Renewable Revolution

I first encountered McLuhan as an undergraduate in communication back during the last ice age. Interesting to be reminded how he anticipated the implications of then-technological changes, when at the time it read, at least to be, as improbable nonsense.

This writer is addressing themes that occur to me, but which are too elusive for me to be competent to write about. One of the attributes of getting older being the you see your own ignorance in sharp relief.

RE: INTO THE MAELSTROM: HOW THE HYPERCONNECTED AGE IS TEARING US APART

Surly,

In the above, otherwise well written, article, there is a problem of perception that I first ran into in college when I was taking Social Sciences at Miami Dade Junior College (1965) shortly after I left West Point.

We were assigned to read a book (The Lonely Crowd) that you may have read, although I am certain the right wing 'greed is good' fanatics that frequent this site have never heard of it, no matter how much college or education they claim to have.

The Lonely Crowd is a 1950 sociological analysis by David Riesman, Nathan Glazer, and Reuel Denney. It is considered, along with White Collar: The American Middle Classes, written by Riesman's friend and colleague, C. Wright Mills, a landmark study of American character.[1]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lonely_Crowd

I read it. I did NOT just read the Cliff Notes. Beyond the snippet I just gave you from wikipedia, I did not review the book I read so many years ago to impress anybody here. I am responding to the article because that instantly retrieved "The Lonely Crowd" out of long term storage in my memory banks.

Here's the deal, Surly. A person is either driven by outside influences (peer pressure) or he is not. Yes, we all have a mixture of influences, both from without, and from within, that govern our behavior. But the ASSUMPTION that we are invariably governed by peer pressure is only valid if peer pressure ALWAYS overrides personal principles. Now, those Social Darwinst fascists at the helm of the media corporations that want to control our every whim probably believe that.

I do not. And you should not. A shi t sandwich disguised as a chocolate chip cookie is still a shi t sandwich, even if 40,000 bought and paid for bullshit artists are telling you otherwise.

What this boils down to is perception. The media fascists are attempting, as our gooberment and happy talk propaganda based social institutions have ALWAYS been trying to do (SEE: The Lonely Crowd), the "join the in crowd" con. They want us to feel "left out" if we do not do what "everybody else is doing".

But you and I know that everybody else is NOT "doing that". The polling of the American public makes it CRYSTAL CLEAR that they are on the right side of almost every issue of importance and value to an egalitarian socialist type government structure.

AND, most people, except for the allegedly big brained right wingers (like some who post here, who claim most people in the USA are ignorant rubes that swallow any bullshit, no matter how much it harms their best interests - how convenient for the right wing profit over people and planet Capitalist bastards.), DO REALIZE they are being handed a daily SHI T sandwich by the media and the gooberment.

Yeah, divide and conquer is what is going on. Yeah, they want to tear us apart. Yeah, they want to use the PERCEPTION (totally FALSE, but very convincing through bought and paid for repetition) that people who are guided by principle and not by the mob are outliers (i.e. anti-American/anti-Capitalist/Communists, etc. ad nauseum).

True, we all want to belong. But anyone who is willing to sacrifice their principles in order to "belong" is part of the problem, not part of the solution.

The article gives way to much weight to our need for peer group acceptance and ZERO weight to every average human's daily objective analysis of what is genuinely good for an individual and the society that he lives in (i.e. PRINCIPLED behavior).

I am not a Maslow robot. If the author believes that we humans, who certainly do possess base instincts that can, under certain conditions, be manipulated to our detriment and some bastard's profit (i.e. Capitalism), CANNOT function in any other way (i.e. Social Darwinsm is IT), then I must protest.

Social Darwinsim is NOT "IT". Maslow is NOT "IT".

We behave on principle or we perish. That is not hard to understand unless a person deliberately refuses to value principles because they deliberately refuse to give any value to morality based behavior. The book I read in college, The Lonely Crowd, TOTALLY missed the issue of principle. I said so then, even though I was an atheist at the time! LOL!

Yeah, I know Surly; I'm an outlier.