pointing the finger at the power of institutions...

Humans are the weirdo beasts of an unfit species where invention compensates for our weakness... 

We have cornered our future with a makeshift accidental and often brutal evolution of our desires and aspirations. Nature can be brutal too, but we don't have to be more brutish than necessary, though we often are and have been... Warring between ourselves has been a too common trait of our species, way beyond the mere skirmishes between monkeys so to speak. And yet we've thrived. Has our battles toughened up to be who we are?

Our aggressive necessity is somewhat exaggerated dubiously one way and subdued in another by our institutions in which our innate sociopathy lurks to promote and support duplicitous leaders. We define our allegiances and our enemies in this fashion, whether our allegiances are correct or not. In these lots, we often place the known irrelevant and the unknown unattached as friends to promote our numbers — and as enemy combatant to minimise the "risks" of whatever... 
We have thus allowed major institutions to take over our personal humanity — institutions that, for more than 4,000 years of recorded history, have made us part of wonky unsatisfactory systems that to say the least are squarely in the way of a better understanding in peaceful diversity for humanity. But it has worked well enough to take us mostly successfully on a path of orchestrated illusions in a quest of comfortable survival.
This skewed synergy has happened all over the world in various societies in which we, individuals, become culturally entrapped and dependant of... Few of us escape this trap, that is often set because of our enforced need to belong and because of our contradictory interactions, with love and fears. Some of us have had dreams of utopia... and of the journey to get there beyond the restrictions imposed by ownership and furthered by the acceptance of sharing. It is always hard to define how much we need to keep for our self... Relatively, the richer we are, the more we want, individually. It's a self-feeding loop with growth...

There is a major difference between relating to other people and belonging to a group. Relating can give us the individual power of independence without rejecting our species, while belonging can have tendency to make us be owned by the system and to become slaves, intellectually or practically, in one of its many sub-contraptions... Some of us like it... It's comfortable and one does not need to think for one-self... More and more, universities have become technical hubs to learn how to be owed by the system...

In all our gamut of relationship, nothing is ever pure and there are levels at which we may exploit other people for our own benefit, within or outside our group... We will rob them, own them and sometimes destroy them for what we think is either our own improvement or for our safety but this is only an illusion enforced by the system ill-willingly protecting itself while not protecting us from being compromised into deceit and into murder.
But we also love people, within our own prejudicial limits.

The science of the future in which one could dream of a better humanity in this relative universe should present us with ways to extricate ourselves from the ephemeral often inane, though "emotional", frothed up experiences of others — those events that seem to become the standard for all of us by using the lowest denominator in the social order, through the importance attached to news items. We become bamboozled by remote events instead of being wooed by proper ideas and genuine immediate relationships.
The science of the future ends up relying on better gadgets for sale rather than better philosophy — as if our present lot of various thoughts was already at the top of its tree. It's not. We're still in the humming stages of our expression in the lower branches of a tree that is growing faster than we can climb up. But there are many factors, especially "news", fashion and other distractions that stops us from shining beyond the miserable and the pre-munched mundane. 

In our new age of information, "news" has become a most powerful industry — a shitty dictum of glum designed to make us sit on our arse while being outraged — a medium which seems to reinforce our fears, our angst and our prejudices, while making us suckle on a security blanket "that we're safe", despite all the dangers around — because "we are protected by the system". The system reminds us daily that the sky would fall on our head if the system was not there and not to worry because we are insured... Thus rarely goes a glitchless day like those on The Truman Show where all is best in the best of the best bubble, but it's still good morning, good day and good night in our little sphere as we watch disasters somewhere else. 
The ill-informed dictum habit of "news" is like a rope which ties us to the post of habitual comfort, unless we chose to hang ourselves with it in disgust. This news gathering also becomes extended by the system simply spying on its citizens, us.
The Prism revelations are but the tip of an old iceberg of secret deceit against us. The French revolution, the communist saga in the US under Hoover, the witch-hunt in the Salem days — information about citizens has often been used against citizens. The "collaborators" during WWII denounced their neighbours... At first, this could seem to be the exceptions rather than the rule, but with a more powerful denouncing platform hungry for padding a 24/7 news cycle, the news exception has become more and more the rule.
We are trapped into a system that manipulates the purpose of life through this news, in order to suit the controllers of the system — controllers who also become victims though they are major profiteers of the system. It's 1984 with a flexibility we think is freedom, but it's not liberty.

