Crisis

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.

Millions of mediocre polygons.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.