How is it that we take so much for granted as real in our everyday lives, when it is typically
more complicated than that?
The fact that, in order to write this essay, I am staring into what has essentially become our
technological oblivion, tapping a few buttons that I’ve practically memorized, and watching my
thoughts manifest in a program—which, by the way, is translating, in some unseen, intangible yet
very real realm, a constantly-updating stream of 1s and 0s into several successive higher-level
languages and eventually into something called “Times New Roman” text set to a 12-pt size,
double-spaced, on a two-dimensional screen that is capable of representing the three-dimensional
“real world”, manufactured from multitudinous disparate materials brought together as the result
of an extremely long, complex web of design, innovation, business transactions, and manual
labor—speaks volumes about how much in our modern age we truly take for granted. (Eat your
heart out, Proust!) Berger explains, “We never look at just one thing; we are always looking at the
relation between things and ourselves. Our vision is continually active, continually moving,
continually holding things in a circle around itself, constituting what is present to us as we are” (p
9). With advertising and marketing agencies feeding us endless streams of mind-numbing “But
wait, there’s more!” idiocy; telling us how disgusting our bodies look; how inadequate we are in
the bedroom; how we will never amount to anything unless we get out there, unquestionably clock-
in to the dictatorship for 40+ hours a week, and prostitute ourselves for money in whatever ways we morally rationalize to ourselves as acceptable so that we can buy all of the trinkets, planned
obsolescence, and other wastes of precious, limited resources that will supposedly make our lives
so much better; it’s no wonder people typically are just too inundated with distractions and
perception manipulation to notice nuance nowadays.
Are there pragmatic reasons for doing so?
Of course! —There are pragmatic reasons for doing everything...right?
Are there consequences?
Cheesy philosophical jokes aside, by pragmatic standards, the idea of “consequence” is
really just a description of our ongoing interaction with the paramount reality we all mutually
experience. So, we call things choices and pat ourselves on our backs for being so very special and
capable of making those choices; but we don’t realize, or perhaps refuse vehemently to realize,
that none of those choices would exist were they not consequences of some earlier and earlier
consequences—a possibly never-ending chain. In fact, none of us would exist by the same
reasoning. Talk about consequences!
Why might it matter that we recognize what we take for granted?
In 1928, a book called Propaganda was released by Edward Bernays that was essentially
the foundation for the highly influential sector of our world called public relations. In this book,
Bernays describes the rather simple process of manipulating public opinion on large scales using
regional and situational biases, nuance, and unrecognized consequences. Today, coupled with the
ubiquity of the Internet, using these and several other techniques to manipulate public opinion has
never been easier! Whereas Berger claims that the “camera isolated momentary appearances and
in so doing destroyed the idea that images were timeless” (p 18), the Internet—or more accurately
our misuse of the Internet and perhaps all of our modern technology—has simply destroyed the idea of actually knowing things and replaced it with the idea of looking things up. In other words,
knowledge of how to look things up has become a poor simulacrum of, and at the same time has
successfully depreciated and supplanted, knowledge itself.
Perhaps the most irritating “argument” I hear tends to reference minimum wage and how
some people apparently don’t deserve a living wage because they “flip burgers” or something—
as if that should be viewed as a pejorative. (By living wage, I mean a wage that can allow one to
afford to live without any assistance programs outside of reasonable extenuating circumstances.)
At its core, the argument hinges on self-placement upon some imaginary hierarchical scale that
only exists in the minds of those perpetuating it which basically states “Everyone must EARN
what they get. No entitlements. No freebies...” and so on. Well, I love being the eradicator of
unsubstantiated claims, so think about this: Just by being born in a so-called First World country
in our modern age, you were GIVEN cell phones, automobiles, planes, interstate highways,
healthcare systems, supermarkets, the Internet, and computers; clean, fresh water delivered right
to your spigots; and lights at the flick of a switch (or even the clap of your hands). You got all of
that and more and in fact expect it—and what did you contribute toward it? Nothing! Don’t feel
bad, though—I didn’t do anything to contribute toward it either; but I certainly expect it. For, we
are all entitled to the fruits of our predecessors’ innovations because that is the nature of innovation
itself: To allow for the free flow of information so that others can build upon that information and
perhaps better some aspect of our world with it. But, a dangerous situation manifests when people
begin alienating others by using dehumanizing tactics: Social stratification. This idea is not just
socially constructed; it is socially reinforced—fascinatingly, even within the lower echelons of the
class system itself. In other words, no matter our place on the hierarchical scale, the assumption
that classism even exists is taken for granted without exception. So, I suppose the question at this point is this: What kind of consequences will arise from our current actions and social organization
on this planet considering we’re no longer captivated by our own experiences of the universe
because we were duped into striving to live vicariously through and emulate other people’s
experiences instead?
