Meaning: Do It Right.

“Bender, it has come to my attention that this company has been paying you to do nothing but loaf around on the couch.” – Futurama

I gave The Mrs. a dictionary for our first anniversary.  I wanted to give her something with a meaning.

Imagine you’re between 16 and 24.  You live in a country (Great Britain) that has a robust social safety net.  Your parents are doing okay.  Not millionaires, but doing okay.  The U.K. has a huge safety net if you can’t work, or don’t want to work.  For instance, in London you can have:

• Council flats (apartments) – in U.S. English: subsidized or (nearly) free housing.
• Free crisps (potato chips) and biscuits (cookies) delivered by singing Welshmen in chimney sweep attire.
• Free Dr. Who™ costumes, though they only come in the sizes of “elfin” and “aircraft carrier”.
• X-Box® games delivered at no cost via the luminiferous information aether (Internet).
• A majority Pakistani population.
• Free healthcare, including funds for Cockney coal-miners to blast and carve your teeth into pleasant looking shapes.
• A zero effort, zero risk life.

At least 1,500 citizens of Great Britain turned their back on this life of shabby luxury to go live in a land without air conditioning, bangers and mash, Top Gear™, and cell phone reception for the opportunity to become bloodthirsty Junior Assistant Jihadis in the ISIS® organization.

Why?

I’ve heard that ISIS has a new name.  WASWAS.

At least partially because life had no meaning for them – they weren’t accomplishing anything, and they knew it.  Carl Jung observed this problem in the early twentieth century.  Jung’s observation was made as religious belief was waning in Europe, and as people there were continually centralizing themselves in cities that became larger and larger.  Jung saw that the loss of a belief system that allowed them to have a higher purpose in any setting – large or small, was devastating.

Also, Jung saw that this was coupled with the anonymity and lack of true community of large cities.  To put it bluntly, for 99%+ of people living in a city, the city doesn’t care if you are there.  Your contribution to the whole is diluted to the point of meaninglessness, like the guy in the BMW® factory that installs turn signals.  Jung had ideas as to the result of this situation:

The individual’s feeling of weakness, indeed of non-existence, is compensated by the eruption of hitherto unknown desires for power.  It is the revolt of the powerless, the insatiable greed of the have-nots.

Did you hear about Carl’s daughter?  She was a little Jung, too.

In modern society, the numbers of people are huge when compared to the historical setting that mankind has experienced through time.  I wrote a somewhat related post here (Mental Illness, Dunbar’s Number, and the Divine Right of Kings).  Modern people have, at least a bit, developed ways to replace the meaning of religion and the belonging that only occurs in small bands:

• Sports teams. This allows achievement by proxy.  Your team wins, even though exactly one player out of 50 are from the state the team is in?  You won!  Your quarterback gets traded next year?  He’s dead to you.  Logical?    Effective?  Yes.
• Video games. Video games are a form of artificial achievement.  You achieve a pre-programmed victory designed to manipulate you into feeling good.  Designers of video games have turned this into a stunning skill, making successive video games more immersive.  And despite this immersion, it doesn’t make kids more violent – I rarely lose a fistfight with a sixth grader.
• Work hard, do well, feel good.  It’s a simple enough equation.  It’s also one of the most real and most wholesome things on this list.  Especially if you are a mummy – they aren’t evil – they just got a bad wrap.
• Consumeproduct culture. No, that’s not a typo.  What is a consumeproduct culture?  It’s one that replaces shopping for meaning.  Did you find a new Brad Pitt® flavored toothpaste to buy?  Great!  It shoots endorphins into your brain that make you feel you’ve achieved something.  But it wears off, and you’ve got to find Johnny Depp shaped vitamin C gummis and buy them tomorrow to feel okay.
• Politics.  Just like sports teams, cheering for your side allows you to feel good when you win, and bad when you lose.  The current Leftward polarization of the Democrats is very tied into this.  How many Leftists does it take to change a lightbulb?  2500 to protest, and none of them working to change anything.
• Mind altering substances.   Cocaine.  Alcohol.  Marvel® movies.  These allow you to escape just for an hour or two.  Oddly, the common denominator in all of this?  Robert Downey, Jr.

