Source:- Google.com.pk
I don’t believe in “love” as most of us do, not the romantic, idealized, abstract and perhaps ridiculous noun of an idea. I recognize “love” as the wholesome, grateful, accepting and respectful verb in action. I personally believe that all forms of love must be preceded by a genuine level of spiritual love and acceptance; anything else is either infatuation, obsession, or perversion. However, what I tend to see in society--no, not even just see but explicitly, personally experience and sense in society--is a serious straying from this idea which I can only view as a basic tenet for any kind of human, cooperative experience that can be considered remotely natural or sane. It is almost as if our culture has become emotionally, psychically, spiritually stagnant. For us, displays of affection are embarrassing. When I say embarrassing, I mean it becomes difficult for us to truly express our honest emotions towards another person; the number of people who have difficulty expressing themselves emotionally in coherent sentences is surprising: most people I have met are incapable of interpreting any kind of emotion other than the most basic such as anger, joy, and fear. How are we supposed to explore ourselves as human beings while so restricting ourselves to an external standard imposed on us by society, one which limits us from our own full emotional empowerment and potential? After all, our emotions are what drive everything in our lives whether we want to admit it or not. It seems as if somewhere along the road, we as a culture (particularly American culture and “white” culture in general), took a wrong turn and somehow ended up in an environment where it is as if we are rather tolerating each other rather than coexisting; measuring rather than collaborating; and suspecting one another rather than trusting and evolving as a species.
At a surface level, there are two obvious ways to analyze this issue, utilizing Marxist and feminist criticism. At the outset, a Marxist interpretation tells us that the basic issue is that our economic situation has impacted our cultural psyche; because we operate under a false ideology (an ideology that seeks to keep power with those at the top of a social class) which seeks to permanently separate the rich and the poor, we ourselves are put under the pressure of this class system, striving to either gain wealth or retain wealth, and those of us who are too poor are incapable of doing either--which is where the idea of the American dream comes into play, convincing us that regardless of our monetary stature or class, we can still achieve. In fact, the American dream has become such a strong force in American culture that it’s almost expected of all of us--a relaxed, easy-going lifestyle is viewed as unmotivated and worthless, the poor are viewed as lazy and useless because they are not “succeeding” in a system that is designed to keep them from doing so, and the middle-class person is expected to succeed and continue succeeding. The American dream has succeeded its original humble ideal of owning your own home and beautiful, nuclear family; now, it is a fantasy of complete and total abundance. As a culture, this kind of ideal puts a gigantic expectation on us, whether we are aware of it or not, whether we subscribe to it or not, whether we want it to or not. All of us, at one level or another, is pressured by the American dream. Nobody except the most privileged, lucky, and perhaps hard-working can achieve the kind of fame and wealth that seems to represent America. Yet, we all seem to expect it of ourselves in one way or another, and when we fail to, we for some reason blame ourselves for inability (once again, whether we are conscious of this influence or not). Or, worse yet, we realize that the American dream is absurd and become stagnant, unable to move in our lives. Add this on top of the subconscious, constant sense of cutthroat competition that underlies all activities, even some realms of the arts, and we begin to see why there is so little love for the rest of humankind, when we are too stuck in our own struggling lives against the others on the same level as us, underneath the titans who we never seem to reach, and above the poor and pitiful who we have been taught to condescend to. This classist attitude makes it very difficult to remember that we are all human, at base on the same level of existence. Because of the “false consciousness” (another term for false ideology) that follows us as can be seen in the experience of the well-off narrator amongst the poor struggling with his own moral guilt in The Fever (a book about a nondescript man who lives richly but then becomes guilty as he sees the poor and penniless in an unnamed country), it becomes that much more difficult to treat one another with the kind of respect that we deserve as human beings--in fact, the only kind of respect we can possibly afford. As I say in my essay regarding The Fever, “the only thing that could work [to solve the classist issue] is if enough powerful people became selfless enough to eventually lose everything they had to help the common people, the helpless . . . Even then, there are people who are even greater, more powerful than us who would do anything to stop ‘progress‘.” However, we as a people at this moment in time seem unable to achieve this--at this time, all we can possibly have is what love we can afford each other where we can.
Sad quotes love
Sad quotes love
Sad quotes love
Sad quotes love
Sad quotes love
Sad quotes love
Sad quotes love
Sad quotes love
Sad quotes love
Sad quotes love
No comments:
Post a Comment