Shop Till We Drop

"Unless you are prepared to give up something valuable you will never be able to truly change at all, because you'll be forever in the control of things you can't give up."

— Andy Law
Creative Company

"After living with their dysfunctional behavior for so many years (a sunk cost if ever there was one), people become invested in defending their dysfunctions rather than changing them."

— Marshall Goldsmith
Mojo

We are highly adjustable creatures...highly mutable!

We Morph...we shift...we slide, and finally we adapt.

Like a flock of Sparrows we tilt with the ephemeral winds of Fashion.

Our brains are Neuro-Plastic!

As human beings we can be shaped...molded, and it is this capability which can become our greatest strength.

It is important to understand this new reality of neurological science, as our emerging conscious awareness of ourselves both individually and collectively continues to gain momentum across the globe in line with the Web's growth around the planet.

We are shifting as you read this...bending and creating change amongst ourselves and within society in subtle, imperceptible ways and ultimately...we are Evolving.

Considering the woeful state of our societies and the distressed, diseased health of ourselves and the Earth generally,perhaps it is time for us to consider a new 'Shift' of direction, a healthier direction, one which involves 'Consciously
Evolving'.

In order to expedite such a 'SHIFT', we need to examine where we are going wrong, in other words we need to become consciously aware of the reasons for our ill-health.

Our Society is a Consumer-based society so perhaps we can begin there.

Consumerism and our Society's belief that owning 'things', especially with the right label, gives us added importance or status is a prime example of a primitive delusion.

What we possess as material possessions has absolutely nothing to do with who we are...Ultimately who and what we are, and our worth as humans can in actuality never be found outside of you and can only ever be found on the inside, but try telling Donald Trump that!

Oscar Wilde said this on the topic :
"Private property... has led individualism entirely astray. It has made gain not growth its aim. So that man thought that the important thing was to have, and did not know that the important thing is to be. The true perfection of man lies, not in what man has, but in what man is."

Our Society's values have become unhinged from humanity's concerns and they are now easier to turn off than a Phone-App, and society's commercially driven delusions are making us ILL...

I'm tired of seeing human beings running around like headless chickens in pursuit of the latest whatever...

I'm so tired of seeing people treated like 'less than', due to economic circumstances.

Pulled up in a Ferrari? and you're double-parked outside because time is money? "Well then step right this way Sir!"

Let me ask you this :

Do you think that it is even conceivable that a Corporation can still run its business in a decent, ethical manner in today's economic climate?

Can a Corporation still be decent 'people'?

"Sorry Frank...Look, I realise you have been with us for most of your life, and that you have a family to support, with Katey and the boys, and oh yes of course you have Mr Kwatsch Senior to look after as well now...but well, we have had to tighten the ole belt again.

You see the overheads are just crippling us this year...

And what with the new roll-outs in Asia, and all of the exciting new developments that are coming on-line, I'm afraid we'll have to let you go"

Ultimately I don't believe so, not in this type of Economy today as they have to compete for Profit against their ruthless competitors otherwise they go under and cease to exist.

The perfect example given to me by the brilliant Jacque Fresco is that of someone who goes into a local Lighting and Fixtures shop to buy a lamp.

The business owner knows perfectly well what the customer has described, and he also knows that his competitor across the road has precisely that particular type...

But do you think that the businessman would ever say so?

Tell his customer that his opposition, his competitor across the road has a better range and has that particular model?

No...He will try and sell his lamps ; "I have the perfect thing! Step this way!" etc., ad nauseum.

A business has to use deception and subterfuge in one form or another, or lie outright otherwise they don't make a profit in a dog-eat-dog world.

The far-sighted H.G.Wells once said : "Advertising is legalised lying"...

So our Economic System actually encourages dishonesty.

It fosters a lack of decency, integrity, humanity, and as for ethics?

They were summarily dismissed and began disappearing from day one.

Here is a simple test that you can perform : try and think of the 5 or 10 largest Corporations who have an influence on your life...OK?

Now name 1, just 1 Corporation which hasn't tried to deceive you about contract options or exit agreements, or hasn't robbed you financially in some incremental way, or which hasn't blatantly lied to you by way of omission, or about what a product contained...kind of hard to name 1 isn't it?

In the last 5 decades or so, we as Humans have accepted a gradual erosion of ethics and civil liberties, brought about by our Corporate Masters, those who make the shiny baubles we consume...

This erosion is a form of structural violence, and it's slowly killing us.

Consider the fact that the Apple Corporation's chief manufacturer, after an increasing number of tragic suicides at the plant, chose to install nets between the buildings to stop jumpers rather than remedy the cause of their employees' obvious suffering...

It was the Cheaper alternative which naturally prevailed.