I just got back from my heroine dealer.  I got Wonder Woman®, She-Ra™, and Black Widow©.

I’m not saying that these coping mechanisms are evil, or harmful.  Some, like working hard, have huge societal and personal benefits unless you’re working for an evil company.  Others, like politics?  Not so much, especially the Leftist variety.  Again, Carl Jung saw the rise of Leftism in his life and correctly described its rise in these two quotes:

Such people are very likely to gravitate toward collective ideologies, mass movements, and institutions which they view as having the power they as individuals lack.

If the individual, overwhelmed by the sense of his own puniness and impotence should feel that his life has lost its meaning, then he is already on the road to State slavery and, without knowing or wanting it, has become its proselyte.

So, the “British” ISIS-Bois sashayed to Samarra and moseyed to Mosul out of their comfortable council flat life.  They did this because they felt no meaning in Great Britain.  Great Britain was a country that they and their ancestors had no hand in building.  They and their ancestors didn’t really contribute to Great Britain in any significant way.  They knew that they were no more British than I am Martian, and won’t be until their great, great, grandchild is named Nigel and has horrible teeth.

What’s red and bad for your teeth?  A brick.

Therefore, they weren’t assimilated enough to move their search for meaning to Manchester United®, so might as well go and kill some people down in the Middle East.  This is just another example that soccer is an evil game devised by aristocratic European women so that they could play it while their husbands did the dishes.  (Apologies to Mike Judge)

This isn’t just a crisis of the ISIS-Idiots.  This is a crisis that faces mankind in general.  Many of the spiritual, social, and political ills the world faces right now stem directly from the minimization of religion and the urbanization of population.

Big cities are dehumanizing.  Do you know a person on your city council?  Do they know you by name?  Do you have their cell phone number in your cell phone?  Do you have proof that they plagiarized in high school?  Do you know what happened at Uncle Tom’s cabin, and what’s down in the wishing well?  Would they pay attention if you called them on a Tuesday afternoon?

This is the norm in Modern Mayberry.

Does it make sense for any person to live in a city where these things are not true?  Does it make the citizens of Dallas better off to have a city of a million people where their voice is so diluted that they are just one among millions, feeling no control?

My doctor says I should take meds for my schizophrenia.  But look who doesn’t get lonely during quarantine – this guy!

Adding to the frustrations is that most decisions are made not at the local level in those massive cities, but at the national level where hiring a stupid person isn’t a mistake, it’s a feature.  In the United States, most regulations that impact people on a day-to-day basis aren’t made in the Modern Mayberry office.

Nope.

Most regulations are made far away in Washington – and not the good Washington where the volcanoes and earthquakes will eventually eliminate all the Leftists.  This results in one-size fits all regulations that meet the needs of the lowest common denominator.  Why does the EPA design wood stoves for use in Alaska?  Can’t the Alaskans be left alone to figure that out?

These rules do more than frustrate individuals.  The confine those that could become great.  Could a company like Apple® be founded today?  I don’t think so they would be crushed by regulations – they would have to remain as an open sauce company.  My next door neighbor, who runs a small farm bank, told me that starting a small bank from scratch today would be nearly impossible.  The small has been eliminated, the middle is discouraged, and only large companies can compete.

The result is that people on all sides are done with the current system.  On the Left, there is a desire for what only could be called a Marxist revolution because the state isn’t powerful enough.  On the Right?  There’s a feeling that the United States became a little too centrally powerful around 1843.

I side with the Right.

What civilization had the best tattoos?  The Ink-ans.

We have learned that the solutions from the Left, in the end, provide only death and tyranny.  The “British” people who went to join the jihadis were fans of death and tyranny in their own way.  The rioters of BLM are fans of death and tyranny, as well.  As mentioned many times, that path is the path of destruction.  The Left wants to destroy our civilization, the Right wants to build civilization.

On the Right, I’d suggest leaving the cities.  Outside of the danger we’ve seen recently, like Mars, cities ain’t the kind of place to raise your kids.  Find your Modern Mayberry.  Meet your neighbors.  Build relationships.

Find meaning from something more than an Amazon® shopping cart.

Ohh!  Did you see that Lighting Deal®?