Modern reality is circular: social problems arise from ill-thought out solutions, feeding the downward spiral instead of stemming it. The subjugation of personal choice reflects the imperatives of those who control the marketplace. Because our consciousness is so altered through consumer culture—a drug-induced numbness—people are easily convinced that they still have free will when they don't. They are so confused they really cannot say what reality is. Resistence against an unjust system involves great risks, making collective social delusions manufactured by the corporate-state appaeratus all the more alluring and convenient. The passive state that results from drug-induced numbness conveniently ensures a cycle of denial, which affirms prevailing social values (coopted by those of the marketplace through the rise of the commercial pseudo-culture). Studies indicate that Proziac greatly diminishes sexual desire and so people then have to take drugs like Viagra to help them overcome a problem that was caused by another solution.
Geocentricism
Our cultural biases many of which can be traced back to ancient times, hold us prisoner to the old notions of the past that were not aware of their own biases. The notion of the Earth-centered universe was forwarded by Ptolemy in Greek times--egocentricity--everything in the universe revolves around our world. Despite the fact that Copernicus later proved that the solar system is heliocentric--sun at center--we still exist very much still ensnared in a geocentric and anthropocentric bias of the cosmos. For we are humans, we have biases and will continue to have them, but we can be more honest about them, and in that process of honesty and integrity create the foundation for a better and more just world. Intentionally would be the conscious and active understanding in how we think. By being more conscious of the biases that affect the way we think, and lead to our conclusions about reality, we can better understand how and why we think the way we do, and then in the process of this be more intentionally compassionate and thoughtful in our actions towards not only humans but life itself.
Illusion of Efficiency
Even though the amount of resources used to maintain the modern world is unnecessarily high, an illusion of efficiency pervades our economy. Rational economic thinking creates vicious loops of environmental exploitation and mass manipulation of the world's human population all the while contributing to the illusion of short term prosperity. It is this language of deception that helps to sustain the liberal democratic electorate's complacency to the status quo.
Notion of the Sensible and the Bounds of the Expressible
Obsession and fixation with the everyday reality of things leads us to assimilate a way of thinking that clouds our senses. Forces within society act to reinforce a false notion of the sensible creating an artificial and arbitrary boundary of the expressible ideas and behaviors.
Mainstream thinking people look at a world that is filtered. The media is an extension of marketplace need rather than the public need to know what is indeed going in the world. The journalism's devotion to objectivity is a farce that only serves to cloak its need to defend and assemble the marketplace instilled reality into the public's consciousness. The elements of the social superstructure represent things that are peripheral to the core economic activities that sustain the well being of the society. These include education, the arts, the mass media (this is changing), the culture (in the postmodern, and is related to the rise of the mass media as a pivotal part of the economic infrastructure), the social and the political.
Viviane Simon-Brown, says that television is telling you that everyone has more than you." Yet “two out of three Americans long for a more balanced, simplified lifestyle," says Simon-Brown. "They want to work less, spend more time with family and friends, reconnect with the natural world, and discover new meaning and satisfaction in their lives.” Simon-Brown says "Rethinking the American Dream" is designed to raise awareness about our nation's consumptive ways, help viewers evaluate their current lifestyles, and introduce choices that can improve our natural environment and quality of life." (puborders@oregonstate.eduhttp://oregonstate.edu/extension).
False Reality of the Mundane
Social boundaries limit the bounds of the expressible—the open discussion of ideas. The most important ideas about life and existence lie in the fringe zones of society. Those who collect that information are neglected and treated in the media as persons non grata. The mundane in our lives actually filfills an important purpose in making us want to work hard to consume more. We work to support prevailing power systems and the people who occupy positions of notability and in so doing empower their realities while disempowering ours. This relationship defines the increasingly polarized economic reality of our world and sustains the status quo. Most people spend too much time inundating their consciousness with the trivilities of life to be able to understand how the world works. People who hold ideas that might generate an awareness grow frustrated as they feel that there is something that keeps them from communicating to the public at large.
The Lust for National Champions
For the conventional mind it becomes necessary to worship the cult of bigness in order to escape the false reality of the mundane. What we call national champions is a manifestation of a desire for one’s cultural identity represent to signal superiority or at least competitiveness in relation to other large global–national or otherwise--entities. National champions rely on the destructive, Apollonian imposition of order over nature and spirituality.
Overcoming Social Filter and Personal Filters
Preconceived notions make any socioeconomic establishment--regardless of its cultural context and place in history--a tough nut to crack. The burden of proof is always placed on the dissident so it should be no surprise that whistleblowers in institutions have no incentive to speak of organizational wrongs against the greater society, since the society itself is constructed in a way that is antithetical to interests of the long term interests of the society and the present and future needs of all its people. We need to tune our perceptual systems to filter information that while is of little direct use to us and our life goals. If we do not do the immense bulk quantity of life's information becomes so immense that it is no longer information, but noise. Overwhelmed by the noise, it is we by our own voluntary actions, and not the big bad world, that renders us rudderless amidst a great sea of change.
Who Must Provide the Burden of Proof Business or the Environmentalists?
The debate in America continues is there is a environmental crisis or not? We have not even really gotten to the, if so then what do we, response to that first question. Research indicates that there is a fundamental problem between humanity and its environment. However the burden of proof is not on the producers and the consumers that sustain the present unsustainable economic system, but rather on those who speak of the need to reexamine how our behaviors affect the world around us.
