We are the victims of ourselves.
Culture is made up of individual action. We could choose different. So far, we've chosen (collectively) status quo.
I choose to see it that the "system" is not optimal, and it is often unjust. But I refuse to see myself as a victim. I recognize that I can opt out quite a bit, and I could opt out entirely but so far I make the choice to stay in for a variety of reasons.
I look around and I see a society that, despite all its problems, gives people the freedom to live in a commune (and some do) or as the Amish do (and some do). We *are* free to opt out. Most people just still want their car and television and private house and all the trappings. And the cost of wanting that sort of life is taxes, a work schedule, and all the system brings with it.
The fact is, if enough people opted out and changed their lifestyle, the system would collapse and culture would change. We keep it as it is- a system based on inequality and dehumanization.
Yes, we are free to do quite a bit, but it is difficult to opt out entirely. I suppose in some ways I am just stubborn and bitter about the complex reality that I find myself in. Although there is freedom, I don't yet feel free enough, and beyond that there are powerful forces that impinge on not just my personal freedom, but as I see it, the ability of anyone to experience high levels of and a high qulaity of freedom.
I also refuse to be a victim, but it's not simple. Perhaps it seems like it's just a matter of personal willpower, just a matter of saying "I don't want to be exploited," or "I want to live this particular way, because it is more free," but I've not found it to be so. My personal experience is that, at a young age, I was separated from my family for long hours of the day and thrust into a completely different social setting where children were shepherded and penned, coralled by a few adults who tried to impose some premeditated order through games and nap time. Later, it became reading and writing exercises, and then math and science; still later, it became full-scale indocrination into a system of behavior and traditions, as well as a certain (boring!) version of history, as well as a certain set of expectations of what life was to be: career, striving, saving money and making sound investments, taking vacations, observing certain strange holidays, and upholding all manner of insincere social obligations, followed by retirement.
I went along with it for a while. What choice did I have? This was the life that confronted me, and its messages were contradictory, complicated, and seemed to grate against some essential part of me. With the information I was receiving about the world, that essential part of me was irrelevant and had no place, so I began to see it as a flaw that ran through my being and should be conditioned out. But why was it so difficult to condition out? Why did this feeling of being overwhelmed, at odds, cheated, this feeling of something being not right with my daily reality not go away? Why these persistent feelings of alienation and irritability, this deeply-running sense that I was different and could not be fixed? Yet I didn't have time to introspect, or the time that I did have wasn't enough, and the track of education/indoctrination swept me along, and I was very unhappy.
Is this my fault? Is it any child's fault that they don't fit into the artificial construct that is society? Where can they turn to fit in, what are the alternatives for them if the standard education route is not serving them? There are none. You get along. You ride it out.
And then it spits you out into college, or not. And you end up with a degree or a certificate and a pat on the back and have to go get a job. But the jobs are all meaningless, and nothing quite caters to your skills or interests, because you don't know what they are, because you never got to develop them because you had to spend too much time reciting the pledge of allegiance and taking geometry and algebra and chemistry and not enough time in art classes and the art classes you took were all technique and no heart. There's no faith in the education system because it is a bunch of unrelated hour-long compartments that you shuffle through in a day, and none of them connect together very much, and some are interesting to you, but most aren't, and it's hard to relate very much to this institution that is supposed to be educating and shaping you, preparing you for "life," and then one day when you are about 16 or 17 you wake up a little bit and realize, while walking over some cracked pavement where weeds are growing through the cracks and there's an empty plastic bottle and some string and a candy wrapper all flopped there on the sidewalk like who cares, you realize that
this is life, this is life, the life you are living is now and in this strange cracked concrete landscape and it's wonderful in an ugly, raw way, but you are so unfamiliar with it because you've been cooped up in schools and institutions for 12 years or more. And that's just kind of a prelude, because once you've graduated from all that school, that same oddly polluted reality is still waiting for you, stretching out in front of you, and you have to find an apartment and a job and pay bills and there's really not much time to stop and think about why, but you do when you can and it's frustrating and sad, and you get really tired, but you are resilient, too, and somehow, after a while, things aren't quite as difficult, but by that time it seems like the world is falling apart, or it already has, and there's this clamor about how we have to fix it...
pardon me if I sound like a pathetic victim. I know I'm much more fortunate than many, and I am thankful for that. And I know that we are powerful people and we can act and create change, but see, part of my deal and part of how I make change is by telling this story about this pathetic old world that got sidetracked and started putting up high-rise hotels and cranking out glitzy glamour magazines and telling people that they must work harder because of the nazis or the communists or that they should work harder because one day they will retire or they should work harder and buy more because what the terrorists want is for us to give up and stop consuming. Part of my action plan is not whining, but painting this raw vision of how irritatingly complacent and stupid and trite the american way can seem to its youth: the beatniks of the '50s, the '60s hippies, the punks of the '80s, those nihilistic gen x'ers from the '90s; and by comparison i imagine how difficult and frustrating and unfair life in this system might seem for someone who was called negro, for an indian on a modern-day reservation who is trying to navigate two worlds, for a black kid in the ghetto where education is even worse than my pathetic story, where the way to rise above seems to be to have a certain pair of shoes, or to get a basketball scholarship, or join the army, or sell drugs.
yeah i paint bleak pictures sometimes, and i don't give much credit to the american system. why should i? there are enough people out there who are already singing that jingle. i tell my story... i relate to those who have come before me and around me now who feel dissatisfied and who feel personally violated and like they have been done a huge disservice, as if life itself has been truncated, stunted, stripped of color and complex layers of meaning.
i say my piece. it's part of the change i want to see in the world.
peace,
pathless
...and so you also see, i would not make it in an amish community. commune... that i might have to try sometime.