Groliers

[degringolade]

Meiji Period (1868–1912) / Nakahara Nantenbo/ Zen Staff

So I am running into problems with my “good idea”of going to hotspot only. Apparently I need to work harder on my data diet. I have burned through the 30gb of data and I will need to go on a diet for the next two weeks. Sigh. But learning this kind of thing is a good thing and the pain will only be minimal.

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Lately I have begun to realize that, if I am not careful and aware, I am prone to a dangerous nostalgia. There are two dangerous mindsets, the idea that the future is going to be better and all is well, and the equally dangerous thought that the past was better and all we have to do is walk things back.

I guess that looking at my grand-daughter has made me reconsider things. She is going to be living in a different world than I lived in. In all spheres things will be different than the post WWII world of American Hegemony and the cold war.

What brought this on is that when she was still in the womb, I went out and spent around $100 on a set of “Young Reader’s Classics”, which along with the Book of Knowledge and a set of Grolier Encyclopedias were the residue of my father’s ill-advised foray into being a door-to-door encyclopedia salesman.

But these books were my lifeline growing up as a upper-lower to lower middle class youth in rural Utah. I cherished them as they were the only way out of the boredom and enforced solitude of an outsider non-mormon burdened by being farther along on the autism spectrum.

Then the other day, while I was considering the whole matter of possessions, the digital world, and nostalgia I came to the conclusion that these books would be meaningless to the girl/woman that she will become. These books are a part of a past that is gone and won’t be coming back.

So the set of Groliers went back to our local bookstore. I hope that we can get some credit from them to buy books that fit the now better. But the incident has gotten me thinking about the way that things are going.

We (mostly I mean me) tend to think that things were better in the past, but truthfully, I really can’t say that was the case. There were times in my life that were easy, and there were times in my life that were hard. Assigning good/bad to this kind of thing is a dangerous idea. The times are the times, and individual egos and the trappings that surround them are such that there isn’t much an individual can do to effect the outcome. It is kinda like a fish in the sea trying to fight back against fishing nets, predators, global warming, sea level rise and acidification. All of these things exist, but the causes (if such a thing exists or such a judgment could be made) are well outside of the abilities of an individual to effect.

I have been pondering the nature of democracy here in America and beyond. I think that the myths surrounding what we refer to as democracy and the nature of our civilization/culture are as accurate and misleading as any other myth and now we are getting to the point that the contradictions are no longer able to be ignored.

Note: Analysis is not advocacy

While we can be roughly considered to be a democracy, the way that the system is set up (and this was from the beginning) the popular vote was glorified but in fact was limited and advisory. The only straight democratic subsystem in our body politic was the House of Representatives. Presidents are still elected by the Electoral College. The Senate used to be appointed by State Legislatures but that was changed by amendment (seventeenth) in 1913. The Supreme Court makes no pretense whatsoever at democracy.

We have always lived in an system where the elites held sway to a greater extent than the common man. What I am trying to do currently is to evaluate, through my own, admittedly imperfect, ideological lenses, the effect on the general population of greater or lesser degrees of elite control.

First thing that I want to do is set down the question that I think need to be answered in order to address this. What is the relationship between levels of elite control of the culture and the overall happiness of the culture and is there a pattern that can be derived from looking back at the history written by the victors?

I am fortunate in the sense that my needs are met easily because they are as small as I can make them. This low-level contentment allows me to stand slightly outside the prescribed structures of the mass-society. I am still somewhat dependent on the whims of the general culture (retirees are always such) but since I have spent the last fifty years working toward getting some distance from the nonsense, the culture allows me this limited luxury either out of some misplaced guilt or a desire to keep me quiet, which I appreciate.

But, for better or worse, I am a creature of the culture that I stand at the edges.