The Empire is dangerously insane - “Empire” as in the dominant industrial growth culture in which we live our lives like fish in a fishbowl. “Dangerous” as in a clear and present danger to itself and others, as in violently consuming the real world in its desperation to keep growing. This dangerously insane Empire which we inhabit is not the real world. We are losing the real world because the Empire is marketed desperately, expansively, ubiquitously as the only world worth considering - the one responsible for our “happiness.” The real world, the planet Earth, has limits. What characterizes our Empire is that it cannot imagine the existence of limits.
One of the solutions [to climate change] is that we start to consume less. And that's something that consumer capitalism just says, "Hang on, what? Doesn't compute, don't understand. That's not something that we can do. That's just simply not possible within these systems." So climate change, from that point-of-view, is a function of living in a finite world, but it's beyond the philosophical imagination of a system premised on infinite growth. - Justin Lewis (from “Consumerism and the Limits to Imagination” www.mediaed.org/... )
Believing in infinite growth in a finite system is a delusional belief - “delusional” as in a belief that leads to chronic suffering if not transformed by real contact with the truth. But this delusional belief has become God and Emperor of our fishbowl. The Empire that is strip-mining the planet to provide consumer goods for the 10% of the world’s population who can afford to buy them has been decreed to be beyond questioning - economic growth may not be questioned. Therefore we must not only contribute to the dismantlement of the planet by our purchases but we must also actively cooperate in that dismantlement through our employment.
We want more things but we don't even know what it is that we want. We just know that we want more, and somebody comes along and tells us what that thing is and then we say, "Yeah, yeah, yeah I want that." So it's a permanent state of wanting that’s kind of unfocused. We have chosen to make our dominant cultural industry the industry that produces precisely that state of wanting. And it's everywhere. It has transformed every cultural industry that we can think of. — Justin Lewis
That “dominant cultural industry” is the creation of propaganda commonly called “advertising” and “marketing.” We are told that this industry is innocently “informing” us of the enhanced states of “happiness” we can attain if we buy the various products that are so creatively and imaginatively offered to us. The fact that measures of GNP and quality of life have been diverging since the 1970’s is never mentioned; it is a fact that our “happiness” stopped growing when the growth of consumer capitalism exploded. (This is when “citizen” became rebranded as “consumer.”) This fact contradicts the propagana so it is buried under mountains of cheerleading. Nevertheless, we are busily taking the vital foundations of life and turning them violently into money to serve needs, the satisfaction of which no longer make us happy.
When the institutions of money rule the world, it is perhaps inevitable that the interests of money will take precedence over the interests of people. What we are experiencing might best be described as a case of money colonizing life. To accept this absurd distortion of human institutions and purpose should be considered nothing less than an act of collective, suicidal insanity. — David Korten When Corporations Rule the World
Collective, suicidal insanity. That’s essentially it. That’s where we are.
Our information - now become infotainment - is generated and disseminated by propaganda machines whose sole focus is the manipulation of the primitive areas of our brains that simply love to gossip about the latest, breaking outrage. What did Donald Trump tweet today? For more than a year they have been profiting from the vulgar, shallow, ignorance that spews from a narcissitic billionaire. And it is about nothing but profit. There are no ethics, no desire to “inform,” no concerns about the serious damage to informed consent this stenography of the powerful, this propaganda for profit, does to the processes that were originally intended to serve the interests of we the people.
It is a sick joke now. Nothing more. Collective suicidal insanity that entertains in the most shallow manner as the ship sinks below the waves. The Empire is collapsing into a morass of vulgarity, ignorance and violent planetary consumption and the facts of that collapse are simply not interesting enough to sell well to today’s lotus eaters whose “consent” consists of momentarily lifting their heads from their grazing to nod assent to that which promises not to interrupt their supply.