This is http://www.essayz.com/a8809081.htm Previous-Essay <== This-Essay ==> Following-Essay Click HERE on this line to find essays via Your-Key-Words. {Most frequent wordstarts of each essay will be put here.} ========================================================== %TECHNOCRATIC ADDICTIVE CODEPENDENT SOCIETY 880908 The provision of "fixes" for profit teaches people that they need to be fixed. People learn that it is normal to be defective and in need of fixes. The message is that fixes come from outside a person, and make a person all right, happy, fulfilled, acceptable, etc. The individual messages have to do with the advantage of the fix which is being advertised: food, soft drink, alcoholic beverage, cigarette, clothing, sexuality, education, science, technology, weapons, etc. The overall message which is the foundation of the individual messages is that most people are in need of being fixed by some thing which is not inherent in themselves. The pervasive message is that there exist external technologies which can be purchased to compensate for internal defects which are inherent in individual persons. Given sufficient advertising many people tend to come to believe the basic message inherent in the advertising. They find temporary satisfaction in individual fixes. The temporary satisfaction comes to be viewed as a confirmation of the basic message that there is a fundamental human need to find a fully satisfying fix. The view evolves that the fundamental human problem is that of finding the satisfactory technology by which to be fixed as a good person. Fixes are offered by others. Advertisers are not selling the view that salvation is present within each person as a power which transcends each person. Such advertising would not be profitable in a business sense, and does not dominate the market-place of a profit-full economy. In a profit-full economy the basic message which dominates is the message that fixes for defective humans are to be acquired for a price from outside the defective humans. This is the foundation for the vitality of a capitalistic system. People who try all the legal fixes ultimately find that none of the legal fixes bring full satisfaction; they are temporary fixes which ultimately fix nothing. People who have been taught that they need fixes and who experimentally find that no legal fix brings ultimate satisfaction, ultimately turn to other fixes which promise to bring ultimate satisfaction: chemical solutions, illegal drugs, illegal business and disintegrative sexual activities. Such fixes heighten the sense of promise, the sense of need for powerful fixes, and the total dependence upon external fixes. People become dependent upon techniques, they become technocrats addicted to various forms of fixes. The more respectable addicts are addicted to respectable technologies which are admired far and wide. The less respectable addicts are addicted to illegal technologies which lead more quickly to personal and communal disintegration. All addicts and their supportive codependents are dependent upon fixes which reside outside their being who they really are, fixes which do not reach to who they really are. Such fixes do not fix anything. They do not fix the need to be who you really are. All fixes heighten the conviction that you need to be somebody other than who you really are before you can be fully fixed; and heighten the conviction that you really do need to be fixed. There is no way to satisfy such convictions. Our fulfillment as a person is in fully being whole and honest as the unique self which we really are. There is no fulfillment in trying to be any other person than the person we really are, or in trying to fix the person we really are to be a presumably "better" person. The way to be fixed is to accept and live the revelation that we do not need to be fixed to be a whole member of a true community with integrity. The true community is a community of people who in joy accept themselves and each other wholly as whole persons who are holy as they really are. Acceptability is a gift, not an achievement. In the nature of things we are acceptable. We can relax when we really know that together with integrity. (c) 2005 by Paul A. Smith in (On Being Yourself, Whole and Healthy) ==========================================================