Our society seems doomed.
First, it seems like its first value is to “have fun” and “get ahead” in the crudest senses. These views inevitably lead to disease and disaster. Hence, a doomed society. Pretty obvious, isn’t it? How could it end up otherwise?
Basically, the core of our population lives in very unhealthy ways that get them sick and hurt and result in their voluntary maximum exploitation. Again, disaster.
A social norm that is based on a sick stupid person spells disaster. Can it do otherwise?
Isn’t most of America fat, ill and stupid? So aren’t we doomed?
A specific example of our doom—which really isn’t needed since the doom can’t be escaped—is healthy insurance but really you can include all insurance.
How does Ambrose Bierce’s idea about insurance not apply here? His idea is that the sum of many individual probabilities of being screwed is a collective certainty of being screwed. That is, doomed, in the larger sense. Insurance is meant to spread risk but if most people live stupidly and are ill, then everyone is dragged down…and ruined. Get it? More broadly, if your fellows around you in society are stupid, hurt and sick then you’re a goner, too: the whole shebang is augering in. Without hope.
(Here’s one of his quotes: “Insurance – an ingenious modern game of chance in which the player is permitted to enjoy the comfortable conviction that he is beating the man who keeps the table.” His definition goes on and on after that. Hilariously.)
And, ya know, I have to include sports in with this whole doom thing. When we do things that stand a good chance of getting us hurt bad we’re not playing a sustainable culture game. It’s irresponsible for us to put our sport injured knees and sports-related broken bones onto the wallets of others, which is all that insurance does! A kind of sport injury is one that doesn’t cost money to repair or require doctoring but which one can even bounce back from stronger—some stress injuries work this way, especially in the classic old martial arts training. Shocks and impacts can be strengthening—so they’re not what we’re worried about. I’m saying that it takes a stupid, exploitive, DYING culture to do sports that really tend to get people requiring insured medical attention or that put them out of commission. Rich people used to pay expendable people to wreck themselves for their amusement. Our anti-culture of guilt and masochism now does it to itself. We need to question everything that comes to us from malfunctioning elitist values (for instance drug-exploration and divorce for personal growth or convenience came to us from the self-destructing upper classes—which spread their doom; such things can have roles to play in consciousness raising but like everything of impact must be practiced with a level of caution, support and preparation which our culture had no time or interest in satisfying).
The only corrective conceivable is if new primary values are instilled to replace the sick existing ones. The new primary values would have to be health and responsibility, wouldn’t they? Can any other values result in anything but doom? Of course the only reason why anyone would care about health or be willing to be responsible is if they saw a meaning in life. The only workable meaning in life is that which supports life itself. It’s a loop that needs to be closed and self-referencing and submitted to. Any other value would tend to kill life. And of course we’ll tend to want to do things just for fun (not for life) and to get ahead (life be damned) and so do things which hurt life and bring us all down. Religion is the methods we use to keep ourselves working for life itself.
It might help if our Presidents would get on TV every day and tell the nation to be safe, sensible and healthy in all that it does. And that stupid moves and unhealthy behavior brings us all down…quicklike.
