It has come to my attention that we as a society need to make some very important changes in the way we are living. We live in a material world that is built on the institutions of money, property, and prestige. We are conditioned to focus on how we measure up to such societal standards and to neglect our very own well being. We lack balance, and our poor health as individuals reflects our poor health as a community. Our well being is dependant on our various aspects of our health, many of which are neglected due to our busyness in pursuit of material objects. Spirituality is something that we seem to be lacking, yet the spirituality that is present is separated from the rest of our lives. As a society, we seem to think it necessary to keep our spiritual lives separate from our social lives, thus causing harm to both aspects, according to our including social media expert toronto. We are self-centered as a society and on the individual level, in a sense that is detrimental to our race and life as a whole. We seem to find it difficult to share our healthy behaviors with others around us, whether it be spiritual health, or other aspects of our health. On the other hand, we tend to promote unhealthy behaviors in each other. These problems stem from the fact that we have very little sense of community and a warped system of morality.
Our morality is based on the materialistic aspects of life, and the rest is left to moral relativism. Living in a society that is increasingly dependent on government, we tend to look to the government for laws. The basic idea being that, rather than exploring ourselves and discovering morals as they relate to our lives and experiences, we look to government to have our morals imposed on us by the elected officials. The individual has become so used to having a government around to decide right and wrong, we are left with little to have to decide for ourselves. We begin to believe that if it isn’t illegal, it must not be wrong. The very idea of this is absurd, let alone the idea that 250 million people (in the United States) would allow a collection of corrupt politicians decide how they will live. It is the easy way out. To throw our hands up in the air and say “well, I’m not qualified to decide what’s right and wrong, I should leave it up to the professionals”. We depend on government to decide for us, because in order to discern right and wrong for ourselves, we would then have no excuse not to follow the rules. When we define what we believe to be wrong, we must swallow our pride in order to continue doing what we consider wrong. We must either become hypocrites or mend our ways.
I have experienced in my own life many of the negative aspects of our society, as well as many of the positive aspects. I have found that the two aren’t very different, at least to me. If one fully devotes oneself to either, then it seems to work out just as well either way. We have a tendency to believe, in either situation, that all is well, regardless of whether or not it really is. My contention is that one can work on oneself until the end of time, but if one is still living in a dysfunctional society, progress will be limited. As Studs Terkel said, “how could you be raised in garbage and not stink of it?” I believe our society to be dysfunctional, which is the cause of our dysfunction on the individual level, and it I don’t think that it will be long before we as a society do ourselves in, taking others down in our fall as well.
Our society is plagued with many problems. We recognize these problems, a step in the right direction; however, we seem to overlook the fact that there is a common cause behind these problems, and until that cause is dealt with, we are going to continue to be plagued by problems of increasing urgency and quantity. The old saying says that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, yet we continue to exert so much of our time and energy on solving these problems, just to find that more problems keep arising. These recurring problems seem to stem from the same cause, and still society as a whole doesn’t acknowledge this. Problems such as high crime rates, low moral standards, drug abuse, prostitution, rape, suicide, and abortion are just some of those that we are dealing with today. Others that have sprung up on a global scale include overpopulation, the failing state of the environment, and the extinction of many different species. There have been many problems that have come and gone, often resembling those that are present today, but the overall status seems to remain the same. People are too concerned with working against the individual problems, rather than dealing with the dysfunction that these problems stem from. We have so many different activist groups that are determined to take on these problems, one by one. The dysfunction that is tearing us apart includes the very fundamentals upon which our society is built, such as the establishment of property and power, our control over nature, and our lack of community-oriented lifestyles.
Our establishment of power and property seems to be one of the biggest causes of our problems in society today. Unlike any other society, and unlike any form of wildlife, we have decided that certain parts of the world are property. We even for a period of time labeled fellow human beings as property. It is appalling that while we were able to so quickly understand that human beings are not property, we still haven’t admitted, as a society, that there is nothing in the universe that should be property. It all belongs to the Universe, as do we. We must recognize that what we have is a gift, and it is to be embraced with gratitude, rather than assuming that we earned anything, and that because we earned these things we can and should take them for granted and deem them “ours”. We have placed it in our power to take various parts of nature as our own, denying others the right to make use of those resources that were meant for all of us. The establishment of property is not only counterproductive to individual wellness, but it is also detrimental to society as a whole. To look at it from a political standpoint, one would think that socialism would counteract the establishment of property, and that in effect would make it an ideal form of government. Well the downfall of any form of economy in our society, in my opinion, doesn’t lie in the way it deals with the distribution of this property, but merely the fact that property is still an institution. Capitalism reigns in our society because it gives individuals the ability to amass property and therefore assert power. Those who have the property and power are inherently going to control the government. Those in control are surely not going to work to change the system that got them where they are in society. So, in defense, they push down other economic systems to protect their own property and power. Following the trend of the society from they were spawned, the capitalists pushed down and forced conformity upon any system that didn’t follow their example. Just as capitalism does this to other economic systems, our system of totalitarian agriculture does this to all other forms of living. It is the form of self-defense that wages war on the competition, rather than allowing for healthy competition, allowing the individual to choose what works best for him/her. The fact that nature thrives on diversity shows this system to be unhealthy for both the society and the individual.
