Wednesday, November 14, 2012

The social problems we face today


It might sound surprising, but most of the social problems we face today have already been depicted in great detail by the great thinkers of mankind and they have already explained in the past that our crisis is, fundamentally, an ethical issue with socio-economical consequences, but this aspect seems to be invisible to the majority of contemporary men.

            The malevolent plan of those in control of this pitiful society is, and has always been, very clear: they do not want general liberty because this would endanger their power. Free people are dangerous for those that want to control them. So they implement all possible measures to avoid real liberty and twist the idea of it to make it coincide with just petty material means. The great poet Joseph Brodsky used to say that “Free means not free but liberated”, i.e. real liberty is awareness. Our educational systems have been turned, more or less, into a standardized training or indoctrination apparatus -- if not worse -- and students end up going to universities to buy a degree in the same way they go to a supermarket to buy groceries. Paradoxically, modern universities are damaging knowledge almost to the point of no return and clearly, if the leaders and managers that are nowadays trained by the same diploma mills learn just techniques to attain power or make money and not a cultural/ethical attitude toward the world and society, later we don’t have to wonder about their mediocrity and moral corruption, it’s just the logical conclusion. The contemporary utilitarian approach to life induces the majority of students to believe that the only scope of knowledge is for personal gain or manipulation. As a result the deeper questions are neglected and men go on living, day by day, their unhappy lives of narcissistic happiness.

Confusion generates more confusion and standardized thinking has never led anywhere. We live in peculiar dark times presented as the brightest of all ages by a simplistic system of mass indoctrination. Individuals that are still capable of reading and pondering over the real questions of life understand that we live in a regressive phase of civilization (Giambattista Vico, 1668 – 1744, defined these stages of history as “the cycle of course and recourse”), but this understanding means nothing for the standardized man (or The One-Dimensional Man according to Herbert Marcuse). We have probably reached a point in history where real intellect cannot be understood because the questions that our society poses are no longer intellectual, but fundamentally trivial and deceptive. One example could be the immense confusion between intelligence and intellect. If individuals of real intellect would nowadays be showed on any media around the globe, just a tiny portion of the audience would be able to recognize the meaning of what they are trying to express because they speak a language that cannot be understood without awareness of meaning and a desire for knowledge. A deep person can speak the same language as the shallow person and yet, they speak two different languages: the same occurs in the difference between lover and beloved, as one cannot speak the language of love to someone who has never experienced that feeling. Real words are to chatter what music is to noise and real love is to fake love what a diamond of light is to a ring bought in a crowded mall. So, the more we become oblivious of ourselves the more all deep questions that could bring us in touch with our real humanity will become more and more inaudible, until all is left is the silent scream of our forgotten lives. And all of this in a society that claims to be the most advanced of all human history. Well, after all, history does have its peculiar irony.

(From: Sergio Caldarella, The social problems we face today, in Rantrave.com)