Kaliptus sent this to me on Facebook. I also posted it on my Evolver blog.

Why are we alive? The answers are many and none. It is up to us to define our own purpose, our own reasons, our own aims, goals, and responsibilities. Can you name 10 Reasons of Purpose for the Human Existence? If so please copy this, and type 10 reasons as a Note of your own. Life is important, don’t miss it

(I’m going to twist this a little bit and list 10 reasons I’ve discovered behind the purpose of my own existence. There will be some overlap with the reasons I see for mankind. I’ll explain as necessary.)

1. To procreate. In college I had settled into a purely Darwinian view of things and could see no other apparent meaning or purpose behind life than to create offspring, to pass on the DNA and keep life going. This was a rationalization based on the strength of the theory of natural selection, which I now see is only the beginning of our purpose.

2. To turn the dead order into chaos and then chaos into improved living order. To act as a human decomposer and reconstructor. To use the decay as fertilizer for starting a garden. To grow something sacred.

3. To learn, for the first time in the history of life on Earth going back billions of years, how to control all traits associated with power consciousness, including those connected with ego: pride, violence, anger, territorialism, authoritarianism, etc.

4. To hijack the entertainment factory, the prison for our metaphysical universe, and rebuild (or build for the first time) a truly healthy, technicolor, multidimensional public domain in a way that cannot be corrupted by power or law—as in, the kind of content seen on Tryptophanatic Netvision: http://vimeo.com/channels/tryptophanatic

5. To splatter minds on the wall with words, ideas, images, and sounds; in other words, to push people over their edge of comfort—over the boundary of what they consider “sane,” to hopefully show them that the scary, overwhelming, uncomfortable words, ideas, images and sounds are actually MUCH MORE SANE because they match the true facts found in the universe (especially the INNER universe), which brings me to #6.

6. To overhaul the Aristotelian thought system that is still prevalent 80 years after Korzybski’s general semantics should have inspired its downfall in the 1930s. To expand our conception of the universe from 3-dimensional to 4-dimensional (space and time do not exist independently), and upgrade all the obsolete thought systems: Newtonian physics, Euclidean geometry, Aristotelian logic, etc. This one also includes ending thought processes that foster self-deception.

7. To explain in clear, rational terms the concepts that we have thus far had to explain in poetic or metaphorical terms. Myths and fictions only help us up until the point when we can explain them with more precise ideas. That means increasing coherence, and reducing the noise—not stating as “fact” what works better in symbolic language.

8. To inspire an evolution in psychological awareness. We’ve been kept in the dark about the ideas of Freud, Jung, and others, because that information has been used by the public relations industry to manipulate our feelings—and, therefore, our habits in buying, voting, etc.—since World War I.

9. To convince the world to let technology work FOR us instead of AGAINST us. The fear of a war between Man & Machine is an instance of neophobia (unless we’re talking about subcutaneous microchips to track people, or some other dystopian nonsense like that). Human beings have many levels of consciousness aside from simple intelligence, but we’re not very good at rational decision making and problem solving. Computers (androids) could do this for us! In some areas they already do! Except what I’m suggesting would involve us staring at a screen for less time. Also, to rid the world of manual labor (wage slavery) and really any job that doesn’t encourage the full expression of the big Self trying to manifest itself in every individual human being.

10. To find peace—inner (jedi master status), outer small scale (a place that matches my inner idea of home), and outer global scale (healing Gaia).

I feel like everything I’ve been working on is suddenly coming together with a new clarity. On March 18 NPR ran an excellent interview with Tom Burrell, who worked in the advertising industry for 40 years and just published a book called Brainwashed: Challenging the Myth of Black Inferiority.

I find Burrell’s story to be so interesting because he worked much of his adult life on the other side of the smoke screen, without even realizing the harm his industry inflicts on society. The other reason I want to read the book is that it seems to be parallel with The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan’s landmark 1963 book in the modern feminist quest. What I mean is that the brainwashing of and about African Americans is likely very similar to the brainwashing that contributed (or still contributes, depending on your opinion) to the feminine mystique.

Burrell explains that, in our materialistic society — especially to those who are struggling financially — the only apparent path to status and recognition is to buy stuff. This phenomena is worsened by the way popular culture depicts wealthy African Americans only as MTV stars and professional athletes. It sounds stereotypical to suggest that an ethnic group could share a common desire for Escalades and mansions — but that’s the intent of the ones doing the brainwashing, so it must be addressed. As one caller says, her son assumed that their dentist would be white, because “if he was going to be black he’d be a rapper or basketball player.”

