All the life has been
sucked out of our economy in the last few decades, and somehow we do not know what
to do about it. Maybe that is because we are socialized into accepting our lives
in modern society as an endless series of over-controlled disasters. By the
time you get to the end of the day, you are so stressed out and tired that you
have no energy for changing the world. We used to think that the internet was
going to be an information super-highway that would create an Al-Gorean utopia
where all problems and all daily tasks would be solved super-fast. When was the
last time you heard the term information super-highway?

 At least half of the
Internet is a super-gutter than runs alongside the super-highway. But, the
truth is we are inundated in way too much information. And just like the
semantic satiation we experience by saying a word over and over again until it
becomes completely meaningless, all of life takes on the pallor of anxiety
satiation multiplied by semantic satiation multiplied by the guilt for having
difficulty managing it all, and in the end we collapse, hoping that the whole
crazy train will just keep on chugging down the tracks with or without us
worrying about it tonight.

 So, the next time you
try to find someone to blame or get mad at, or the next time you want to pick
up and get out of town to start fresh, or the next time the government is
telling you to do something you have no way of accomplishing or you might die,
just tell yourself that it is the nature of modern society to manage our lives
as a series of over-controlled disasters.

 Think of it this way. I
am going to tell you a funny story that is true, and it is especially
appropriate to tell today, having just changed the time. When I was a college
professor, I decided to perform an informal experiment. I started asking every
single class I taught to answer this question: “Why do we have daylight savings
time?” After performing this experiment for 10 years, I had some startling
results. In every class, there were perhaps three or four people who would
venture an answer. In no class, did everyone have an answer. In every class,
the few people who had answers did not agree with one another – they each
always had different answers. What does this tell us?

 It tells us plainly that,
as a society, we have absolutely no idea why we all change time itself twice a
year. There is no consensus, and there is no widely understood or agreed upon
logic behind why we do it. Yet, that does not stop us all from dutifully
changing time itself twice a year. Well, not all of us, because there are
counties that do not change the time. For some reason, in some states, there
are counties that never change the time, while the next county over will dutifully
change time twice a year. How can you not do it when everybody else does it?
But, in the next county over nobody is doing it.

 Perhaps the most popular
answer given had something to do with farmers needing more daylight hours in
the morning so their kids could work the farm before going to school. Really? Trust
me, our economy does not depend on child labor working the fields for a few
good hours before going off to school. In our society, farming is almost entirely
a corporate enterprise at this point. The plain truth of the matter is that there
is absolutely no consensus among us, and we have absolutely no idea why we
change time itself twice a year.

 From a social
psychological standpoint, ‘the social’ forms and shapes ‘the psychological’. The
only answer can be that daylight savings time is a form of social control that
does exist to serve a function. Conjecture: if we can all be persuaded to
change time itself without knowing why, then we can be persuaded to do almost
anything else. We can be persuaded that we need to get out of Dodge quickly
because the coming storm will kill us, and then we can persuade ourselves that
there is no way all of us can leave the state at the same time, and drive
calmly and quickly up I-95 to get away from the storm. And then we can persuade
ourselves that everything always goes like this, but life is just one big
over-controlled disaster anyway, so we will just pray our way through it the
same way we always have.

 The strange thing is
that we have reached this technocratic peak where our crown-of-creation society
can be effectively managed as a series of over-controlled disasters, yet we are
still anxiety-ridden to the core. The strange thing is that we know we are
better off, smarter, and more technologically advanced than our ancestors ever
were – but Johnny still can’t read even though he is graduating high school
next year, and when the next hurricane hits Florida, if you have no way of
flying out of Florida at a moment’s notice, then you will have to stay and
suffer the consequences, and it will be your own damn, guilt-ridden fault.

 How did we become so
advanced that we have outstripped all the problems our ancestors had, but we
still live our lives from one over-controlled disaster to the next? How did we
all get corralled into believing that we have it so good, when the truth is
that too many of us live from one over-controlled disaster to the next? Maybe
the problem is that we believe everything we are promised and told because we are
just too idealistic. We always want to believe that our ship is about to come
in, and that our very own Willy Wonka golden ticket is just around the corner,
about to fall into our hands. Why else would everybody buy a lottery ticket?

 Humans are ridiculously optimistic
and it is perhaps our best and most endearing trait. Maybe modern technocratic
society is not going to be so much better than life was for our ancestors after
all. Maybe life is always about trade-offs – isn’t that what they mean in Taoism
when they talk about Yin and Yang? Maybe life gets better and better and worse
and worse at the same time.

~End 3 of 3~ New post Thursday ...