Thoughtfulness
Of paramount importance and relevancy to true and lasting human
accomplishment is the way we deliberate between short term gain
and long term accomplishment. The overriding consideration must
be our degree of thoughtfulness. Thoughtfulness means an honest
examination of the desired objectives over time. It means
adherence to the primary value of truth while addressing
perceived short term needs, without distorting the long term
goals. Those trusted with overseeing the mission must be ever
vigilant in not allowing principle to yield to exigency,
especially when the wiles and demands of the surreptitious or
loud and aggressive are insinuating themselves into the mix for
personal gain.
If the self interested are allowed to dominate or eclipse
principle through corrosive influence, the consequent decline in
overall diligence becomes the acceptable norm. Capitalism today,
the most pervasive and influential system in industrialized
society, has become a predominate fixture in perpetuating this
decline. International conglomerates wield unchallenged power
over people and nations only to satisfy their own narrow ends,
with no regard for external ramifications, yet they survive and
flourish essentially unfettered and unchallenged.
Corporations today are predominately fixated on stock price and
maximizing profit. In a small town where scale is manageable and
knowable, a business realizes is place, role and efficacy in the
economy of the area. It needs a profit to survive, a condition
understood and accepted, but kept in balance by the ethics,
wherewithal and means of the community. In a healthy
environment, it is a contributing member of the whole in both
usefulness and service adding to the overall welfare and
ambiance of the community. Corporations on the other hand lavish
outrageously excessive rewards on the higher-ups while they in
turn establish destructive precedents that compensate managers
for short term results; treat employees as easily expendable
pawns, and sacrifice substance to image enhancement. Products
and services possessing intrinsic significance become
irrelevant. Hyped value with no regard to consequence, but
profitable, is the primary consideration.
Corporations dominate the landscape. The majority of us toil in
increasingly meaningless, stressful and time demanding
occupations, with credit and consumption heralded by the mass
media our reward. A relentless barrage of commercial miasma
invades our psychic at every venue, branding their version of
morality into the fabric of our daily lives. Image makers,
indiscriminately selling manufactured desire, have elevated the
irresponsible personality to social prominence, even hero
worship. Without intervention, and none appears likely, the
declining circumstance of all our lives will continue to
deteriorate as greed and intolerance perpetuates itself. Fateful
decisions should not be made in a vacuum by people with vested
interests, which unfortunately is exactly the situation we now
find ourselves in. We have abdicated our intuitive duty to build
a more sustainable existence by giving power over our lives to
the purveyors of fear and greed.
In a perverted antithesis to the quest to find relevancy and
meaning in the world, mass media advertising is providing
manufactured identity, through product worship, to target
audiences, most egregiously to the young and searching. Mass
marketers cater to moral insecurity and foster irresponsibility
through aggrandizement of inane idols. They endorse and promote
immediate gratification and intimidation through peer pressure.
They supplant the quest for substance and meaning with drivel
and triviality. In attempts to appear righteous they unabashedly
employ insidious public relations tactics to play on emotion or
loyalties. The absurd and demeaning circumstance of popular
culture shows how much we hunger for access to meaning within
ourselves, and how far short we have fallen in attempting to
find it.
Most of us go about life as though meaning where something
outside of us, the purview of philosophers or poets. We focus on
results with little regard for process. Our present mind set and
world view of exploitation and quick fixes, without regard for
resource husbandry or spiritual interconnectedness, has gained
us temporal abundance but depressing materialism and its
attendant waste. Individual freedom is now overshadowed by
individualistic irresponsibility; decency corrupted by
self-righteousness and moral superiority. We confuse justice
with revenge, accept the decline of authenticity, and support
the misconception that fear can be overcome by preemptive
violence.
We have evolved to the point in time where we should be
utilizing every means and opportunity available to us to
intensify the search for meanings within the interconnected
whole. But there is no venue or leader or guiding principle that
can be trusted to launch such a campaign. Because of our
pragmatic approach to life, we no longer have authentic heroes,
heroes with any transcending relevance, to show us the way
either in parable or deed. We have been reduced to contrived and
orchestrated mass adulation for anti intellectual success icons,
race car drivers and ball players. We seek to mark time with
trivial diversions with no inkling or thought to embarking on a
hero's journey to forge a sustainable new paradigm world view,
or to explore the spirit within. Mankind needs and seeks
to find meaning, but settles for beads and trinkets. It can only
be through widespread thoughtfulness on an individual level,
focusing on things that have intrinsic value, that we can hope
to regain some semblance of authenticity in our lives.