With this essay Chance Occurrences, I explore several key elements that I was exposed to in my early days of thinking about life. This was a time when I read a lot of books and also was very interested in alternative understandings of reality. Because to me the mainstream institutions were really not doing a very good job not only at managing reality but defining the root causes of modern reality.
The Bounds of the Expressible
There are too many chance occurrences that we deny and accept as merely coincidences.
Is society's collective mind closed to the notion that there are other forces at work? That something has gone awry?
This is something is hardly new; it has been brewing within us for many years.
What has happened to the visionaries, prophets and philosophers?
Where is their relevance in our lives?
What is the message that they speak?
Who or what holds the key to understand the DNA-like coding that underlies the essence of life?
What drives the system that delineates reality to the shuttered emotionally disheveled masses?
Why does it impose a regime of ignorance on the people?
Such questions are hardly irrelevant. Governments and credentialized elites all over the world have shown a reluctance to discuss "fringe" issues, mostly out of fear of ridicule and the loss of their legitimacy as centrist, mainstream thinkers. Their reluctance only makes us question their authority and probe deeper at the facade of modern existence that to us masks the essential truth to life. They suppress this out a visceral instinct - a desire to preserve the status - to preserve their vested interests. Most of the power elite are so much in denial of these truths, so they are not even aware of what it is they devote their lives to suppressing. The powerful themselves are not fully aware of the injustices that they perpetuate in their heinous distortion of life's essential properties and qualities. These issues range from UFOs to the paranormal to issues relating to spirituality and the idea that there is an essential meaning to life that transcends a purely human consciousness. I feel that this denial of a greater reality than is commonly expressed as "reality" within "normal" and "credentialized" circles is no coincidence, but is reflective of the need to maintain appearances in contemporary society.
More precisely it is that by defining sophisticated but covert structures that limit what Noam Chomsky calls the bounds of the expressible. A key element of the dominant paradigm is to orient people towards consumer and industrial modes of thinking about phenomena, while disregarding more organic, spiritual and holistic perspectives. The idea that things in life matter that are not tied directly to consumerism, represents a grave threat to the very dynamic in society that has allowed the dominance of these commercialistic values.
The "Cola Wars: the battle for the consumer mass mind...
In the relentless and repetitive consumer monologue a few things stand out: the icons of the age that seek to get us fixate on consuming more and more stuff. The Cola Wars & the battle for the consumer mass mind tells us a story and helps us to understand how mainstream marketing and advertising operate and their impact on society and the public consciousness. The story is about the need to keep people's minds from operating in a socially, morally and spiritually relevant context. While a few intellectual types devote their lives to seek out some deeper meaning in life or more likely a sense of importance and status, the majority are encouraged towards a dualistic reality hating their jobs, but somehow finding "happiness in slavery" by retreating into various obsessive-compulsive behavioral loops that are designed to ensure economic and social stability. Much of our lives are now spent obsessing about how what we do as a consumer can most optimize our highly individualized tastes and pleasures—a very superficial version of personal autonomy, that relegates us to function simply as an automaton to further the corporate state imperative of maximizing consumption.
"It just tastes better" is the mantra of the age. However another famous marketing jingo is "where's the beef." The Wendy’s mantra reflects an interesting trend in advertising. As consumers felt increasingly manipulated and dehumanized by a heavily corporatized society, advertisers saw the need to deal with a rising cynicism about products offering unrealistic claims. How you can “lose weight in two weeks” or that some product has 20 percent more! Those clever marketers were the ones that labeled their products as authentic in an age defined by inauthentic marketplace driven values and did so convincingly. Companies face a danger, of running out of rope as they seek to mesmerize the people with their cleverly contrived tales of deception. If the consumer develops a cynicism that these products will not actually deliver as advertised—as real solutions to this sense of the consumer being dragged down and assimilated into the mass mind of the commercial culture—it will only undermine the very basis of the marketplace itself as the sole deliverer of progress and happiness in our lives.
Coke and the Creation of the Optimum Buying Mood
Our deceptive social framework is no different that in Jonathan Swift's time. When he wrote Gulliver's Travels it became an instant classic because he was subversive in how he criticized the system. If he had not been subtle (using fictional representations of actual countries that Gulliver traveled) in his criticisms of European civilization at the time, he would have been skewered like a kabob. The deceptive social framework he spoke about in his time is the same one that dominates today. It ensures that greed and avarice pave the way to greater economic progress, while the fundamental causes that create the social sicknesses of his day and our day are ignored and mislabeled as purely personal, cultural or site specific problems.
A great deal of research is done to find the most sleek classy car of the 90s, while many innovative inventors, researchers and social thinkers struggle to get by. Coca Cola’s corporate culture is proud that its products are among the things we share collectivity, not only because it is profitable to sell the world a Coke with the illusion that globalization under neoliberalism will bring about perfect harmony, but because it signifies that commercial culture is dominant over us; that they are dominant over us. Commercial culture's influence extends beyond merely commercialism. Like a virus it has penetrated our consciousness and now affects our behaviors in way that we deny or do not fully understand.
While we have given on the idea of living our dreams as the unique and special people that each one of us is, we can still be proud that we a very small, but necessary part of the Coca Cola experience, because "drinking coke helps keep me cool."
Keeping Cool and Hip
...In an age where talking about a potential future, apocalyptic reckoning has become just another cliché. Its not so much the quality of consuming as much as it is the attributes that are designed to be subtly embedded in the products that we consume without much thought to the greater implication of our habits of consumption. For one thing labels are assigned to us in the process of consuming products and services. These labels represent the core of the modern identity. While much time is spent proving how individualistic we are, in terms of how we consume, most overlook the fact that most of what makes us individualistic is only a shell designed to disguise our immense conformity. True personal autonomy and individualism, represent or even mandate an eschewing of most acceptable and normal modern attributes and values that define most contemporary affluent nation cultures.
In Defense of Despotism and in Denial of Democracy
Increasingly despotic and deceptive messages become necessary as we struggle to defend not so much our democracy, but our way of life. Those who run the establishment manipulate symbols (including democracy), reducing humanity and nature to wreckage, which is labeled post-haste as "the Price of Progress." This process of exploitation initializes the necessity of secrecy and the enforcement of ignorance within the masses. It is the job of the opinion©leaders and gatekeepers to promote people up the hierarchy that will eventually replace them. And so they must pick people who represent their interests and value©systems
Shoppers: get the mall VIP card©. We all want to be important. Hero worship is a very important aspect of modern corporate capitalism. Why is it not obvious that the media is a pivotal part in this shady scheme of exploitation. Credit card companies are just another industry—another cog in the machinery of our reduction—that has grown rapidly through the marketing of the illusion of credit. We so need to be immediately gratified as consumers that we see credit cards as solution to living beyond our present means. Yet the difficulty is that when you are getting something more than what you really can afford to have, it is hard to say no or enough. Credit gives a tool a tool in the arsenal of the consumer that is impulsively struggling to stay ahead with the latest fads and trends. Once you become driven by these trends how do you say no to them? Rock music has become a key tool in creating the buying mood in commercials. Some forgotten commercial jingo resonates within my mind: "its a crazy world have fun with it."