Now that was jolly 'decent' of them wasn't it?

So much nicer than seeing those awful messy stains on the sidewalk which needed to be cleaned constantly...

Now consider the travesty, the absolute obscenity of Economic slavery in privatized prisons!

Remember Christian morality?

That has gone the way of the dinosaur also...

All gone or going fast, and we are either too busy as slaves to the Economic system, or we have become too inured, conditioned and blinded by the light to speak up and say anything in protest!

We have become so conditioned to consume, purchase, go shopping, buy something to make yourself feel better, that if a product is cheap or reasonably priced, we assume that the more expensive version is better for us.

Cheap equates with poor quality in our conditioned brains even though we know that money is just an abstract and arbitrary measure...a contrived, concocted scheme still being perpetrated and maintained by the enormous Banking families of old with the same old scam of fractional reserve banking and rigged interest rates.

Allan Watts the great Zen Author and Spiritualist once said on this topic :

"Money is something of the same order of 'reality' as inches, grams, meters, pounds or lines of latitude and longitude. It is an abstraction. It is a method of book keeping to obviate the cumbersome procedures of barter. But our culture, our civilization is entirely hung up on the notion that money has an independent reality of its own.”

This commercial obsession is naturally also reflected in our language : "What a Cheapskate!".

Our brains need deprogramming desperately...

Our crazy mixed up, topsy-turvy Kulture needs a REBOOT!

We need a Social Rebirth...

Desperately...

Our Role-Models...our Captains of Industry...our Success stories all contain the same contaminant...Money.

But where are our scientific, intellectual and artistic Role-models?

They have been marginalized, they are the also-rans and now all fit into the
same neat category of 'human interest' stories...

"And Now that we have covered the main news-makers and shakers of the day, we move onto a lovely and fascinating story about an Art exhibit at the local Shopping Plaza..."

Or.."And for our final segment today, hold onto your hats because oh boy, you won't believe your eyes when you see what some people can do with string..."

And yet our CEOs, the heads of our 1% are invariably; duplicitous, back-stabbing, conniving, cheating, lying Corporate sociopaths and psychopaths!

They have to be otherwise they don't make the grade, as without these attributes they would never be able to reach such lofty ivory towers.

A Neurological study was carried out recently with the co-operation of a selection of these CEOs.

The results were really quite revealing!

It found that a great majority of those who volunteered to have their brains scanned with Positronic Emission Tomography appeared to lack a section within the part of the brain called the Pineal gland, which is devoted to Empathy, or if it existed, it was very minimal, minuscule and barely visible.

From the Scientific American article on the subject

A lack of Empathy is a prime marker for someone who exhibits psychopathic
behavior.

And this is what we should look up to?...this is the behavior we should aspire to emulate???

Is Donald Trump seriously the best we can produce, the best of us?

Is he seriously worthy of becoming our Fearless Leader in our deluded, hedonistic, materialistic society?

With the emergence of Donald Trump as President, America has arrived at the shores of the hyperbolic extreme, the ludicrously, bizarrely eccentric...like visitors from a nearby planet, cousins, but evolved under different climactic conditions, where the atmosphere was a rich, moist soup of carbon emissions, where extreme conditions of Hyper-Commercialism flourished, a toxic variety which invariably leads to the mushrooming of larger than life figures, like Disney characters in a 5th Avenue parade, and to a glittering, fairy-tale world of brain-washed inequality and hypnotized Consumerism, all built on the backs of an Economic serfdom.

In today's candy-colored, schizoid world if you want to become a success in Life we are told to study the successful, learn their tricks...

So we'll have to all make sure that we look out for Donald Trump's next Autobiographically ghost-written book which will no doubt be released soon...they say his working title is:

"Why I am so Great, and why You aren't!!!"

~ Subtitled ; 'Let Me count the ways'.

Sick values fashion sick people who create a sick, sick World...

This all makes me totally ambivalent about our prognosis...

On the one hand we have enormous potential for advancement, and we have the know-how to end this critical malaise and create a far better world for ourselves by building a Resource Based Economy, if we can only grasp it, and yet on the other hand I see a withered, harrowing, depleted future with great populations of people suffering more than we have ever witnessed previously.

If 'We' i.e everyone in the Western, Capitalist world took a guided, clinically-approved, 24 hour trip on Psychedelics we 'might' have a chance of waking up, and seeing our consumer culture siren-songs to 'go shopping' and 'buy-buy-buy' for what they are...an insidious infestation, a cult-like, brain-washing exercise which ultimately leads to our own demise, brought to us tonight,

by the Fabulous House of "YouKnowWho"...

You know, the utterly greedy and ruthless Corporate Overlords who are enslaving us and who are destroying our Earth!

Unfortunately this is a highly improbable event.