Rendering excessive practices obsolete in age that is supposed to give us empirical and objective truth to questions is difficult since that it is that particular world view that stresses the importance of economic development over all other things. Truth has become relativized and reduced to within the marketplace ideas. The questions about life on a deeper level that much of humanity has desired to be answered about ourselves and about the universe, has become a distanced from the primary goal which is to ensure a compliant consuming public. Those who find the modern materialist world view to be a immense amount of nonsense, find themselves not only coming into conflict with the main prevailing thought currents of society, but also with the impact that those forces have on the creation of their own personas and world views that interface with them.
Who says a truth is such and why do they do so?
Skinner says that reinforced behaviorism can be interpreted as a conditioned response to stimulus which is external in nature. By internalization of these external responses we develop systemic pathways of reasoned or unreasoned response, which produce a certain predisposition within us that we use to categorize others who are different or similar to ourselves. Human conflict is a fact of life as it should be. Diverging points of view create diverging perceptions and views. If it were not for these diverging views, the world would be a place of mindless uniformity.
The function of society is and has always been to condition. People in societies are conditioned to follow a paradigm that best reflects the interests of the society according to those that rule or control the society. Humans as members of these societies develop or are influenced under paradigms of thought which vary though history, geography and culture. Individuals are most influenced by the societal structures when they are most dependent and put in positions that leave them vulnerable and therefore most affected by these institutions in their everyday lives.
The fundamental problem is that nearly everyone is genetically unable to cope with reality:
"The human mind evolved to believe in gods... Acceptance of the supernatural conveyed a great advantage throughout prehistory, when the brain was evolving. Thus it is in sharp contrast to [science] which was developed as a product of the modern age and is not underwritten by genetic algorithms." E.O. Wilson (Apr, 1998)
Three of the most important social characteristics that allow people to put their genes into the next generation are exploitation (making the best use of something -- including other people), lying (I love you, so let's go to bed), and self-deception. Exploitation and lying contributed to human survival for millions of years, self-deception for at least 40,000 years.
Self-deception contributes to survival by making us better liars! In love, business, and politics, sincerity is everything. If you can fake that, you've got it made. But our innate propensity for self-deception -- and "hope" keeps us from accepting bad news and acting before it's too late.
A lack of awareness of the actual processes of existence which govern humanity through chemical, biological, cosmological and social scientific codifications of human life within the social environment means that the we are not able to understand the vastness of the modern world as metamorphasizes around us. The vast majority of humans deny or ignore the subtle nuances that add up to the sum causes of our totality. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and that could leave room for the possibility of a spiritual realm which is not explained or visualized by science as we know it today. That which gives us life cannot be simply explained by dissecting the many parts of life into categories and classifications to further study their intrinsic mechanics. If we do take this route, the answers will continue to elude us. Additionally we will continue to arrive at conclusions that will cause us to remake our policies and perceptions about reality in a way that denies the beauty of life.
The parts function in this complex life-sphere of earthly existence in several ways. The world can be split up into two spheres to better understand it. The personal and the political represent the artificial division of the macro of large societal existence from the small scale, micro existence that the individual actually feels as a human being.
We must examine how those who rule the MACRO-WORLD make decisions that affect our lives in the micro-world. The lack of foresight and relatedness to the common experience has much to do with the degradation of aesthetic spaces in our society.
Mainstream culture fosters a mind-set among the populace that is unhealthy to the proper functioning of a just and harmonious society. People do not think in the interest of the whole vessel of humanity but only of themselves. Therefore through this process the systems collapse under the weight of selfishness and the more economically exclusive people build fail-safes that only their affluent incomes can sustain.
There is also a co-efficient that determines the probability of increase in a more discerning customer. One who is less guided by the demands of commercial culture to conform than to the things that really help them to be able to advance the cause of helping themselves so that they will be more able to help others and in so doing perpetuate the society into the indefinite future. People become educated and from this education they move in ways that more truly represents their interest not the people who create the desire for increased consumption.
Who is the designer?
The designer is the process of neo-liberalism which sees the cultivation of manufactured consent as a more effective tool for assimilation and conformity than the obviously coercive form of authoritarianism, which often uses brute force or the threat of such action to keep the lower levels of hierarchy in line.
The building of a new modern perception of the capitalist industrial society, is the what neo-liberalism is all about. Neo-liberalism is the installing of new program that gives people the proper illusions to dwell upon which serve to mask the true reflection of neo-liberalism: a kinder, gentler machine gun hand. The machine gun is hidden, only when problems crop up from serious social malfunctions of programming systems that sustain the neo-liberal order, is there serious slam down the nonconformist deviants who see themselves as the victims of alienated and displaced culture. As the Machine Gun mentality of our culture becomes more obvious, the illusion of Neo-liberalism fades exposing a grim reality that is the price of progress under the regime of the neo-liberal global order. Here is where the truth of capitalist society becomes evident, as the description of its most radical dissidents is most evidently accurate. This is where revolutions start. The illumination of truth is the precipitating factor that motivates them from constraints of passivity to aggressively engage in methods of change.
The designer is bases the paradigm of modern socioeconomic development upon what is perceived by it to be the ideal formulation of social, cultural natural, economic and political resources. The designer is not any one group or individuals it is a group of things that form the elemental consciousness of the society or civilization.
The designer of human reality is not divine, but it does transcend the notion of human life as finitely limited to individual personal perceptions. It is based upon the fact that the fabric of our existence (or a fabric basic to our existence) comes from many complex sources. Our past has an effect on the present. The subjugation of the masses to sustain the material dialectic-which most benefited the ruling elite-typifies the elemental forces that still sustain the majority of human intent and actions today.
The paradigm of consumption is a multifaceted tool for power accumulation and preservation. It creates increased throughput by which the separation between the mass public and elite cliques can be extended. As we produce more from value added manufacturing Éprocesses of raw materials that are inputted into the industrial system, we increase the GNP; the value of all good and services, which is a indirect gauge of throughput. But Éconsumption as paradigm of reality creation transforms us. The middle class myth of American society is sustained by the idea that we move from humans of which they were several differentiated class grades to consumers who all consume whether rich or poor. The label consumer is all encompassing term used to describe those that participate in the consumption paradigm of commercial culture. As we move from human to consumer, we become commodities of a culture that sees consumption as ends in itself. The consumer becomes commodified into an object. From here the way is opened to quantify the object much as we categorize trees the earth and the universe. For objectification is a key precept of scientific method and if the humanities are to become transformed in way that they can be legitimately be called the social sciences, the identity as humans will have to be reduced. In our study and empirical dissection of human behavior statistical methods of categorization will have to be used. But how far do we go? And how much does objectification reduce us as human to the subhuman or the machine? Finally how is the commercial culture interrelated with the rise of the quantitative thought in the study of human society?
Is Utility Maximization Valid?
Let's think about this logically. Is it better for a business to not have a purchaser or consumer that is aware of the world and the vagaries of the market? If the consumer buys a products based on the its image and not for what that product tangibly does for the consumer, they are falling for someone else's definition of success. People make decisions about consuming from a social (micro) and cultural standpoint of acceptance and the idea of being liked. The emphasis is not on rational consumer thinking; so much as it is on getting a maximum sense of social acceptance for every dollar spent. People will demand less of a product or be more forgiving of its negative, environmental, health or social (macro or society wide) effects, if it delivers them the status success they desire. More importantly they do not see that the ramifications of the consumer lifestyles that they are taught to espouse and revere. These consumer lifestyles that they have to choose from in a materialistic democracy are installed upon the fabric of society because they get to conform in turn to socioeconomic needs of the ruling class.
Since the externalities of popular culture manifest themselves in a myriad of ways and often quite subtle, it is hard to empirical pinpoint the impact. In both the micro-world of the individual and the macro-world of the logic based professional classes who guide and study the world economy (and the superstructures that surround it) there is little evidence which is substantive enough to persuade those that engage in the various systemic processes of denial, that the present modern industrial society is seriously defunct and dangerously corrupted.
Popular culture functions merely as conduit to stimulate trends and thereby increase production creating new income on capital invested. The real mode of determination of cultural values as of present is commercial culture. It, commercial culture is the real force behind that deterioration of the human condition as well as effecting the state of the world in way that makes the illusion of prosperity even more precariously rooted. The justification for the culture of the modern world is it stimulates demand for products that the economy produces. What is problematic here is that there is mounting evidence that this rate of throughput which is still increasing as a rapid rate, is far beyond the ability of the earth to tolerate.
There is also a co-efficient that determines the probability of increase in a more discerning customer. One who is less guided by the demands of commercial culture to conform than to the things that really help them to be able to advance the cause of helping themselves so that they will be more able to help others and in so doing perpetuate the society into the indefinite future. People become educated and from this education they move in ways that more truly represents their interest not the people who create the desire for increased consumption.