Merry Christmas Everyone!
A prayer for all of you!
On this night,
God was Man.
Love He brought,
Love He, Man.
A blessing on your home,
Benedict in your heart.
Emmanuel has come,
Our salvation He art.
May your path be straight,
May your roads be safe.
May the street be light,
May the route be right.
Let us not say that our predecessors did not warn us about the path we are taking. The parallels between the war of 1914 and our climate war are eerily similar…
Nature’s way of dealing with unhealthy conditions is unfortunately not one that compels us to conduct a solvent hygiene on a cash basis. She demoralizes us with long credits and reckless overdrafts, and then pulls us up cruelly with catastrophic bankruptcies. Take for example common domestic sanitation. A whole city generation may neglect it utterly and scandalously, if not with absolute impunity, yet without any evil consequences that anyone thinks of tracing to it. In a hospital two generations of medical students may tolerate dirt and carelessness, and then go out into general practice to spread the doctrine that fresh air is a fad, and sanitation an imposture set up to make profit for plumbers. Then suddenly Nature takes her revenge. She strikes at the city with pestilence and at the hospital with an epidemic of hospital gangrene, slaughtering right and left until the innocent young have paid for the guilty old, and the account is balanced. And then she goes to sleep again and gives another period of credit, with the same result.
This is what has just happened in our political hygiene. Political science has been as recklessly neglected by Government and electorates during my lifetime as sanitary science in the days of Charles the Second. In international relations diplomacy has been a boyishly lawless affair of family intrigues, commercial and territorial brigandage, torpors of pseudo-goodnature produced by laziness, and spasms of ferocious activity produced by terror. But in these islands we muddled through. Nature gave us a longer credit than she gave France or Germany or Russia. To British centenarians who died in their beds in 1914, any dread of having to hide underground in London from shells of an enemy seemed more remote and fantastic than a dread of the appearance of a colony of cobras and rattlesnakes in Kensington Gardens. In the prophetic words of Charles Dickens we were warned against many evils which have since come to pass; but of the evil of being slaughtered by a foreign foe on our own doorsteps there was no shadow. Nature gave us a very long credit; and we abused it to the utmost. But when she struck at last she struck with a vengeance. For four years she smote our firstborn and heaped on us plagues of which Egypt never dreamed. They were all as preventable as the great Plague of London, and they came solely because they were not prevented. They were not undone by winning the war. The earth is still bursting with the dead bodies of the victors.
George Bernard Shaw, on nature’s long credits, in his preface to Heartbreak House.
There are quite a number of videos on Youtube that uncover for the uninitiated the miracle that is Photoshop, more specifically, the mirage of perfection that Photoshop is able to create.
Searching “Photo Retouching” or “photoshopping” on any of the search engines should turn up a whole host of examples of how the program is used to make people look even better. Usually the photoshopped are the young or celebrities, and more often than not they are woman. Hips, Chest, Back, Bust, Abs, Thighs, and Face name the body part and artificial enhancements can be made to it. Got clothes? No problem, the magic pen can remove it with a few strokes. A few years back, the actor of Superman had to have his crotch area digitally reduced because it was ‘too big’.
In most industries, such photoshopping is usually frowned upon for its lack of integrity and intellectual honesty. There is one industry though that has an almost hypnotically high regard for this method – the entertainment industry. Leaf through any publication from the magazine stands – you can be sure that the majority of the time, the pictures in that weekly/monthly have been air-brushed here or there to present an alternate reality of flawlessness, making Adonis’ and Aphrodites’ out of normal humans.
The models on MensHealth have such tanned, ripped and defined abdominals that seem almost non-human; the models on gracing the covers of Seventeen, FHM, Sports Illustrated, Vogue etc have the proportioned, curvaceous bodies that provide a temptation only the devil could conjure and the smooth, flawless face of an angel that probably even God would say was ‘very good’.
The almost faultless physique of these models has resulted in a rising cases of physical and mental illness. Anorexia and Otaku are two results of this mindset.
There might be man who like grasshoppers for girlfriends but it is doubtless that this but a small minority. Remember, the interior sexual drive, which is the first cause of sexual attraction, is geared to looking for the partner who has the best traits to pass on to an offspring. Indicators include the buttocks, breast and proportional hourglass figure, not a stick thin physique, which is, “a freak of nature”. (For man some indicators include a barrel-chests, deep husky voice and flat defined chin.) A skeletal, bony woman is, not good for childbirth and evolutionarily, and not going to give a man that initial attraction. But this is the image that is presented by the media – the ‘killer’-bod.
Otaku is a term used to refer to people who have an unhealthy addiction to Japanese Anime characters. Again, the anime characters are usually female, have large dreamy, watery eyes, full buttocks and breast, size zero waists and a sensual voice. The situation in Japan is so extreme that there are some Otakus who develop a romantic, even sexual, relationship with these Anime characters.
A lot of reasons can be put down for these anomalies, including the possible emotional insecurities of the person, but what is without doubt is that, evidently, both man and woman have been made to worship a flawed and fake image of the human form – all in the sake of money.
Otakus appear because of a competitive market in the Anime industry; Anorexics appear because magazines jump onto the twig bandwagon in the name of sales causing the emaciated body to diffuse into the subconscious as attractive.
