Spiritual Warfare in 21st Century America
Interesting reading... and pretty accurate I think.
I know a lot of people, people who claim they are caring and kind, who have human interests at heart, who would say that the above article is "Intolerant" of human needs, emotional sensitivity and so on.
But what are human needs? The basic human need is three-fold:
Maintain HomeoStasis; Food for fuel, Shelter from the elements/safety for resting and healing, clothing, fire, water to maintain stable core temperature in all seasons.
Reproduce; continue the species, find mates, have children and raise them to maturity.
Pleasure; Without a sense of pleasure, happiness, animals wither and lose the will to continue. You can survive, most things can survive, a great deal of torment, chaos and displeasure without death – but a lifetime without happiness will be a short lifetime, even in the animal kingdom. If life sucks, why bother to maintain homeostasis, why bother to reproduce? There is no reason and no point. Pleasure is integral to the survival of any sentient organism.
Emotional sensitivity would fall under the pleasure category I think, but what in the above article is truly emotionally damaging?
Nothing. If anything there hurt your feelings, it is because you suffer the disease of affluence. My experience says there are at least two ways it can manifest (speaking in generalizations), 1; a feeling of entitlement without labor and 2; a depression over not getting the things promised, but not yet realizing why (no work, no effort, little reward in the long-term). This is what I see around me all the time, now that I think about it, although I am sure there are more ways it shows.
The depression can have many effects, other mental or character disorders, the mentioned eating disorders and so on.
Now, I dont think all these things just came about because we are no longer a survival oriented society (in a Darwinian and Hunter-Gatherer sense), but I do agree that they are made worse by it.
Its not intolerant to look at the spoiled little brats with their attitude, demands and stupidity, and call a spade a spade. Its not intolerant to say “these people (those somehow affected with the diseases of affluence] are not right, and not fit, for the world and the ‘hard survivability’ of our species”.
It is realistic, it is evolutionary and it is truthful.
Now I don’t think we should hate them either. Hate, cruelty and anger are very bad things, and have as much negative impact survival as anything else. It is not that we have to hate, or to damn, the great hordes of people with a negative impact on the hard survivability of our culture and species, its that we have to learn from them. I'd say help them to get better, but the odds of that are slim to none.
They will die off, even if they cannot be helped… we all will die off in the end. But what matters is that their actions, philosophies and lifestyles do not become the norm and pass on to the next generation and the next. We either have hard survivability, as individuals, as societies and cultures, as a species, or we die out.
Hard survivability doesn’t mean taking over everything, ruling it with an iron fist – not at all. It simply means we can survive anything thrown at us, famine, pestilence, poverty, war, vast global change, and come out on the other side still holding on, and still dug in.
People have the idea that everything that has gone before, all the evolutionary steps of man, all the different cultures and societies that fought it out and battled and died, or hung on and changed, were simply so we could reach this point now. But we are not at the apogee, there is no apogee – its not about getting better and better until we are supreme, that is delusional is the extreme – and even if there was, we aren’t there yet. Upheaval, change, all these things are still before us… and as the Babylonian civilization, the Roman, the Mayan and many other cultures have crumbled, changed and shifted, so will ours. We are not done yet, and we never will be… and we have to be ready for that, or we are doomed.
