Dissonance
I took part in an interesting conversation with Jarrod and his mother. I had been showing Jarrod an article on Alternet.org about the impending credit card crisis, which led to some interesting statements being made about personal responsibility and personal security. This morning, I realized that, as a culture, we have some kinda funny and somewhat incompatible ideas about an individual’s place in society. “The American Dream” is this weird marriage of a cult of individualism with a cult of conformity. Success appears to be a case of “I got all this stuff that’s exactly like everyone else’s all on my own, and if you sell enough of your waking hours to whatever drudgery you can tolerate, you can have stuff exactly like everyone else’s too.” I don’t intend to discuss this observation much further in this blog entry, because it seems like there’s too much to look at for this forum. But it is something worth exploring, and I intend to do so in my personal work. But I will say this: The variations of the conventional existence that are constantly being sold to us hold very little appeal to me.