Self Improvement
Things To Think About
- Education or Indoctrination,
- Which do we have?Has the education system in the US failed in its mission?
What's Up With Ming
"Did you ever feel like an alien who somehow became stranded on a planet called Earth where nothing seemed to make any sense?" A quote from "Ming The Merciless"
Civilization Rehab
Recovering from civilization can be brutal but neccessary if we are to become truly free from it's influence. Kick the civilization habit here!
Being Human
The Condition Of Our ConditionArticles on the Human condition and how we might improve it.
Kicking The Civilization Habit By R.E. Darby
When we think of personal development, how many of us consider Human civilization as a negative influence?From our birth and all through our lives, culture, society and civilization exert a powerful influence on who and what we are or will be. This is accomplished through social conditioning and indoctrination.
Personal Development and Society
Normally my reasoning ability would not assume that personal Human development and society are not compatible concepts. But awareness based on experience tells me that their current manifestations are not only incompatible, but in many cases have completely different agendas.
It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out which of these two have the most power, at least in terms of their current realities. I make that distinction because I know that ultimately the individual Human life form has the real power, just consider that society and civilization are the products of the Human mind.
How exactly does our own society and civilization become a liability to our personal development? And perhaps just as important, when does this become a reality? To get even close to any kind of answers to these questions we need to look at another controversial subject, Human community, or population or footprint.
These subjects are controversial because of the specter of population control and the dogma of various organized religions. I think that the practical truths we're looking for here are to be found in understanding how Human systems evolve.
Social Indoctrination
If you're looking for a conspiracy here you're out of luck. If there is any conspiracy it's a conspiracy of ignorance. The fact is, many things evolve right under our noses without us noticing anything because of the soslow.
The soslow is how trees grow, so slow. So slow that we don't notice until they are grown. But trees aren't the only things that use this process and this process can only be effective if Humans don't maintain a reasonable level of awareness and attention. And this process is how Human social systems can evolve into entities that seem to have a life of their own and more importantly an agenda of their own.
While this applies to social infrastructures as well, such as departments, agencies, bureaus etc, the underlying facilitator seems to be the size or quantity of Human population involved. The size of the Human footprint determines the size and complexity of the social infrastructure necessary to serve and maintain stability.
The Human Footprint
The problem doesn't seem to be only about the size of the Human population but also the size and complexity of the systems of the infrastructure needed to support that population.
Beyond a certain size, in order for the systems to fulfill their mission, it requires that the needs of the individual be sacrificed to the needs of the infrastructure in a vicious circle of events that take on a life of their own.
The bottom line is that the quality of Human life is traded off for the maintenance of stability, sometimes perceived as security and comfort.
These tradeoffs manifest themselves in areas such as education, career choices, quality time, personal relations and non essential personal development activities like the arts, physical fitness, the pursuit of understanding and wisdom. All the things that a large society and civilization, absorbed in its own existance, find little value in.
Conditioned Behavior
Habitual behavior is conditioned behavior. The power of conditioning depends on the absents of awareness. This also means that we can use this same process to break the influence of civilization by cultivating a higher level of awareness and do so using the concept of conditioning.
But the most important first step is to realize that we are under the spell of unnecessary habits that serve the best interests of something other than those of the individual Human. With that awareness, we can then begin to establish solid meaningful values to guide us back to the importance of the quality of Human life.