Information used to be controlled by kings and churches, now information is controlled, by and large, by a ruthless bawdy media, drunk with its own power, blasting our senses daily with idiotic crap, all in order to sell us something we don't need, but the system needs you to buy. One could say why not turn it off? But it has permeated our cities with ugliness from posters, traffic lights and sign posts... Imagine a city free of the advertising crap those images that destroy the vistas with pictures of nappies, like sanctioned graffiti. Imagine a space with buildings where there is no regulatory ugly signs telling you where to go... Signs that are presently designed to disfigure the place in order to be noted. You are intelligent enough to turn left in the corridors where beauty is uninterrupted.
Virtual signposts might be the way to go, as long as advertising is banned from public places...

Whether it's finance, religion or patriotism, we are fed like chooks with grains full of this gross purpose, in which the absence of proper meaning is replaced by abundance in what appears to be an unlimited choice of crap.
Through no fault of our own, except having investing our money in gold or gambled in hopes of better returns we tremble as we loose money because some firms we trusted were either badly managed or affected by a global cascade of disasters — a badly managed greed that was designed to promote greed rather than foster improvements in our understanding. 

Actually, philosophical understanding is often in the way of greed... In order for greed to work as it does, it needs a large proportion of us being mugs and losers... Otherwise greed would go on overdrive and cook this planet in a jiffy.
Our level of self-importance is thus controlled by our system-educated personal wants and our manipulated daily habits to believe in things we need... 

In short what I am trying to say here, or the question I want to ask is: can we be more than merchants and consumers? Are we more than merchants and consumers?... The way we are evolving, the answer is clear. Everything we do is related to a merchandising value rather than being formulated to help a better understanding of what we could be. Even our hopes are moneyed. Humans have sidelined themselves as Homo mercantilis... We never became Homo sapiens. Sapiens is still along way off. 
Religion is a merchandising of dubious illusions packaged in unreal and unscientific glitzy paper. Religion, whichever it is, is designed not to understand much nor question anything beyond the dogma, and to fob away the complexity of reality, for money, for power and thus for the creation of submission. There is no power if there is no submission. Submission is a long time established product of the system, in which class and sexism are maintained by the system. In some country, class and gender are strictly controlled with penalties, such as in some Muslim countries, while in the west, due to an illusion of freedom, class and gender are "managed" by news and its derivatives — the glossy magazines. All for a buck.
In the blue corner, the pure philosopher has nothing to sell... Between a merchant and a philosopher, the philosopher looses out. A clever merchant might even be able to re-sell the philosopher's own ideas back to the philosopher, with a bonus set of steak knives or a seat in paradise... 
The merchant will try to call himself/herself a priest...

Governments around the world, under the stress of news and the evolution of greed have had to become powerhouses for merchandising rather than being philosophical units designed to lift us out of this low rent mediocrity.
The dream has been killed by having to count the pennies... The dream has been killed by prayers that vaporise into the void... The dream has been killed by a refusal to understand and accept nature, properly. We become attached to illusions by, let's be fair here, the easy comfortable habits of knowing we're in a mob and that we can buy our right to be in the mob — mostly by paying on credit... 
We will copy others with attention to show we're good mobsters, rather than be original. Even the "art of being original" is often un-originally related to our insecure love-fear relationship with the mob, and we become in awe at the colourful rendition of a chair in a half-sunlit bedroom. Individualism becomes regulated by our thumbs punting on gizmophones... an action that stop us from talking to the person sitting next to us on the bus... We are travelling in the same direction, in different spaces.
Can we do better than this? Is there a need to do better than this considering we are very successful as a sub-loony species? Modern philosophy has been swamped by the tide of greed, presented to us as a need for comfort — or perhaps philosophy does not make sense as we contemplate our navel more than we should. 
More often than not, we loose the thread of our betterment by being influenced or hindered by the variable price of fish — an impediment to our next sets of elevated visions which at times can be too high. 

