Finding consonance of focus in a toxic cultural and social medium

The materialists celebrate their engaging in different activities. Many of those activities are just titillations of stimulation; what I call over-compensation to reclaim the identity they gave up for their employment, status, and trophy relationships. They NEED the sensory spectacles of external sources for their rejuvenation, otherwise they'd have to face a discontent for which they have an impotent apathy about.

These diverting attention-spectacles are replacing the internal physiological and psychological mechanisms that provide the inspiration and motivation for the same rush of satisfaction that those spectacles of distraction serve-like an addictive drug. Since we are cognitively trained to seek out these tangible experiences to be the indirect signals of our opaqued being, for our commercial and emotional contentment, we become predispostionally motivated to the behaviors that apprehend and acquire these trappings.

In the meantime, as we are in this process, becoming an artifact and commodity, ourselves. With the few glorious and inglorious exceptions, who become icons for mimicked paradigms, we become one of the fungible social and cultural widget functionaries whose only affirmations for their existence are the external stimulations that artificially create the existential exhilaration of satisfaction. It's the same as utilizing an ersatz, politically or socially correct, authorized item as the allowed product for your expression. And consequentially, we intentionally and unintentionally seek others to be the emotional, if not the practical enablers in consensus of submission for our activities. Many times these co-dependent, enablement-seeking efforts create a social and cultural web that is a perverse expression of our original intent and a degradation of the ideals for that intent. We have settled by adaptive accommodation into a false representation of ourselves and what we know as better, if not the truth.

Just as the tale of the Tower of Babel described how the multitude of languages was made to confound and obstruct men's hubristic designs for mortal achievement, it also gives a corollary tale of how not only the form of communication can become an obstacle of comprehension, but the substance of the content can further compound the misperceptions and misconceptions of the actors. The misperceptions and the resulting misconceptions create a fiction of the perceivers about themselves, as well as the entities and forms of their environment. Thus the narratives that are our bases of logic become degraded to myths and legends in the delusions of our misperceptions and their misconceptions.

In this gauntlet of psychological falsities there exist the base, popular fallacy and the improvisations, which are derived from them. All these do is divert the energy of a coherent focus to the sensory diversions that have been provided by the cultural fallacy as the affirmations for our being. In fact, the cultural fallacy is the conception of the pursuit of materialistic consumption. That pursuit has perverted and degenerated the processes of our feral physiology whose broader functions are NOT the gluttony of sensory stimulation. The broader functions are for the processing of signals and stimuli for an associative correlation of insight and appreciation of the synergistic and interconnected systems of the phenomena of existence.

There is NO escape or redemption within the framework of the cultural fallacies and their social derivatives. It is a toxic, psychological environment of illusions. One would to acquire an ascetic estrangement from most of the cultural and social forms to relieve the trashing of one's cognitive abilities down the distracting and dissipating paths of external sensory titillation. One would have to acquire the eye-of-the-needle, gatekeeper quality to have a discrete filter that could separate the functional and insightful, associative enhancement from the affected titillation of acute, sensory stimulation.

The on-going process of distilling meaning, incidental to one's obligatory and serendipitous pursuits, I see as liberation from the karma of mental inertia that is stuck on the tar-baby of indulgent, sensory consumption for its own sake. When one is distilling meaning, what one takes in or exposes one's senses to, is done as much for the understanding, analysis, and comprehension of the effects on one, as it is done for the aesthetic pleasantries of that moment. The analytical and insightful understanding of the affects of the aesthetics one is engaging becomes an equally, if not the primary collateral reason for engaging that experience. That experience is engaged because it is an incidental extension of one's organic routine of confirmed knowledge and speculation.

This is not the major or main modus operandi of the cultural or social relations. People are affected aesthetes of their own indulgent consumptions. Those indulgent consumptions are degrading degeneration of their capacities to have an internally generated aesthetic. That aesthete would not be an artificial 'fix' but part of a coherent and resonating body of knowledge that connects meaning with a functional purpose, and not just to a satiated feeling.

Contrasting the linguistics of proactive, prospective thinking versus reactive emotive thinking

It comes down to be the affected sob-sister who specializes in after-the-fact damage control, or the cold-eye analyst who's looking ahead and about for what could be preempted so to control the adverse event or situation. The former is so good at seeking to feel good, they can intuitively be sympathetic to obstructions and adversities to feeling good. They're familiar with the gestures and the mantras of those gestures-all of which are for sharing the emotions and the emoting of the 'victim'-undeserved or deserved. It is a behavior that focuses on what happened AFTER 'the horse left the barn'. There is little reflection of how the subject got to that place after the barn door was closed. It is mostly the centering on how to bring comfort, unconditionally, to the situation. This near-compulsion to keep a situation in a state of anesthetized bliss or stability from discomfort, DESERVED and undeserved precludes conceptualizing of alternative actions. It focuses on the consensual mechanics that prescribe the 'needed' comfort level for that group's indulgences. Thus, since affirming the indulgence to be given to a member, socially, is the primary determiner for thought, little attention is given to analysis of the actions taken or neglected to be taken. The damage control and comforting are as much an affirmation for the desires to be indulged or enabled, as it is the palliative for the subject-accountability or responsibility for the adverse consequences being neglected and forgotten in the process. This approach of thinking has its effects and consequences on the language that becomes the mantra for these situations.

On the other hand, the proactive prospective group think is analytical as it is incidentally emotive to the circumstances at hand. The feelings are coincidental to what needs to be done and to be considered. This type of thinker is marginally affected, and does not become self-indulgent in the 'drama' for the sake of having a shared, emoting experience-primarily. Therefore, this analytical approach separates the factors of the event's present and conception from the emotions expressed in the moment. In the separation of the factors from the on-going carnal and psychological experience, the thinker goes beyond the linguistics of 'how to make the subject feel better' to 'how this situation could have had a better genesis'. Since this train of thought has emotions as a coincidental sign of affirming the low arguability of the logic, rather than as the main reason for whatever logic evolves, emotions and the supporting linguistics for the mantras of emotional enabling are transcended. An entirely unique 'linguistic dialect' of form and purpose develops beyond the preoccupation and obsession with affirming the level of group indulgence. It becomes a search for a refining, if not redefinition, of what can and should be affirmed. The alternative perspectives that are formed from this proactive prospection has little to do with carnal comfort. It is concerned with the relationship of concepts that form metaphors of comprehension to devise alternative visions and avenues for behavior. Unlike their emotive brethren, the present is not for maximum, feasible indulgence; the present is base from which the best signals and signs of the present are used to tangibly and intangibly fashion the architecture for a less ecologically adverse future.

JacobinTrotsky at Twitter.com

The state of the economy is an extension of a 30 year progression not a cyclical hyper anomaly

The people in the Rust Belt have been living it for the last 35 years. Ross Perot spoke about it in 1992. What occurred in '08 and has extended to this day is one of the branches and footnotes of a political-economic philosophy that cherishes profits over community. Those who either spin it otherwise or don't discern the common economic thread happening to the 'People of Main Street' are the agents-of-change for-the-worse. Consumers and organized labor are equally guilty for the creation and perpetuation of these conditions. They have stoked the fires for those aggrandizing to make greater profits by holding costs and jobs to depressive levels for individuals and communities, as the aggrandizers supply the supercilious and superfluous to the consumer as labor focuses on narrow provincial concerns for too long to the detriment of global labor concerns.