I've been reading Alan Watts' excellent book The Wisdom of Insecurity and came across an especially interesting passage I thought I'd share. Keep in mind this was published in 1951:
But the future is still not here, and cannot become part of experienced reality until it is present. Since what we know of the future is made up of purely abstract and logical elements - inferences, guesses, deductions - it cannot be eaten, felt, smelled, seen, heard, or otherwise enjoyed. To pursue it is to pursue a constantly retreating phantom, and the faster you chase it, the faster it runs ahead. This is why all the affairs of civilization are rushed, why hardly anyone enjoys what he has, and is forever seeking more and more. Happiness, then, will consist, not of solid and and substantial realities, but of such abstract and superficial things as promises, hopes, and assurances.
Thus the "brainy" economy designed to produce this happiness is a fantastic vicious circle which must either manufacture more and more pleasures or collapse - providing a constant titillation of the ears, eyes, and nerve ends with incessant streams of almost inescapable noise and visual distractions. The perfect "subject" for the aims of this economy is the person who continuously itches his ears with the radio, preferably using the portable kind which can go with him at all hours and in all places. His eyes flit without rest from television screen, to newspaper, to magazine, keeping him in a sort of orgasm-without-release through a series of teasing glimpses of shiny automobiles, shiny female bodies, and other sensuous surfaces, interspersed with such restorers of sensitivity - shock treatments - as "human interest" shots of criminals, mangled bodies, wrecked airplanes, prize fights, and burning buildings. The literature or discourse that goes along with this is similarly manufactured to tease without satisfaction, to replace every partial gratification with a new desire.
For this stream of stimulants is designed to produce cravings for more and more of the same, though louder and faster, and these cravings drive us to do work which is of no interest save for the money it pays - to buy more lavish radio, sleeker automobiles, glossier magazines, and better television sets, all of which will somehow conspire to persuade us that happiness lies just around the corner if we will buy one more.
He goes on in the same vein, with many more accurate and pertinently prophetic musings on the fundamentally unsatisfactory nature of modern (postmodern?) living. Highly recommended, you may find this in print or audiobook at your local library (I did!)
Submitted April 19, 2017 at 03:22AM by CountCamelback http://ift.tt/2o2cA6D
