Churches eat SOULS
"Good versus evil" is relative; it presents an ambiguous paradigm for moral judgement, and yet it is the only framework offered by the monotheistic religions of the West.
Anyone can have an opinion about virtually anything. Institutions encourage us to consider the opinions they sell as "facts" and that we "believe" rather than question the morality they pitch. Friction between alternative belief structures is healthy in a polite society, and sometimes interactions that shoot off sparks conclude in consensus or a change of attitudes. But often these debates end up in stalemate with the opponents baiting each other and skipping reason altogether.
Benjamin Huff relates in The Te of Piglet:
A peasant and his son had their only horse run away from them. Neighbors said, "oh how sad!" Peasant sez, "how do you know?
The next day, the horse comes back to the farm, with four wild horses following in! The Peasant is lucky, and now owns five horses! Neighbors said, "oh how great!" Peasant sez, "how do you know?"
The next day, while trying to break one of the horses, the son is thrown by the horse. He breaks his leg; it won't heal for months. Neighbors said, "oh how sad!" Peasant sez, "how do you know?"
The next day, a great general came to town. He recruited, forcibly, any young man he could find, for a far-off war where most soldiers were going to die. But the son couldn't go; he had a broken leg! Neighbors said, "oh how great!" Peasant sez, "can it!"
Doesn't Christianity tell its adherents to turn the other cheek and "judge not"? Then why are Christians so judgemental?
Anyone who tells you what is good and what is evil, and judges on that behalf, is lying to you, implying that HIS perspective is the SAME as that of TRUTH, and not simply a subset thereof. Make up your own mind as to what you believe, rather than copypasting the beliefs of others into your brain.
Fascism has many faces...
The United States was able to win two World Wars on the strength of its labor. During both conflicts our government coordinated the working class to both consume and produce in keeping with military goals. The techniques developed by Henry Ford granted us a capacity for production of military goods that could not be matched by the Germans and their allies.
This productive force did not melt away in peacetime, and the uniformity of military production invaded the consumer world. As the 50's began, industrial production provided a level of comfort that workers had never before experienced, so long as they abandoned their individuality. A monoculture was the result, and subcultural initiatives such as rock&roll were regarded with suspicion and persecution.
The Boomers, with their numbers and relative privilege, demanded an end to the monoculture with their dollars. The friction between the monoculture and the new counterculture spawned creativity and conflict across society. Capitalism responded to the demands of the Boomer marketplace with endless options for how to dress, what to listen to, what to eat, ad nauseam. Consequently economic apologists for capitalism crow that it maximizes the diversity and appeal of goods for consumers to trick out their lifestyles.
But are these options really "options"? People spend so much time differentiating themselves culturally that political apathy is inevitable. Political connectedness is a matter of studying, evaluating, and acting; it is difficult, tedious work, and consumerism exists to distract us from ever considering it. People don't think about their LIVES as much as they think about their LIFESTYLES. We spend our leisure time learning about music and cars and clothes, without really considering the basic question - are we helping the world, or hurting it?
In a sense, the mechanical intelligence provided by computers is the quintessential phenomenon of capitalism. To replace human judgement with mechanical judgement - to record and codify the logic by which rational, profit-maximizing decisions are made - is the inevitable goal of the initiatives of capitalist institutions. Marketing and advertising processes attempt to condition customer demand, and though the products may differ the cumulative pressure of so many marketing messages condition us to disregard any messages that don't address our highly-developed consumption desires.
Wage-slavery requires that all people not born into the sixty families that "own" almost everything would have to "work" for those families or their corporations in order to get the money which was necessary for survival. Every individual possesses control over the labor that they can performed in their lifetime. Capitalism must harness and maximize the productivity of this labor, so it monopolizes the major means of making money. Humans wind up selling this labor for money as a compromise, disregarding the more valuable and important goals that may be achieved through rational deployment of our labor potential.
Civilization strips individuals of their ability to survive without it. As individuals pledge their allegiance to the institutions that compose civilized society, they voluntarily trade some of their autonomy for the security and unity they find as members.
Slowly, the institutions resocialize their members so as to recognize the authority of that institution and its protocols and agents. It is safe to assume that once involved with an institution, an individual can best be reached according to the terms and jargon of that institution. This is why people who are under the influence of one or more of these institutions seemed brainwashed and unfree.
Once an institution has succeeded in recruiting a critical mass of followers, the institution can take upon itself a set of roles that contribute to the stability of society, often in partnership with other institutions. these institutions in tandem form a complex known as "civilization". An organization as large as the government takes on a life of its own, and like all life, its fundamental aim is not function but its own survival. This leads such institutions and their directors to team up and manipulate the entire culture to preserve their continued dominance.
The vast majority of the institutions in our society exist as means by which the will of the directing classes can be implemented. These institutions are named to project an image of democracy, justice, education, and choice. The use of rhetoric as a device for engineering consent to be ruled has enabled authority figures to claim "the will of the people" as their justification for coercion and bureaucracy as surely as the monarchs of old claimed the right to rule by divine right.
People before profit.
Money is like blood. It needs to circulate. If too much money pools in just one portion of society, it may lose consiousness.
Here are some of the features of the capitalist economy. There are a couple pros and a lot of cons. The cons may seem smart but they're bullets speeding towards our collective heads.
• Many products are poison. They sell us fat in a variety of disguises but it's all just fat.
• Money is the paramount value. Everything you desire but can't afford is an advertisement for the power of money. Money, therefore, is reaffirmed as the ONLY THING THAT MATTERS to the vast majority. Our chains forged, and our free will becomes a mathematical function drawn this way and that according to the ebbs and flows of money.
• The mechanical intelligence of computers is a model of how capitalism is structured. Human judgement and intelligence is replaced by a database that monitors our choices to such a degree that it can predict them, in order to maximize profit at the expense of any other values.
• All processes in capitalism are ever-evolving, efficient mechanisms to generate profit. Marketing, for instance, is manipulation of the human intellect in order to predictably (and thereby efficiently) generate and then satisfy demand. We've become response mechanisms ourselves, as predictable as a robot. It's no wonder they call television shows "programs".
• Expression - a natural right to anyone with a voice - has become a huge industry (MTV, Hallmark, the New York Times, et al). Our individual expression is devalued by this fact - unless a message earns money, it is considered silent. Certain people anointed by the System are appointed as spokesmen for the rest of us. Our ideas are rendered silent by a wall of noise.
• The industry of expression, like most others in global capitalism, is rapidly consolidating. And since this industry manufactures products for sale, controversial sociopolitical ideas are far less marketable than crowd-pleasers like sex, music, gear, and laffs. Because distribution of ideas is handled through mass media or through a few profit-maximizing chains, the lowest common denominator determines our culture.
• Suffering is an industry. Stress is ubiquitous in the USA, as if we have a collective headache. Each one of these stresses creates a "market", and the companies who exploit these markets do not want to CURE people but rather keep them sick. Their products address the symptoms of stress, not its root causes.
• Relationships between individuals and their family, community, environment, culture, and spirituality have been frayed by technological distractions. Our attention the domain f capitalist media and commerce titans, drawn away from real relations by a hypnosis of easy answers.
We shouldn't be allowing civilization to continue on its destructive course. Let us admit the successes of past generations. Let us admire the massive monuments with which they've littered the Earth, be they pyramids or ICBM's - for their day is finished. Let us resolve to repair the human spirit with monuments gone out of control - the pyramid schemes of corporate greed that have choked our native industry. | 