But we are running out of time in the bio-mechanical framework in which we evolved in. The surface of the planet is limited by its own interactive designs, in which some "improvements can be humanly made" but in reality these improvements are no more than elastic bands that we are stretching further until they snap or recoil with time delay. 
We can be more judicious than this. We should be more judicious that this though we definitely crave the boring with a little twist... Straight boring would annoy us. We're easily fooled and we bore quickly... We need to see or participate in new tricks as long as they are not confronting or not laced with real bio-uncertainty... 
Of course we gamble, but we know the odds, the cost and the reward, and the lure is attractive, and basically the same: money... When the odds are not in our favour or are unknown, we don't want to know and we spend money not to know — many of us bet against knowledge.

In each new generations, there are young people who discover the inadequacies of the system and expose this in various means. The Femen in Germany (and Ukraine) are a case in point, where young women are pushing feminism beyond the intellectual feminism into a new sphere of freedom, in which choices — including those that could appear to be against feminism —  become a new battleground. These people, shaking their tits for freedom, get hammered by older folks because other perceptions enter the skewed equation: the terms of reference are prejudiced by our perceptions of beauty, of youth, of the cold weather that makes bare nipples ache, of dignity and of the welfare payments that support this "annoying" (to some people) freedom...
It could appear to be tacky to parallel the work of say a Germaine Greer and the protests from Femen — but one could compare a dedicated scientists cataloguing the human-induced death-throes of a species, against the green-activists that chain themselves to the first tree to be bulldozed in a pristine forest. The activists will achieve some success on a different level, by making the "news" for being a nuisance to the system — while the scientist's work may not rattle anything and end up in a dusty drawer of a museum.
There is a claim that the Femen movement is undignified and counter-productive to other female movements especially those of women oppressed in the Arab world... But stuff it. Women do it tough there sure, but the Muslim religion is more of an undignified impediment to freedom, while the Femen tits are not undignified since they are a natural part of the human body and only rattle the mind of people in suppressing societies. The slogans are there to challenge the suppressions.
Men of similar gender revolutions may now dream of being an X factor or a Voice or be warriors with super gizmos only found in video games and drone consoles... In the past they may have dreamt of being in a rock-band or being captain Kirk on "the Enterprise" to suddenly realise the trick of the illusion, when the actor who played the dude now looks fat and old... 

The Misogynist speech by Julia Gillard should have shaken our prejudices beyond doubt but even if it did then for a fleeting moment, now, after the initial shock of liberality, many of us, especially some women, have gone to condemn the speech as an opportunistic rant, when it was a real cry from the heart. It suits some of us to dismiss it because our system of preservation needs the certainty of prejudicial order and shopping habit. Our usefulness and social positions were challenged beyond our measured acceptance by this fantastic speech. We also forget that the speech was a proper response to a stupid parliamentary challenge by a misogynist neocon — Abbott... 
Eventually, comes a time when our usefulness to ourselves and to the system becomes nil. Our inbuilt obsolescence takes over and we become 'a burden" to the system. We are not able to care for ourselves. And the system cares for us with so much love that we are not allowed to kill ourselves. Thus our mind is regressing into another space, alien to the present and takes refuge in a more and more distant past, until they place us in a pine box, with a sigh or a fanfare according to the number of our friends.

All our decided problems, including the silly concept of the original sin, could stem from the inexorable shift of our individual life towards oblivion, in a universe we guess has a much longer time-span... Most of what we think is related to this dichotomy we see as an unfortunate annoying discrepancy. Having a life without a further pay-off seems unfair. We are jealous of the age of the universe, thus we invented eternity. But we totally mucked up this interesting illusion with a high-valued prize balanced against a dire punishment, to make sure we would be a mob player. 
Meanwhile, the system sells us painkillers and guns, while stealing our secrets to know if we're really a fully-paid member of the mob.

It's great to be alive, painless and free...

Gus Leonisky


see also: http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist