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Our culture of 'personal competitive elitism'
Our culture produces elitist thinking at an early age, and it has come back to haunt us.
Date: 12/23/2006 12:16:39 PM ( 18 y ) ... viewed 1892 times
I feel a strong need to post/blog today about our culture of competitive elitism, not about the higher-up Elites, but ordinary people, the citizenry, who has become 'mins-elitists' in their own worlds.
We place such a hig value on star power, on heros, and we even adore the wealthiest people like they are our saviors, and indeed some of the wealthy actually believe it, but without having the responsibility that should go with that.
There are all sorts of re-inforcing behaviors for this elitism, things like LOTTERIES, and competitiveness in the workplace. From day one we are given "our toys", and the kid with the most gets the best friends. Most, best, have, get, hold, share only when you have extra - these are the mantras of our children!!
We have all this competitiveness and elitism going on, and then we wonder why we have the social problems we do:
- Its not mystery that homelessness has something to do with these bigger houses being built, and even restrictions on minimum size for new homes - if smaller houses were the norm, then housing would be cheaper, and the poor could afford it. Duh.
- Lottery winners get the loudest cheers as the prize gets bigger - a $2.4Billion prize was handed out in Italy this week, and it was broadcast around the world. That money would have been enough to make a huge difference in about 240,000 people's lives by winning just $100,000. {or at least 1000 people winning 2.4million]. I would like to see a limit on lotto prizes of $100,000 as a way to begin to fix the problem of concentrated wealth, at least as something that people see as 'okay'.
- Bigger Cars - what evil kind of thinking is it when people who have enough money insist on getting biggest cars because they are safer in an accident? Think of those sharing the roads, driving smaller cars - are their lives not worth as much? What about the fact that the bigger cars do the damage, and if both vehicles were small there would be less serious crashes? This is pure and plain elitism at work, and it is not good for society.
I could go on and on with examples, and I might add to that list later as a way to show just how wrong elitism is in a civil society.
Instead, I need to say that these kinds of behaviors, and the re-inforcement s that we are all subject to that develop our thinking along these lines, is anti-social. In that, we are a sick society. The symptoms are evident all around us.
The reason we have been led down this path is , of course, capitalism. The Economics of Capitalism dictates that having wealthy people to do the investing is good for society, other wise there would be no investment, no progress. That is not aniron clad truth though - did Chinese or Russian society have no progress without the private wealthy investors? When nobody else does it, governments are generally able to do it, and when they do there is not a lot of wealth going to one person as a result. That makes it BETTER for society than when private wealthy people start up industries, ets.
On the ground, we have addicts who may be people who did not stand up to the comptetition, who knew from the start [grade school] that they did not have the right stuff for success, perhaps due to learning disabilities, health issues, or physical impariments. Sure, there are many examples of disadvantaged people making it big, but they must have something special going on that not everybody has. For those without any competition drive, success is just a thought. Do we just discard those people? After all, isn't it a good thing, beautifull in its own way, that they are "not disposed" to competition?
We have poor people, and economics of capitalism dictates that there MUST be a class of poor people, possibly just for the cheap labour they provide for the wealth investors. "The Poor have allways been a great source of wealth" is not just a quote from Rockerfeller types, [was it pappa Rockerfeller himself who said that?], it is a way of life, a philosophy of economics. It is ensured by policy.
Today more than ever, it is obvious that our elected governments are selected, controlled, and supported by corporate culture. What is good for the masses is not what the agenda is. The agenda of every modern democratic government in the western hemisphere is to make wealthy people happy, because they put those elected officials into power, and they have ways to take them out of power if need be. Nevermore obvious than with the Bush government, catering to the Elites can take on seriously evil tones.
The example of invading Iraq so the oil will be under OPEC control is one of the most eveil act of these kids of governments. The acceptance of this invasion by the American people, at first, tells a lot about the kind of society we have. They were thinking about having global domination, and what great prosperity that would bring to them personally. They were thinking about having enough gasoline for their needs.
They were thinking about being safe from terrorists, for their personal safety [it turns out this was a farce, there never was much of a threat after 9/11, which was apparently done at the request of the Bush-Cheney cabal]as if the rights of all the Iraqis was 2nd to American safety, despite the fact that so many MORE Iraqis would die fromthe invasion than Americans would die from terrorism.
This is elitism too - "my right to live is bigger than your right to live". That kind of thinking can only come from a group of people who are utterly into themselves, a view that was taught to them in their early years by the competitive-driven society with a capitalist economy.
No human has more right to live than any other human, but we have not shown that we believe that by our elitism. That shows how far we have gone down this road, and there is no doubt that we must start to change the behaviors that promote this personal elitism.
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