So obvious and so dismissive..
It seems no one is getting the message here!
When a society chooses to flirt with the boundaries of anarchy…that perception of “normal” social and personal dynamic changes…
Violent movies don’t “cause” anti-social behavior, what violent movies and violent video games and violent sporting pastimes…accepting a level of violence and brutality in our communities as a “normal” expression creates..is a climate of acceptability toward violence. Brutality and expressed aggression lays the foundation for a re-calibration…if you would, a repositioning of the boundaries of what standards become the indicators of a potentially serious problem. While “competition” can be the sieve that separates the committed athlete or businessman or performer, competition without a structure of limits becomes anarchy.
Perfectly normal healthy people fall victim to the national/social sentiment that regards the drive to achieve…to ‘win’ regardless of rules and regulations. To “win”..to “excell” to “be the best” despite a system of limits and checks and balances intended to ameliorate excessive competition and the significantly higher potential for behavior that should be regarded as inappropriate and dangerous, that leads many of these perfectly “normal” folk down the slippery slope of criminality and corruption.
When we accept the Jon Benet Ramsey’s of the world and the dehumanization of children…modeled all too frequently by the glamor of fame and fortune regarded by the average Canadian and American as the fulfillment of the mythic “superiority” or “realization of hidden promise”…so prized by our consumer-driven societies…we prepare the field for a far broader latitude in judging the relative misbehaviors and anti-social behaviours of everyone from parents and their children to sports and entertainment figures.
Our compass for detecting the disturbed individual is sent awry by the re-formulation of a set of standards abandoned in the name of being the biggest and the best…when even a cursory examination of these sentiments forces and dynamics within the social paradigm reveal a lengthy history of damage suffering and anti-socialism of all kinds.
Honest people are taught to abandon that honesty in the name of cultivating the sham of status…and regard “fudging the numbers”… “cooking the books” and outright fraud as simply the demands of a social order and self-consumed society. In a climate of lax or inadequate social structures with respect to firearms, automobiles, drugs and the fundamental “soil” of social development that prizes success and consumption above all else, we see our social fabric not just frayed at the edges but tearing itself apart from within.
We have mountains of evidence that indicate that governments acting in the name of alterior motives are prepared to act…to take entire nations to war on the basis of faulty and inadequate…to say nothing of fraudulent “intelligence”…because as George Patton was so fond of saying, “America will not tolerate a loser.”
And a loser is definded not by the more global standard of laws and systems of philosophy that should act as guidelines to governments but instead governing agents are warned that they as elected representatives will pay the price for their reticence to act by losing their grasp on power weatlth and authority.
The structures of modern society are expressed through our technological expertise bound by a juvenile obsession with being first…if not simply being seen as being..first.
I suppose like so much else here at CC I’m wasting my time once again….few people it seems are prepared to look at the broader picture in the context of the events that swirl around us that are portents of extremely serious dyanmics that sit poised to consume the world that we’re so happy to ignore.
Wasting my time…..