The establishment of property goes hand in hand with our practice of totalitarian agriculture. We as a society believe that the earth was made for us, and that we are free to do what we want with it, no matter what harm comes to the earth or even to ourselves. We take control over the productivity of the land and soil, determining for ourselves what and how much “should” be produced. This is explained by the story of Genesis. We lived in paradise, but we ate from the forbidden tree. The fruit of this tree was the knowledge of good and evil, the knowledge of what is to die and what is to live. We took these decisions into
our own hands, saying, “We eat wheat, we will let it live, and we will clear land to ensure that it has room to thrive. We have no use for the bugs that eat our wheat, so we will exterminate them”. Our practice of agriculture forced us to spend all of our time working to ensure the production of food. Before agriculture, we ate what God provided us with, and all was well. We labor under the assumption that, if we do not force the earth to produce, she will not produce. We have populated the world to a point where earth cannot support us without being raped. We maximize production, only to see the population continue to rise. It won’t be long before agriculture can no longer supply us with what we need to survive as a society, yet we continue to increase production. Each year for the last hundred centuries, we’ve increased production, only to see another increase in population. We make more to feed everyone, yet every year there are the have-nots who go hungry, and the haves, that have an overabundance. In a system of property, where we take it upon ourselves to decide what is fair and what isn’t, we’ve made it so that those who don’t work to ensure that the earth will produce “enough” go hungry, while those who do so are rewarded with too much.
Our society has long neglected to give the individual what is necessary to survive. Our individual wellness includes three different aspects: mental, physical, and social. In the modern age of working for a living, our wellness is often neglected, or at least unbalanced. It is necessary to have a well-rounded level of fitness, yet this is uncommon in our society. We must spend our time laboring in this system to provide what we need to merely survive physically, and often we neglect the other aspects of our wellness. We are not well rounded, and often once our mental fitness begins to suffer, the remaining aspects of wellness tend to follow. When any one aspect of our fitness is neglected, it keeps us from reaching our potential in the other areas. People in our society tend to find an aspect of their wellness that is most appealing to them, and they work solely on that aspect. We don’t have time for all three aspects; we spend all of our time working. Most of the industries, businesses, and careers in our present society tie back into agriculture, or are at least supported by those who work to feed themselves. Our society is bent around providing the population with food, and we have gotten way out of hand with it. Why do we need such an elaborate system to keep our people fed? People labor themselves to death just to provide themselves with nutrition and some material comfort. All of this labor focused on providing, and little time is left to work on us. We are slaves to a society, and we ourselves are the slave drivers.
In effect, being slaves to this society, we have little time to work on what is necessary for us to work on. There is no time to live when we are fighting to stay alive, and that usually consists of working to feed ourselves and, in effect, the rest of the group. Throughout the years, life has lost many of the things that once held this society together, such as family and community togetherness, morals, and respect. It isn’t because evil people came along through the years and degraded these things, or that people decided that they liked it this way better. This was inevitable. With such an increasing population, and a growing segment of that population which can not or will not support itself, we must work harder and harder to keep things going. Society has grown immensely. There are jobs that no one could’ve imagined thirty years ago which some people make careers out of. Life isn’t about living anymore, it is about making a living. We have such an intricate system set up to govern our people, and that alone provides approximately five million jobs in the United States alone. This form of government is set up to show us what to do, what not to do, and punish us for breaking the rules. We are constantly showed what is “wrong,” yet people continue to break the law, get arrested, go to jail, and possibly even be put to death. People wonder why there is such a high crime rate if everyone knows that these things are wrong. Well the problem is that people don’t know that these things are wrong. They know that these things are illegal, but that doesn’t make it wrong, especially if they don’t get caught. If we taught our people how to discern right from wrong, we wouldn’t need to punish them for doing wrong. They either wouldn’t do what was wrong, or they would do it and then, on their own, face up to the consequences. This is because in a system in which everyone has a common set of values and morals, unlike our system, people immediately accept the responsibility of facing the consequences of their actions before they have even acted. In our society, there is no one around to teach a child that drugs are bad and teach them why they are bad. All kids hear is “JUST SAY NO!” Well, what do you think that kid is going to say if he hasn’t learned that drugs are bad by the time he is offered his first hit off a joint? He’ll say, “What the fuck were those guys talkin’ about? From now on, it’s ‘Just Say Hell Yeah!'” Maybe down the road from his own trials and tribulations, he’ll learn that drugs are bad, and he’ll wonder, “Why didn’t I believe ’em?” He didn’t believe them because they didn’t teach him. They told him.
It truly takes a village to raise a child, and our village is to big and to busy. So what happens if we continue the way we are going? People will continue to go about life, making a living, and neglecting their own health. Push yourself to an early grave, because at least then the work will be over. A lucky few find something appealing, something that catches their eye, something to believe in. Those lucky few find the will to live and a reason to seek peace of mind while pulling off the whole “work” thing. Well, I suppose I’ll be one of those lucky few, and I wish to make myself happy by teaching others, and if the best teacher is example, well by God I better get to work on myself.