Market as Metric

HA...

no problem coberst, you don't need to spend your precious time condescending to an ignorant fool like me.

Good luck finding people who actually want to listen to you with that kind of attitude. Seems to me you only wish to discuss this with those who already share YOUR ideology, and yet you hope to educate us all and expect us to change our behaviour?

Good luck mate.

Eorl

You make a good point. I have to remind myself that there is a hierarchy of comprehension.

We are aware of much more than we are conscious of. We are conscious of much more than we are knowledgeable of. We are knowledgeable of much more than we understand. Understanding is the pinnacle of comprehension and it is a mighty struggle to go from awareness to understanding and each step is necessary for the succeeding step.

It appears to me that you are not conscious of what I think to be evident therefore I shall try to move your awareness into consciousness.

My definition of ideology would claim that religion, politics, nationalism, capitalism, communism, racism, etc. are ideologies. This means that many people who are members of such groups are ideological to one degree or another. To be ideological, among other things, is to be biased (prejudiced?-irrational opinion directed at some other group).

I suspect that every child is subjected to enormous ideological influences throughout their childhood. It seems impossible to me that a child can reach adulthood without being an ideologue. A critically self-conscious adult may examine all of his or her ideologies and discover those prejudices and subject them to careful scrutiny and thus cleanse the irrational aspect of their beliefs.

While this critical self-consciousness is possible I think it is very unusual therefore I believe that we are all ideologies to one degree or another. What is important is to recognize this aspect of our nature and to be on the alert at all times. This means that we must be critically self-conscious at all times.

You still seem to be under the impression I don't understand what you are saying, am I supposed to use more sesquipedalians?

To be clear, here is the part you have not proven to be true....



I think critical self-consciousness is common in varying degrees from extreme navel-gazers like yourself to village idiots (and most likely proportional to intelligence) I would expect poorer intellects would find the complete abandonment of all ideology to be very difficult and I doubt it would always be a good thing either for them, or for others.

As for capitalism, I hear this kind of thing a lot from the more socialist idealists. That people should want their lives to be more comfortable is not hard to understand. Even "fashion" clearly serves a purpose when viewed as a mechanism of sexual competition. The idea of someone who has something they don't need trading it for something they do is also pretty simple. Capitalism is governed by the laws of supply and demand. I don't see anyone worshipping anything, and I think most people do see "shopping" for what it really is, and run their budgets according to Maslow's hierarchy even if they don't know it as such.

I just think you have judged humanity rather harshly, although if you live in the USA perhaps it's understandable given your disproportionate religious population.

Eorl

The nature of awareness and consciousness, the first two step of comprehension, is interesting. Objects of awareness and consciousness are not like objects of knowledge and thus cannot be ?'proven' as being ?'true' or ?'false'.

I live in the mountains and go hiking often and occasionally I am frozen in my tracks by something that I become conscious of. In such cases I determine that it is a certain pattern in my perception that chills my blood. I guess we are programmed by our genes to respond in such a way for survival through the millions of years surviving natural predators.

I would say that I was aware of the world in my view until of a sudden I became conscious of one element of that of which I had been only aware of. Now someone who has not hiked in such an environment would not be aware of such a thing and also the person hiking with me may not be aware of the thing that I suddenly become conscious of.

I guess that objects of awareness and consciousness are very subjective matters and one cannot prove or disprove any aspect of such experiences. If we differ as to what we are aware of and of what we are conscious of then we can only recognize that such matters are very subjective.