Someone asked me the other day what advice would I issue that captures the spirit of our times. The only catch was that I couldn't just speak in parables and be all mysterious and everything. I'm ok with temporarily suspending my reality - so here was my response...
The 'Spirit of our Times' might be different where you live but for me here now it reeks of profiteering without ethics and Weberian Corporatism. It reeks of a society where the darning mistress only focused on strengthening the social fabric where the individual gets to be economically useful to someone - whether that be as a consumer or as a worker.
Society leaves people to take personal responsibility for the maintenance of their personal connections without truly providing sustaining, quality backup mechanisms for people to genuinely engage when they most need it. For the healthy and 'successful', personal responsibility alone, may sound like a fine option if you find yourself able to gorge yourself at the banquet of success.
Too often however I speak to people who are left with a profound sense of personal loneliness and disconnection when their lives are not going so good. Our social experiment failed as far as I am concerned. The mistress forgot to darn the parts of the fabric that give balance to work and keep us connected to others in times of deep or lasting personal crisis.
For people to be ok (even when bad things happen) we need others - in the flesh, besides us. We need people around us who can listen to us with their hearts and talk to us with their brains. We need to have people around we feel we can trust with our vulnerabilities, and our not so socially successful parts of self.
Our society is setup to be economically focused as the social standard, with the catch of deep social isolation during the rough patches. Our families are often broken leaving two adults whose wages now maintain two households instead of one. Our elderly are left in nursing homes because being 'a carer' is not economically viable and people are too busy engaged in their economically useful lives. Blah blah blah...
This is why men cannot live as a commodity alone.
The 'Spirit of our Times' might be different where you live but for me here now it reeks of profiteering without ethics and Weberian Corporatism. It reeks of a society where the darning mistress only focused on strengthening the social fabric where the individual gets to be economically useful to someone - whether that be as a consumer or as a worker.
Society leaves people to take personal responsibility for the maintenance of their personal connections without truly providing sustaining, quality backup mechanisms for people to genuinely engage when they most need it. For the healthy and 'successful', personal responsibility alone, may sound like a fine option if you find yourself able to gorge yourself at the banquet of success.
Too often however I speak to people who are left with a profound sense of personal loneliness and disconnection when their lives are not going so good. Our social experiment failed as far as I am concerned. The mistress forgot to darn the parts of the fabric that give balance to work and keep us connected to others in times of deep or lasting personal crisis.
For people to be ok (even when bad things happen) we need others - in the flesh, besides us. We need people around us who can listen to us with their hearts and talk to us with their brains. We need to have people around we feel we can trust with our vulnerabilities, and our not so socially successful parts of self.
Our society is setup to be economically focused as the social standard, with the catch of deep social isolation during the rough patches. Our families are often broken leaving two adults whose wages now maintain two households instead of one. Our elderly are left in nursing homes because being 'a carer' is not economically viable and people are too busy engaged in their economically useful lives. Blah blah blah...
This is why men cannot live as a commodity alone.
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| Photo by Paul Clark https://picasaweb.google.com/paulclark7559 |
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