Does the human belong to a kind of system?

[Bombini]

Does the human belong to a kind of system? Sometimes it feels like the world isn't natural. That all of our feelings and happenings really don't matter? And some things that seems logic are actually illusions of our mind? That the things that happens between friends and people has nothing to say? Pretty much everything we set our mind to we can do. People die every day, and people get murdered. But the rest of the world usually don't care? Please reply!

 

[minorwork]

My first inclination is to reply, "What's the use?" But you deserve more. You love who you must. To everybody else agape or good will. Can you save all from their misery? I have my hands full with my offspring. Even then they are of the age where I cannot protect them. They must make their own mistakes. Is this a system? I do not understand what system means to you.

 

[jim mcnamara]

By system do you mean culture?

 

[minorwork]

Systems established by various cultures include but are not limited by those I have considered. Drop and rot: existentialisms. Heaven and Hell: Judeo-Christian-Islamic systems. Life after life: the reincarnation systems. The cargo cults and many, many other attempts to reconcile the human situation.

Lately human problems are blamed on climate change that is human caused. So the Judeo Christian Islamic systems seem made for such a problem. The human is saddled with "sin" from birth. I abhor this concept but it is a potent political weapon that is being exploited by the "saviors" of our planet.

Doggonit. Where'd that soapbox come from?

 

[Bombini]

Me

Yes, i do mean culture. Or the thing we would perhaps call society.

 

[jim mcnamara]

Most cultures are collective, the individual is more of a cog in a wheel than a primary driver of what happens.

Western culture, by that I mean mostly the US and Canada, tends to emphasize the individual rather than the group, but it still works collectively. IMO, this confuses people. Most folks think that every individual is special, until they encounter making a phone call to a big comapny to transact business.

There is really a duality - US culture deifies the conceopt of the unique individual, but most individuals are in the cog classification even though they view themselves as belonging to the CEO or movie star classification. Cog people get treated differently from movie stars, if you haven't noticed. The unique thing is, IMO, a result of media advertising.

On the subject - I saw media in action changing cultural values, first hand. I lived on the Navajo Reservation in Arizona for long time. It is a VERY large chunk of high desert scrub with a dispersed population. Everybody there wore traditional clothing, or blue jeans and a t-shirt. If they could listen to music at all it was distant AM country & western radio stations.

Then, the tribal phone company got sold out to a private concern. The private concern convinced the tribal council to allow them to string cable TV lines on the existing poles. This meant all of the little places like Sunshine, Cornfields and Teec Nos Pos were able to get lots of TV channels, which was not possible before. The cable company provided 13 networks including the new MTV.

This was when heavy metal music was starting to be very popular. Within six months most of the kids and even some of the adults dressed just like the musicians on MTV. Within two years of the advent of cable, the Navajo Police were arresting juvenile members of a Satantic cult that was found North of Window Rock.

Prior to cable most Navajos could not even spell 'satanic' or more correctly could have cared less about something like that. The tribe cut MTV in response to the satantic cult thing. The place where I lived was changed forever after that.