What does modern Western society stand for?
Question from the Internet:
“Does modern Western society revolve mainly around fighting oppression and depression?”
Probably this is what the West would like to believe.
But in truth, modern Western society is only about excessive consumerism, elevating the individual over the collective; it is about ruthless competition and survival and success at the expense of others. Thus the West has always been colonizing, manipulating, controlling and exploiting others, and it is the same today, especially when we look at the US.
Obviously, the rest of the world is not much better, or it is even worse. After all, we are all born with the same, inherently self-serving, egocentric and exploitative nature. But the West expresses our cancer-like raw capitalistic qualities the best.
The problem for the West — and for all of us — is that the excessive overconsumption and the constant ruthless competition while we try to provoke, manipulate and exploit each other makes us behave and exist like cancer. This is especially so since we exist in Nature’s finely balanced and mutually integrated system that forced humanity also into today’s globally integrated and interdependent world.
Thus nobody actually fights against oppression since we all aim to oppress and control others — regardless of what we say or what we think about one another.
And since you mentioned depression, when you look at Western society, you probably find the highest level of depression, suicide rates and substance abuse. Why? Because excessive overconsumption only makes us emptier while we all get exhausted from the constant fight and pay for more when we do not actually need it and we can’t afford it.
We are all depressed because, deep down, we know whatever we do right now, whatever we are brainwashed has nothing to do with our human purpose in life.
This is what we should focus on, finding the actual human purpose in life and actually getting to know why we are called “human beings” in the first place. And this search is completely missing from Western society. So we just stubbornly and blindly continue with our self-destructive lifestyles and activities like a terminally ill alcoholic or drug addict.