we also hear from neighbours, friends that many young talented
men and women have forgotten filial piety. these people are from
the higher society, earning tens of thousands of dollars monthly
but yet leave their old folks in nursing homes and never visited.
my wife worked in Dover Hospice before and i can assure you, many
patients were left alone waiting for death. sons and daughters,
family and friends do not visit frequently. once a month? that is a
blessing. of course there are cases where the children are filial
and caring but seriously, how many?
...Another aspect of this nineteenth century propaganda system
is the increasing emphasis upon material desires. If you had the
material things you wanted --a nice house in the suburbs, a
swimming pool, a couple of big cars, a place in the country, a
motor boat, a trailer to take it back and forth--you should be
happy and satisfied. Now it's endless--a pocket computer, citizens'
band radio, whatever you want...
...The second thing that occurs as this goes on is increasing
remoteness of desires from needs. I've mentioned this. The next
thing is an increasing confusion between means and ends. The ends
are the human needs, but if I asked people what these needs are,
they can hardly tell me. Instead they want the means they have been
brainwashed to accept, that they think will satisfy their
needs.
But it's perfectly obvious that the methods that we have been
using are not working. Never was any society in human history as
rich and as powerful as Western Civilization and the United States,
and it is not a happy society. Just this week, I looked at a book
called "The Joyless Economy", by an economist, Tibor Scitovsky, who
diagrammed some of these things...
...The other part of this will require you to put these things
together to some extent. Persons, personalities if you wish, can be
made only in communities. A community is made up of intimate
relationships among diverse types of individuals--a kinship group,
a local group, a neighbourhood, a village, a large family. Without
communities, no infant will be sufficiently socialized. He may grow
up to be forty years old, he may have made an extremely good
living, he may have engendered half a dozen children, but he is
still an infant unless he has been properly socialized and that
occurs in the first four or five years of life.
In our society today, we have attempted to throw the whole
burden of socializing out population upon the school system, to
which the individual arrives only at the age of four or five. A few
years ago they had big programs to take children to school for a
few hours at age two and three and four, but that will not
socialize them.
The first two years are important. The way a child is treated in
the first two days is of vital importance. He has to be loved,
above all he has to be talked to. A state of individuals, such as
we have now reached in Western Civilization, will not create
persons, and the atomized individuals who make it up will be
motivated by desires which do not necessarily reflect needs.
Instead of needing other people they need a shot of heroin; instead
of some kind of religious conviction, they have to be with the
winning team...
http://www.wealthbuilder.ie/essay15.htm
