It’s no shocker that you can look around you and see an unlimited supply of shallow lives and shallow interactions. Shallow people doing the same little things day in and day out, complaining about their situation, and their redundancy, meanwhile holding onto it like a child holds a teddybear in the middle of a storm.
We’ve culturally lost our creativity. No one innovates a damn thing anymore. If you want to be ‘new’ and ‘in-style’, you go to the mall to buy the mass- produced cargo pants that everyone else bought yesterday and pick up the latest in mass-produced music. You eat the food you saw on a commercial the night before and you get in the car that you bought because it was the #1 rated something-or-other for the best financing price. You paid your down payment on a snazzy-looking credit card whose interest rate is an order of magnitude greater than that of your financing plan. You drove your new car off the lot, plugged in your mass-produced cd, and promptly sat at a stoplight amidst 50 perfect clones of you, sitting in their car, with their cd, and their cargo pants.
Everyone who brings up this argument bitches about everyone being the same, bitchmoan bitchsomemore moan bitch moan bitch. Yeah, that is annoying as all hell, but it’s NOT THE PROBLEM. The problem is that we’re obedient consumers. We are users. We consume, and use, products that other people make. That other people design. That other people create. And we create nothing ourselves.
Every successful period of history, in any culture, was spawned from a burst in creativity. The Egyptians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Chinese, the Germans, and even the Americans have clear-as-day examples of flourishing culture at different points in history. And it didnt have to do with what shoes they wore or what pants were on sale. It had to do with people doing something more than just follow the readily-available mass-trend. Creating things, on a personal level, has always been the turnkey for cultural growth.
Individual creativity has been a well-documented basis of honor in cultures since the greek times. The romans were also notorious for their well- roundedness, where a skilled fighter would also be encouraged as a musician, and an actor, and a philosopher. The builder who could not also sing was taught to feel that he was dishonoring themself, and thus his culture, for not holding a greater breadth of ability.
This spirit carried on to the renaissance, and fueled the expansion of the world that established the Americas. Historical figures like Thomas Jefferson and Winston Churchill held the stature of self-creativity, often in the name of self-honor, high for the world to see. They promoted the spirit of self- improvement for its own sake – to honor the ability we have to learn and to grow.
Somewhere in the late 1800′s and the 1900′s, we chipped off our renaissance- based beliefs in learning broad talents and decided to specialize. This became an historically-swift transition that has now placed us into corporatism. The only “innovation” is done by corporations, for the sake of profit, on the largest scale that can be accomodated. The motivation for action in our corporatist culture is profit, and profit is much more attainable by a corporation than it is by an individual.
I wager to say that this corporatism is dwindling the spirit of the individual. The definition of ‘individual’ has even changed in this period of time. It once had a primary meaning (in terms of a culture) of an unique and exceptional person. Now, it has been chopped short to simply mean a single person. The personality has been stripped from the person. The creativity and uniqueness has been stripped from the individual. The remainder is a consumer body that buys and uses the mass-produced products in large disposable quantities, keeping the corporations in the highest possible profit margin.
The modern-day individual is not encouraged to make the means to think or act creatively, unless they are doing so for the benefit of their employer. There is no honor found in bettering oneself. There is no honor in anything but servitude to the corporatist structure. In turn, the concept of honor is being lost in the daily lives of our culture. It is being slowly killed off for the sake of the bottom dollar. We have dishonored each other… and ourselves.