There is a need to make the greater society aware of the excesses of the modern world, and to bring us back into balance with the natural world, reversing the positive feedbacks that are creating climate change and global degradation of the environment. There is a persistent reluctance to change our lifestyles.
The whole question of burden of proof gets us to the examine of the role science plays in sustaining Ecocide (the human destruction of intact ecosystems). Some legitimately ask the question, can science help in better examining the situation and eventually help to solve the problem?
Science is not inflexible and most of it is not fact, rather science is a process of understanding how the world works from a material or physical standpoint that can be empirically defined by the tools that science has honed to a relatively sharp enough edge over the years. Science is an evolving and dynamic process that is designed to solve a problem. The problem is part of that which is the phenomena of things. In order to solve the problem you have to understand the problem, so you observe it you monitor its function and behavior and you may even proceed to dissect it to see what it is made of.
Research indicates that there is a fundamental problem between humanity and its environment. However the burden of proof is not on the producers and the consumers that sustain the present unsustainable economic system, but rather on those who speak of the need to reexamine how our behaviors affect the world around us.
The Dialectical Swing between Faith and Rationalism
Science is a reaction to a human experience. Human experience and observation after being repeated over and over again, led to an attempt to develop a methodological way of measuring reality. The primitive time in science's process of evolution is dominated by what we might see as irrational and false observations as to how things work. Science is susceptible to dogma, as is any world view or belief system. Science provides us with a series of facts, but the value system from which to do something with this information is subject to interpretation. Why we are here, what is going on and how best to deal with whatever is going on (Tom Fleishner Ecosa Institute Lecture 9/15/00))? Tom Fleishner says that conservation biology is a crisis field, because the way humans are affecting ecological systems is leading to a vast global crisis. Ecological science determines limiting factors in an environment. Resource extraction and pollution load limits should determine the level of economic activity. Designers can use that information to better design sustainable systems.
Signs of Degradation
As we seek to expand our ecological footprint, we are reducing that of the organisms that make up the natural environment. As we hog the biomass, we protrude into the natural habitats, breaking them up and trampling them down. This has resulted in a loss of habitat for many organisms, resulting in a massive loss of biodiversity. Biologist E.O. Wilson has said that this level of human generated extinction is 1000 times greater than the natural rate of species attrition. The disruption becomes evident in ozone depletion temperature, sea level and precipitation change globally. It is also evident in our land use patterns.
Wetlands have dried up as we have increasingly made decisions to "develop" these pristine natural areas by altering the very makeup of the area, by draining these areas of their water. The Everglades is a wonderful example of this. Now realizing its mistake the US government is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to fix a problem that it created through its belligerent disregard of the natural world. These reconsiderations of previous human thoughtlessness in relation to natural processes are still seen in isolation of the whole human impact on the environment. Public policy in America is still based on a denial of the total impact of humanity on natural systems. There is begrudging acknowledgement of a problem within a limited areas but there is still heavy resistance to the idea that these problems are isolated outliers but in essence define the scope and methodology of modern development strategies.
Water is a major crisis area. Pumping water from rivers and lakes and from the subsurface aquifers and redirecting it away from natural systems has led to the collision between common sense and political expediency. We have mined the water and the result has been that springs have dried up and rivers that once ran year round now go dry and wells have dried up and there is now ground subsidence (the collapse of the ground into sinkholes), where there were once plentiful subsurface water supplies.
If enough regional or global sub-systems are affected by human activity then the whole systems starts to oscillate beyond normal parameters, climate change, ecosystems are disrupted and organisms become instinct from the chaos that results. Eventually the errant systems are forced by usually external factors to repair themselves back to a state of general systemic symbiosis.
While there is a loss habitat as nearly fifty percent of all the world's landmass has been modified to suit one sort of human need or another, it is that very modification of the environment--crude and inefficient as it may have been--that sustained the present levels of economic prosperity that we are now enjoy and see as basic to our existence.
Cancer Clusters
William Morris' phrase "Dark Satanic Mills" suits not only mid-19thcentury England, the setting of which it sought to describe, but the present reality of modern society which is not really changed as much as might like to belief. That is because the essence of the degradation persists below the surface of modern reality in very subtle ways. Cancer rates rise as chemicals spew and belch out of the industrial icons of progress, mammoth factories that impose a dismal architecture across the urban landscape, transforming urban spaces into modern wastelands. Leather factories pollute the water supplies in rapidly industrializing China, so as to create cheap leather for Western markets.
Zeneca Pharmaceuticals is a good example of the dynamic of dysfunction that colors the modern existence, in hues that most people are loath to understand or visualize. Zeneca is a company that was known to have produced chemicals that use were sold as pesticides that were part of the green revolution--the industrialization of agriculture--that allowed us to produce enough food on a massive industrialized scale to sustain the rising needs of a exponentially exploding human population. The only problem is that the people who produced this chemical and the 86,000 (and counting) others, has no justification based on their position within the marketplace to be cautious. Corporate people traditionally railroad their ideas and products into the public's consciousness, to ensure their survival in an what is oftentimes (and this is being mindful of the many oligarchies that dominate several immense commercial sectors) extremely competitive marketplace.