usually dumb and
realilsed pretty quickly that if you sell something cheaper than the next
guy, people will buy your product. Others realised that if you can
piggyback a product onto the values of society then you can charge a lot
more for it and people will still buy it and the modern way of advertising
was born. This advertising is now so prevelant that I would argue that
except for sleep and excursions into wilderness, you dont go for more than a
minute without seeing some form of advertising. think about it, if we are
exposed to anything for a long enough period of time then we learn it. We
see adverts almost constantly, imagine if all adverts had something about
nuclear physics, I am sure we would all know about nuclear physics (within
the boundaries of intellect). We have been conditioned to want things
because we have choice, or percieved choice anyway, we actually have very
little choice as there are so many different constraints which effectively
pidgeonhole us into choosing between homogonous products. We constantly
make poor decisions, fashion is the ideal proving ground for this claim.
take high heels, their implicit purpouse is to make the leg appera longer
and increase height, why, to appear sexy as per societal values. fair
enough - however if you start to look this ideal then some strange things
can be revealed. I would argue that the length of a womans leg and/or their
height are reasonably low in marginal utility for most guys, further I would
also claim that women would not be particulalrly interested in pursuing
discourse with a man who holds these 2 benefits of high heels with such high
regard. The justification of high heels starts to tumble with very little
pursuasion. Add to this the fact that when women wear High heels the
occasion is usually such that the majority of women will be wearing similar
footwear so the relative length of legs and heights remain basically the
same as if they were all wearing high heels and the justification becomes
even more hazy. If you also take into account the massive amounts of damage
high heels can do and their gross impracticality then women who wear high
heels start to appear unrational. We pay grossly inflated prices for
underpants with a mans name on them and hundreds of % markups on T shirts
because of stripes or a swoosh. This is ludicrous. The effect of this mass
adoption of consumerism is massive. The biggest threat is to the very thing
that we can look to and get some sort of understanding of true quality,
mother nature. Americana seems to be fascinated by statistics (very
classical) so here are some of you:
93% of teenage girls report store hopping as thier favourite activity
On average, parents spend 6 hours per week shopping and 40 mins a week
playing with their children
810 million litres of motor oil (16 Exxon Valdez) are washed down drains or
end up in land fill every year
1000 years ago forests covered 34% of the land area of earth
Today trees cover 26 percent of the land but just 12% consists of intact
ecosystems
Every day 137 species become extinct or 6 per hour (this is based on
conservative estimates of 50000 species per year)
*this is 1000 to 10000 times greater than existed in prehistoric times
There has been a 50% increase in income in the last 35 yeaers.
Per capita consumption has rissen by 45% in the last 20 years.
Employed people work 163 hours more per year than in 1969.
The quality of life as measured by the index of social health has decreased
by 51% in the last 20 years
The %age of people who claim to be happy is the same
The average american consumes as much as 7 mexicans, 15 chinese, 38 indians
or 531 ethiopians.
We have been robbed and lied to - this type of existence doesnt make us
happier as people claim, Adam smiths invisible hand is giving us a great big
finger. There has to be another option so that quality can become
established again before we amuse ourselves to death. Anyone who has any
ideas of a workable political system with an emphasis on quality rather than
consumerism economics please express them to me, or else my playstation
generation will be in a spot of bother.
I will leave you with this. It was signed by over 1600 senior scientists
from 71 countries, including over half of all nobel prize winners, titled
simply the "world scientists' warning to humanity" the document began:
"Human beings are on a collision course. Human activities inflict harsh and
often irreversable damage on the environment and on critical resources. If
not checked many of our current practices put at serious risk the future
that we wish for human society and the palnt and animal kingdoms, and my so
alter the living world tha it will be unable to sustain life in the manner
that we know. Fundamental changes are urgent if we are to avoid the
collision our present course will bring about"
the werning then went on to explain the crises in the atmosphere, water
resources, the oceans, the soil, the forests, biodiversity and human
overpopulation. Then the words became stark.
" No more than one or a few decades reamin before thi chance to avert the
threats we now confront will be lost and the prospects for humanity
immeasurably diminished. We the undersigned, senior members of the worlds
scientific community, herby warn all humanity of what lies ahead. A great
change in our stewardship of the earth and life on it is required if vast
human misery is to be avoided and our global home on this planet is not to
be irretrievably mutilated.
Nevertheless whe the "world scientists' warning to humantiy" was released to
the press it was rejected as "not newsworthy"
evolve
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