We Don't Deserve Utopia
Governments and Corporations exist for their own benefit nowadays. The interests of these two entities are now one and the same: money. What better way to get money than to take it from the people you control? In a Utopian society, corporations, do not profit. Corporations don't spend money on themselves, but they invest it in the country. Corporations are the entities that the government imposes taxes upon. They are most able to pay such fees. In a world where the government and corporate entities are forced to work for the benefit of those whom are responsible for its survival, citizen shan't have to fear these comic book villains, but embrace them. A company that is capable of posting hundreds of billions in profit is certainly not a company that has competition or is providing beneficial services to its customers. With profit margins this large, it's clear that these companies have only one thing on their mind: money.
It's been said that money is the root of all evil for as long as it has been around. It has become just a saying as people don't put any thought into it (or anything for that matter anymore). Life has become a race to the end, a race to buy the modest home, complete with 2 luxury cars (that don't even get 20mpg), 1.83 children which parents shape and mold to become exact replicas of themselves, not thinking about the future, but how much of their money they can spend before they die. Money isn't the root of all evil though. This valuable paper only provokes the natural human response that is indeed the true root of evil. The one unforgivable sin: Greed. Before humans began to settle into clans and villages and towns, cities and empires, we knew nothing of possession. The concept of ownership had never been bestowed upon us, yet once things became permanent, when you had a need for heavy clay pots to hold water, possessions were something to die for.
The problem is that humans are depressingly inadequate. We could spend no longer than a few days in the wild. To combat this, we developed intelligence, and the ability to use tools, but as time goes on, we became so dependent on these tools and possessions, that being without a particular tool meant that death could be imminent. Greed evolved as one of the most important of human emotions, coupling dependence with technology, turning greed into an easily dominant character trait. Kings were selected by how many possessions they had. Things became powerful and valuable. It wasn't long before currency became the law of the land, with everyone fighting over the shiny metallic objects that could be exchanged for anything you could ever need or want.
What do we want now? We want to be happy, but no one seems to be able to say what happy is, so they just let everyone else decide what happy is, and then they strive for this status of happy, which happens to require as much money as possible, requiring more and more with every generation. If more people sat down and contemplated what happiness truly was, they might come across the idea that possessions cannot listen or interact with you in a meaningful way. They might also realize that money is not a good insulator and will not keep you warm at night. The problem with money is the fact it's what everyone seems to want, so we just make more of it to keep up with demand. But what if money wasn't important? What if what was actually important was surviving? A laughable thought, as the human race has moved far beyond surviving to the ability to live a life that is comfortable. It seems today that comfort is the ultimate happiness, yet we are still unhappy. The reason for the typical mid-life crisis is that when we all turn middle age, we start to think about what happiness truly is, then we realize that we haven't been happy yet. We spend the first forty years of our life preparing ourselves for the life of comfort, but when we get there, we realize that we've wasted our best years.
One cannot be told the meaning of life because it is different for every person, but we try anyway. Society impresses upon us the importance of being 'normal' when no one sits down long enough to think about what normal actually is. If you take a look at the people in your life, are any of them exactly like you? Of course not. You may have some things in common with them, but no one is exactly alike, yet we try to suppress our individuality so we can become normal! Have you decided what normal is yet? It's another word for 'insecurity'. Being different terrifies people nowadays. Everyone becomes the person they hate just so they can pretend to be like everyone else, slowly changing themselves into someone that is boring and ordinary, so they can fit in and appear to be living a successful life. Then you have to ask yourself, what is success? These days, it's quite obvious that life is nothing more than a video game and the points are the flat green rectangles that you trade your time for. Tell me, would you pay your hourly wage to go have an adventure? Yes? Tell me again, would you pay many times your hourly wage to do everything you've ever wanted? What's that, you don't know what you really want? I see, because you were too busy becoming successful to know what you're interested in.
If you look back on your life, you may realize that all the time you've invested in your personal success may very well have been better spent doing things you enjoy. The human race is in a very unique position as far as animals go. Wild animals spend their entire lives surviving. There's not an activity wasted in the daily life of a blue bird. A snake is always looking for its next meal, but us humans, we're better than that. I couldn't even die if I tried! My roommate would immediately rush me to the hospital and I would probably survive. In fact, it takes such little effort to survive in today's world that it's no wonder people are unhappy. You'd think with all of this spare time on our hands we would contemplate mysteries of the world around us, or perhaps try to make our home a better place. Instead, we watch mindnumbing television shows and consume the resources this planet provides us at an alarming rate.
We sit around every night watching American Idol because our lives are so incredibly boring and atavistic that we consume ourselves in the lives of others so we don't have to think about our own. When I was a child, I proposed that man would not kill itself in nuclear war and we would not go the way of the dinosaurs, but rather that we would sucuumb to our own bordom as we figured out every last question that had ever been asked. As a child though, I did not expect the situation to arise so soon. Are people no longer curious? Do they think they know everything? I certainly hope not.
02.18.2010. 13:56
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