Noam: "I've never seen anything like this"

I’m not a Chomsky fan but I have to agree with him here. We are becoming a nation of people who distrust education and won’t take the time and effort to educate themselves. We distrust those that are more intelligent or are perceived to be. We want simplistic answers that satisfy our basic instincts. We distrust those that are different than us and even dislike them. We adore sloganism and shy from independence and find comfort in group think. We are fearful of change. We want and “need” to believe in the divine nature of our nation. We boast because we need someone to hear how good we are.

A witches brew.

Personally, I believe the more unhappy people are the more they become reactionary. So the inquiry is why are we so unhappy? So what causes “happiness”? I don’t think it has anything to do with the gathering of our toys. But were told otherwise by our over commercialization. Our economy is run by the accumulation of “stuff”. Were constantly told by the merchant society that we won’t truly be happy unless we have this and that. So when we get all this “stuff” and our lack of satisfaction remains we look to outside reasons. Immigrants, race differences, politicians, government, media, that’s the cause of why I’m not happy. In short we “react” to issues outside of ourselves instead of looking within. That’s what I mean by reactionary. Anecdotally, I have had clients that live in the ghetto with not much “stuff” that happen to be far more happy than what I suspect in some of my very wealth friends.

At bottom is the fact that we are all born selfish. The more unhappy we are the more we revert back to our natural selfishness. We are less empathetic as to the disfortune of others. We want answers and we want them to be simple.

I have no idea what I’m writing here but I’m sticking to it.