One of the
aspect of our current society’s philosophy that afflicts me the most, it plain
frightens me at times, is the tendency to make everything superficial, to
rejoice and celebrate very superficial, mindless products, not only in entertainment
but in every single aspect of life. It happens time after time.
You see it
clearly in entertainment, pretty much anything they show on MTV, on TV in
general really, suffers from this lack of substance, this mindless drive to be
just for the sake of airing, for watching just for the sake of watching. We
also see it in a lot of movies, especially action movies and romantic comedies,
completely lack of originality, just there because the mindless crowd will go
and watch it for the sake of watching something. Videogames as well, changing
the focus from story, character development and self-discovery to graphical
fidelity and higher polygon counts.
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| Millions of mediocre polygons. |
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| 16 bit masterpiece |
It
permeates other aspects, as I wrote before; you can see it in healthcare,
drinking this new herb everybody’s drinking because everybody else says it’s
good for you without looking up its actual properties. In fitness, people who
go work out however everybody else is without trying to figure out what they’re
actually supposed to be doing, resulting in injuries and bad form. In every
diet that is just guaranteed to work
because your friend who ate McDonalds everyday exchanged them for an
apple-only-regime and is losing weight.
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| 6-pack, Here I come! |
In music,
some completely void of emotion or message. It’s also evident among educated
circles, where, after a discovery is achieved, everybody rejoices in it –remember
the alleged Higg’s Boson recently– without having the slightest idea of what
they’re talking about or why it’s important. Books also suffer, old
masterpieces become popular and commented on by people who haven’t read them
and don’t really understand the themes in them, just to seem superficially more
interesting. It permeates relationships even, having a lot of Facebook friends,
not really having one single good friend you can count on. It goes on and on.
However,
what scares me the most is the affect is has on the philosophical currents of
the generation. It’s created a crisis of thought, one generated by people
itself –which is why the book Fahrenheit 451 scares me ten times more than the
more popular 1984–, a crisis which traps even individuals who realize it exists
and want to escape from it.
Some people
realize the void of substance in which their everyday lives take place and want
to fill it up with new ideas. Some of these people are unfortunate enough to
find these new ideas in self-help books. Now, for me, every good book you read
is a self-help book. Every cookbook you open that teaches you a recipe is a
self-help book, every novel you read that makes you identify a part of yourself
you didn’t know existed is a self-help book, everything you read that changes
the way you see any aspect of life different or gives depth to any concept you
previously knew of, or defines new ones, is a self-help text.
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| Accio, wand! |
Superficiality,
however, has given birth to this monstrous genre known as self-help book, which
consist of an idea, generally that being an extremely positive minded person
will help you achieve your goals, shown superficially and in a dumbed down
manner, so that these starving minds can feed off of them. Everybody’s familiar
with them, from The Law of Attraction to everything Coehlo writes.
The Law of
Attraction –or whatever it’s called– for example, tells you that if you wish
for something, it will come to you, just by wishing it, that the Universe
conspires to make it so, it has testimonials too, a friend of mine told me she
had been wishing for a specific car model in an specific color and just by
wishing it a week later she had found it. This is, however, probably more
related to her actually looking more actively for it and enhanced perception than
some conspiration of the Universe in her favor.
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| Trascendental knowledge |
Actually,
the reason I’m writing this is because a friend of mine made available to me an
article in which something called The Resistance is discussed. In this article,
The Resistance is this sentient force that makes change harder in your life,
makes you sleep in instead of work out, waste time, watch videos or whatever is
the opposite of a beneficial action you intended on doing. This view on the
resilience of people to change their daily habits and being comfortable in lieu
of taking risks and working hard might be helpful for some people, but only in
the same way other more realistic approaches might be helpful and without the
bad side effects, some of which that society in general seems to embrace because
of this method of thinking.
People who
consume this superficial literature, these dumbed down philosophies, claim that
they are the best thing that ever happened to them, and elevate their scribbles
to levels unimaginable, which aggravates me greatly, this lead, for example, to
the recent news that Coehlo critiqued the novel Ulysses. Now, everybody can say
anything about anyone, it’s a free world, and I haven’t even read Ulysses yet,
but seriously Coehlo badmouthing ANYONE is ridiculous. I’m also allowed to have
an opinion. But, enough ranting, the point I’m trying to make is, our
superficiality is leaking into even the minds of those who try to escape from
it.
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| 70% of the population |
What people
should be saying is not “Everything happens for a reason”, but “Everything is a
consequence of an action”. This disregard for causation is, in my humble
opinion the cause of most of the problems in society, be them related to
health, education, politics, relationships and even entertainment. Understand
that The Universe isn’t conspiring ANYTHING, you’re absolutely irrelevant to
it, there is no Resistance keeping you from your goals, you’re just being lazy.
Understand that if something is to happen, if you are to achieve a goal, you
NEED to WORK for it, because it will be the consequence of your actions, not
some lame children book fairy tale. Embrace causation, and you will understand
the way people act, why everything happens, how the Universe works, the social environment.
Causation is the key to achieving your goals, dig deep into the thin layer of
current bullshit and try to be a coherent person, you’ll need nothing else.