It is when the insatiable thirst of money becomes an end in itself that these problems begin. It is the result of capitalism out of control. It suggests a civilization in the throes of a slow, relentless trek to its eventual demise. This is the deeper malaise that we have found our human society entangled in, a quagmire with no recourse to escape.
The marketplace of today judges systems and companies by the narrow barometer that is money. Money-men are celebrated by the amount of profits that make for the company – a successful organisation is one that makes greater returns on its income. Countries judge themselves by their annual Gross Domestic Product, a good year is one where the economy expands, and a bad year is one where the market does not. World leaders stall on any form of agreement to save the earth because there’s no economic gain in it, forgetting that if people cannot live, there is no economy to run.
Carl Zimmerman, a Harvard sociologist in his Magnum Opus “Family and Civilization”, discussed three kinds of family units: the trustee family, domestic family and the atomistic family. The trustee family is a close-knit, tribal like (in local lingo this would be something like the kampong); the domestic family centres on the nuclear family and maintains ties with the extended family; the atomistic family has attenuated ties with the extended family and views everything through the lenses of an economic entity. In his book, he discusses how all three forms exist at any time but moves from the trustee family to a predominantly atomistic family. The atomistic family, when in the majority, leads irrevocably to the end of the civilization.
Is this not what we are doing today, with our valuation of people as economic units; with our view of education not as a means to truth but as a tool for economic leverage? When medical treatment is given with inequity, favouring the rich over the promises in the Hippocratic Oath; when the legal field becomes an industry over its office of jurisprudence; when media outlets sell equivocation, bigotry and hatred for money; when religion sells itself out into a numbers game; when science falsifies results for the sake of its patron; when everything can be reduced to marketing and advertising. When we allow these things to happen, we elevate money to be the central focus of our life and sanction every moral as fair game to be shot down towards that end. This un-quenching craving for money is the result of the atomistic family in ascendancy. The traits that make humans human are slowly sent up in smoke as the sacrifice of ‘necessary evils’ to fulfill a ‘useless good’.
Abraham Maslow in his 1943 paper, A Theory of Human Motivation, developed the theory of the Hierarchy of Needs. In it he talks about the five levels of human needs and how humans need to adequately satisfy the needs of the lower levels before progressing to a higher level.
To reach his final result, he made an examination of those he deemed to be ‘exemplary people’ instead of the normal human person. What defines exemplary people is that they have over-achieved and are not excessively stuck in the cycle of money. Regrettably though, his oft quoted hypothesis may describe the ideal human instead of the common man. Although man can talk about the goals of self-actualisation and have come up with great theories and ideas, the average man-on-the-street is stuck in a rat race of survival – shape up or shift out. What is survival? A job to ensure that one has the money to fulfil his basic needs.
What results is that instead of building on our respective needs grounded firmly in the human person, the whole pyramid is coloured through shade of money. Instead of a building up the pyramid with solid stone, inferior wood has been used.
Money has become an end, not because humans are so naturally disordered that we seek such confusion rather, because humans seek a lasting completion and happiness in the incomplete. There is a chase for some intrinsic good, but because society is run by money, we are unable to recognise what it is that we really seek and hence assume it to be the things that we can buy with money. Is it any wonder that the people who live in the countryside seem to have a clearer world view than the people who live in the city?
Thus money today buys all sorts of things; it buys knowledge, health, longevity, looks, reputation, comfort, and even love. Think about the global education system, the health industry, medical supplements, cosmetic treatments, celebrity, material goods and social escort services.
What happens after we begin to view everything through the lens of money is a magnification of the monetary value of everything. We come to know the price of everything and the value of nothing. The economic view of being comes to pervade all aspects of our life, infusing so deep in as to suffocate us in the bedroom, a child becomes a financial burden better to be terminated than suffered. A senior citizen becomes an economic liability better to be sent away and left to expire. A person is judged by his ability to contribute to the workforce rather than by the content of his character.
What this manifests in is a slow demise of civilization as we know it, beginning with the most capitalist countries and eventually the rest that catch up in capitalism. Zimmerman talks about how the western world is closest to this end, I would like to suggest that the notions of the western/non-western world, developed/developing nations are obsolete. Instead of a western/developing division the world could be looked at through an index of saturation – capitalism saturation. The measure of capitalism is a measure of how pervasive the “invisible hand” (that Adam Smith mentions) is in a society; the invisible hand not being the problem per se, but its unrestrained nature.
The most capitalist countries happen to be the most developed, and the current economic powerhouses. These countries also happen to have obscenely high crime rates for their economic development, rapidly slowing population growth (and negative growth), soaring societal discontent, population growth is screeching to a halt. Lowering religiosity rates point to an eradication of the communal good in favour of individual rights (the exception is USA which has been aided by immigration of people from less developed countries).
The demise of civilization does not mean that the human race will die off; humans are more resilient than that. The higher up the index of saturation, the more capitalist a country is, the more dominated it is by the atomistic family. The atomistic family is however untenable and will eventually erode itself through its own self-serving means, leading in a shift of balance of power back to either the trustee or domestic family. The homogeneity of civilization (thanks to globalisation), means that the blind will lead the blind over the cliff, Capitalism would have to scale back, and just as the ancient Greeks and Romans lost their lustre of their empires, the same will eventually happen to this generation of humanity, beginning with the most capitalist of countries.