You can listen to the interview with this embedded player. My post continues below.

Later, in response to a caller, Burrell says “what that brainwashing does is gets you to a point of being so insensitive — or desensitized, that you become unconscious of what is going into your head, what you’re seeing and what you’re hearing. You also become a party to the brainwashing, or black people become a party to the brainwashing. But that’s the nature of brainwashing. You join in and become your own victimizer.”

Neal Conan points out that the Cosby Show was a notable example of black people being portrayed in a positive light — which is exactly what I was thinking as I listened. I used to love the Cosby Show, partly because the Huxtables seemed to be a healthier, more balanced, and more well-rounded family than most that I knew in suburban Detroit (most of whom were white). Just the fact that the dad was a doctor and the mom was a lawyer seemed cool to me. That kind of thing was so uncommon, for any ethnicity. But Bill Cosby was in charge of that show’s production, and he clearly had his priorities straight.

Probably my favorite part of the interview is when Burrell discusses the way black people have taken ownership of the “n word.” He claims that using the word gives black people a false sense of empowerment, since they’re actually contributing to the problem. Every time the word is uttered by anyone, it furthers the desensitization.

Burrell says we have to “turn those images around” in mass media, and Brainwashed reportedly describes ways that can be accomplished. One idea relates to creating your own media using a personal computer, which is pretty much equivalent to one suggestion in my essay “Indecision Over Michigan“! Of course, I was talking about the broader effects of TV addiction, not just racial brainwashing.

The website for Burrell’s book, stopthebrainwash.com, features an interesting intro video as well as updates on his work. There’s also an excerpt from Brainwashed on NPR.org.

With that in mind, I’ll keep this very brief. Back in December I found a TED Talk video with Mike Rowe, the host of Discovery Channel’s popular show Dirty Jobs. He was speaking at an Apple conference in Monterey, CA — so pretty much the opposite demographic that he works with on the show (i.e., working class America).

He tells the story of filming a specific episode when he was struck with a rare feeling: he thought someone was doing their job incorrectly, but then realized he was absolutely wrong. The job was sheep farming, and Mike was learning how to castrate the lambs. It turned out the legally approved method (tying a rubber band around the scrotum for about a week until the “parts” shrivel and fall off) is actually less efficient and more painful than the farmer’s method of choice (making a small cut in the scrotum and using his teeth to bite off the testicles).

So Rowe, with balls stuck on his chin, has an epiphany about the dirty work he’s seen on a regular basis throughout the show’s history. This leads him to reconsider the very notion of work, especially how it fits into the social landscape of 21st century America.

In the New York Times Sunday Magazine published on February 11, an article by Russel Shorto called “How Christian Were the Founders?” looked into recent efforts by the Texas school board to inject into history and civics curriculum the idea that America was founded officially as a Christian nation. Their other aim is to wipe out the idea of separation of church and state, since it wasn’t stated in the founding documents of the United States.

Because Texas buys more textbooks than most (or all other) states in the country, publishers shape their textbooks based on guidelines chosen in the Lone Star State. The logic is simple: they don’t want their books to go unsold. But this has a toxic effect on the rest of the country, because only one textbook version is produced at a time — regardless of what other states want.

Remember in 2008 when we heard all that fuss about whether Creationism should be taught in schools alongside Darwin’s theory of natural selection? That fight was spearheaded by the Texas school board, which at the time was led by Dr. Don McLeroy — a dentist with no background whatsoever in education, history, civics, or economics. According to Shorto, textbook publishers let McLeroy run through their book drafts to make adjustments as he sees fit!

That Creationism effort was a failure for the Republican majority in the Texas school board. It also led to McLeroy being removed from his position as chairman of the board, because of the conflict presented by his extreme religious views. But a New York Times article from March 12 informs us that, this time around, they actually won.

I shouldn’t imply that it comes as a surprise. The conservative/Republican/Christians (take your pick of title) on the board vote as a block, so currently they can do almost whatever they want. Not only that, but their aims are extremely specific. “As Cynthia Dunbar, another Christian activist on the Texas board, put it, ‘The philosophy of the classroom in one generation will be the philosophy of the government in the next.’”

To state my reaction briefly, this scares the shit out of me. This is different than the disorganized rabble chirped back and forth on cable news programs. This is organized crime… in the public school system!!! It would be one thing if they were arguing on the basis that students are getting an inadequate education, but they admit that their aims are solely political. (The ironic part is that these conservative Christians probably send their own kids to Christian schools. They shouldn’t even get a say in the matter of public education.)

