When we go to war, we should be clear, we fight for an ideology: a system of thought which emphasizes the competitive side of life, not as a human shortfall, but as a virtue, something to be worshiped, to be deified. It is an ideology based on the conception of the individual as a hyper-competitive agent; and, as the ideology goes, this conception, when acted-out, best serves both the individual, and the broader society. Yet the world is a mess.
The ideology itself calls forth war, as winning is the goal, cooperation with those not on the team, is ruled-out. In the international realm, where different nations subscribe to differing ideologies, economic systems, religions, and so forth, the West, specifically the U.S., is unable to accommodate different patterns of life due to the dominant competitive trait within its own zeitgeist, it demands victory, not compromise, not cooperation.
It seems the competitive characteristic might be more prevalent in the upper economic classes, and maybe this is why they are in the upper economic classes, not that we should presume their life is the preferred way of life. This is not to state that the ruling elite are bad people. They too are victims of ideology, they worship a god–a competitive god, which demands certain behaviors, and has its own definitions of sin and virtue. But very often the competitive god, is not the god the working classes, broadly defined, prefer to serve.
Many in the working classes prefer a cooperative world, to serve a cooperative god, where competition, while not oppressively restrained, but is also not worshiped and taught as an ideology. The western cultures, particularly the U.S., worship competition. This needs to change; it’s bringing us to our demise.
This hyper-competitive environment has brought us to the edge of world war with likely nuclear consequences; tremendous wealth and income inequality; and environmental destruction. Yet we, who disagree with the competitive, materialistic ideology, compliantly go along, because, this is what we do–we cooperate. But in the process we allow our children, our brothers, our sisters, during the act of war, to be offered on the altar of material consumption and unbridled individualism within that material realm.
A big part of the problem is that material consumption has so dominated the western cultures that it has, in the process, hijacked the term “freedom”; so that freedom is expressed mostly in the material realm: freedom to acquire wealth, freedom to consume whatever . . . and freedom to destroy the environment and to engage in war in order to achieve both of the above.
But ask an artist, writer, or any other person with a calling with little market value, if he, she, or they, are free to develop their gifts in a competitive economic environment, which, by design, only places value on the individual equal to their ability to meet the corporate inspired consumption desires of others. Freedom, to be free, is to be, who you are, and not only while acting as a consumer and producer of mindless items of consumption.
In spite of this, we go along, brainwashed by the corporate press which, perhaps by default, unwittingly serves as the propaganda arm of capital interests. How could it be any other way? The corporate press is embedded with, and part of, the ruling establishment.
The world will not change, until the ideology changes–from one which worships competition, to an ideology which worships cooperation. Of course, we should already know this, as many of our religious and humanitarian traditions have been telling us this from the beginning of time.