I normally don’t discuss politics in length on this blog, but the topic of education has been dominating my mind lately. The school system may be under attack by these troglodytes, but I would argue that it was already broken. Or I should say, there is no proper system in place to ensure that people are encouraged and have enough opportunity to educate themselves to the level required by modern society.

I just got a copy of R. Buckminster Fuller’s 1969 book Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, and the first subject he brings up is that modern “society operates on the theory that specialization is the key to success” (p 12). He claims that this is the product of the most powerful men throughout history, organizing society in a way that suited their needs. He still has to prove that to me; I think it might be more appropriately viewed as the result of us not being prepared for the complications of consciousness. Regardless, today the specialization is the result of the ridiculous level of power held by corporations and the government, and — on the other end — the cause of the alienation and frustration experienced by the individual trying to fulfill his right to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

What I’m saying here is that the education system we assume to be fully-functioning is actually producing a society of individuals in arrested development (yes, I do intend to build on that concept by discussing the popular Fox TV show from the mid 2000s). We’re brought to a point where we can get an hourly wage job or, if we get a college degree, an institutionalized office job — but it stops at that point because, from the view of those in power, too much education is dangerous for the status quo. That system is collapsing from within, since a world full of uneducated people is a world doomed to fail — hence, the Great Recession, global warming, bank and auto bailouts, etc.

Fuller extends the idea of specialization to all our cultural categorizations (which is why I’m boycotting the Census!!!) like race, religion, nationality, and so on. As he writes, “By the twenty-first century it either will have become evident to humanity that these questions (of intellectual specialization) are absurd and anti-evolutionary or men will no longer be living on Earth” (p. 19, I added the parenthetical info).

But before Fuller hijacks this post, let me return to the point. This fight isn’t a move to improve the American public school system; it’s a deliberate move to make it worse. The school board conservatives are basing their argument on one fact: that a concept so ingrained in American life that we take it for granted — the separation of church and state — is not found in any of our country’s founding documents, like the Declaration of Independence or the U.S. Constitution. In fact it was first seen in a letter written by Thomas Jefferson, in reply to a representative of a smaller church who felt his denomination was being persecuted by more powerful churches.

To make matters worse, the Declaration of Independence does use language implying that our nation was founded “under God” and that Americans have “certain inalienable rights” bestowed upon them by that God. So although there is no religion-speak in the Constitution, one tactic used by the school board was to bind the Declaration and the Constitution in history texts — as if they were actually the same thing. Therefore, it can be deduced that the Constitution contains Christian language, and America was founded as a Christian nation.

Of course the founders of the United States were religious people. They had fled their native lands because of religious persecution. They understood more than the founders of any country on earth that church and state must be separate, for the alternative unavoidably leads to tyranny. To me it’s pure nonsense to suggest that the founders had actually intended us to be a Christian nation — just as much as it was nonsense how Bush tried to pitch his fundamentalist creed on us from ’01 to ’09. But then I already knew that our society is defined more by absurdity than any kind of sense.

Trying to juggle all this nonsense hurts my brain, so I suggest you read Shorto’s incredible (but really, really long) article to comprehend the issue better. My intention here was to illustrate that our school system is beyond broken, but — like in many other areas of society — we probably can’t expect that the system will ever improve. It’s too institutionalized. I’m not arguing for home schooling, but we’ll have to brainstorm alternatives to this secretive ideological brainwashing going on in our K-12 schools.

Talk about fighting a 12-headed monster. For their widespread idiocy, Christians are really well organized in their efforts at manifesting hell on Earth. I wish I could laugh when they go on about the “liberal establishment” — I can’t even figure out what that refers to. “Liberals” don’t have an establishment, any force as binding as religion that guides their efforts at progress, politically or otherwise.

Liberals do have great literature though. Sometimes I feel like all great writers have been unequivocally liberal in that they worked solely to push mankind forward. Orwell was prominent in that camp, and whenever I hear about these insane ongoings my mind instantly recalls his warning in 1984: “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”

We have to fight all efforts to control and manipulate the past, or else our future — and the future of our progeny — will be jeopardized beyond repair.

I have a feeling that when I’m older and reflecting on my experience as a young man, there will be a vital point in the story when I exclaim, “And then I found The Feminine Mystique!” It’s bewildering to consider that the work — which launched the modern feminist movement almost 20 years before I was born — could relate in any significant way to my own life. In fact it’s more than just significant; the application to and explanation of my own life is monumental. But I’m not alone there. I think Friedan’s work applies to our entire society. My new theory is that many of the forces affecting women in the ’50s and ’60s now affect both genders equally.

I’m only halfway through the book, so I can’t summarize the entire thing yet. I’m trying to get in the habit of posting little bits as I read, instead of trying to cover the whole whopper once I’m done. (That’s been difficult since I’ve realized I’m kind of like an Ent — those tree-like creatures from Lord of the Rings. Treebeard’s saying went something like, “It takes us a really long time to say anything at all, so we don’t say anything unless it’s worth taking a really long time to say.”)

My statement about the book’s ongoing validity relates to Friedan’s thesis:

“It is my thesis that the core of the problem for women today is not sexual but a problem of identity… Our culture does not permit women to accept or gratify their basic need to grow and fulfill their potentialities as human beings, a need which is not solely defined by their sexual role” (p. 77).

I don’t know if it’s pure coincidence or if my reading habits are starting to converge towards a single subject, but this statement was a perfect follow-up to a book I just finished reading: The Undiscovered Self by Carl Jung. In that short book the famous psychologist seemed to be inviting someone to tackle the subject of feminism by taking the individuality angle. As Jung wrote:

“The individual is increasingly deprived of the moral decision as to how he should live his own life, and instead is ruled, fed, clothed and educated as a social unit, accommodated in the appropriate housing unit, and amused in accordance with the standards that give pleasure and satisfaction to the masses” (p. 12).

In the natural progression of my independent studying, I’ve noticed a shift from fiction and philosophy to nonfiction and psychology, with the dividing time period being the 1950s. Both of these books fall in the second category, and I’m sort of surprised by Jung’s near-total absence from The Feminine Mystique. Jung’s book was published in 1957 and Friedan’s in 1963, so maybe there wasn’t enough lag time between the two.

Like I said, I still have a large chunk of it to read, but while Jung’s name has only been mentioned once so far, an entire chapter was dedicated to Sigmund Freud. In a way I’m glad about that, though, since it’s now obvious that I had a very skewed idea of Freud’s work. What I mean is, I only knew about the beneficial (or potentially beneficial) nature of his theories of the subconscious mind. I had no idea that he was sexist, or even hated or feared women. And I took a class in college called “Freud and Psychoanalysis”!

Apparently Freud was “a prisoner of his own culture,” by which Friedan means Victorian Europe at the dawn of the 20th century.

“In Freud’s time, evidently, cultural hypocrisy forced the repression of sex. [...] He then developed his theory by describing all the stages of growth as sexual… Something that could be described in physiological terms, linked to an origin of anatomy, seemed more comfortable, solid, real, scientific, as he moved into the unexplored country of the unconscious mind” (pp. 106-107).

Friedan explains that, while psychoanalysis was helpful in the therapy setting, its interpretation by mainstream culture was very damaging. Almost all the freedoms that women fought for from the mid-1800s (including the right to vote, which wasn’t granted to females until 1920 — though I didn’t know that!) until the end of WWII had reportedly vanished by the early 1960s.

“What happened to women is part of what happened to all of us in the years after the war. We found excuses for not facing the problems we once had the courage to face. The American spirit fell into a strange sleep; …the whole nation stopped growing up. All of us went back into the warm brightness of home…

“It was easier, safer, to think about love and sex than about communism, McCarthy, and the uncontrolled bomb. It was easier to look for Freudian sexual roots in man’s behavior, his ideas, and his wars than to look critically at his society and act constructively to right its wrongs” (pp. 186-187).

But as she goes on to say, “the individual” couldn’t solely be blamed for what happened in our culture. Psychologists, anthropologists, guidance counselors, professors and magazine editors all began taking Freud’s “lead,” telling women that self-fulfillment came from staying in the home, serving their husbands and children in their biological role. Once that caught on, highly paid marketers and advertisers took it to a new level of absurdity, manipulating the fear and guilt of women, knowing that these newly created housewives were responsible for 75 percent of spending in the home. (By the way, British documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis is the only person I’ve found today who seems to care about this topic. His documentary The Trap explores the ways that Edward Bernays, Freud’s own nephew, became rich by applying Freud’s theories to propaganda and brainwashing efforts in post-war America. Although, Friedan doesn’t seem aware of this either. Edward’s mother is mentioned in passing as a “strong” woman from Freud’s life — but Edward himself is totally omitted.)

So ladies and gentleman, we enter a new phase of the mystical creative journey. From not on there won’t be so many muddled, abstract philosophical explorations. Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus marked the end of that painful phase for me. Now I set out to explain the real world and what might be the most bizarre mystery of the universe: PEOPLE!