I am exposed to disturbing things / signs / trends on a daily basis. I am wondering how long I can maintain what I consider a normal standard when the people around me compromise their integrity and act in ways that are immoral but (perhaps?) necessary for their survival.
We know a man cheats at every turn… so that he can feed his family. It’s a way of life. Cheating, stealing, cutting corners, taking advantage, screwing the system, manipulation, lies, etc. So what do I tell my son about this? Do I tell him to do the right thing unless certain conditions are met? What are the conditions? At what point can he disregard moral law and join the (swelling) masses of people who live by no law and justify everything they do?
I am asking these questions because I have to answer them. I don’t want my son to cheat, steal, cut corners, take advantage, screw the system, manipulate and lie. I also don’t want to tell him a person is not responsible for their own behavior because of some entity like a political party or “bankers” or “big business”, because that’s not real. If you put your hand in the pot and steal, it is YOUR hand. However, I’m not keen on condemning others, especially when I don’t know their exact circumstances and this all makes me feel intensely uncomfortable.
I also feel sad. I come from a terrifically hard place and I never thought I’d have to go back there. I wouldn’t feel so bad if I wasn’t a mother. But I am a mother.
How do you feel about the world around you at this point in time?
@Isernia “I have felt for about 10 years now that society will be forced to revert back to Victorian times, for lack of a better analogy”
We can only hope. It may be unrealistic, but I would take your vision over this “thing”, new dark ages we’re living in.
well, this is a big question. First of all, I’m not impressed by people on tv telling me I live in a decaying society and it’s all over for us, and now we’re going to become a third world country.
When you talk to young people, they don’t think it’s true that it’s all over for them, quite the contrary. They’re not concerned that we’re turning into a third world country because most of them have very little experience with being a first world country, given that most of thee benefits of it were eaten up by the locusts tht were their predecessors. There’s nothing wrong with being a third world country, lots of nice people come from them, and most of those countries are full of honest, hardworking people who are not at all concerned that they don’t have color televisions or their own automobiles. So this seems like more of a Lament of the Educated Class.
Going to college and working for a corporation your whole life didn’t get you very far in life? and now the money is all gone because the corporations took it all?
Surprise, suprise.
This is kind of how the class wars have been going for thousands of years and my family were all peasants, so I’m not afraid of losing all kinds of benefits I never had to begin with. I’m not afraid of giving up some future promised to me by huge institutions who had everything to gain from lying to me, and to you.
My grandma raised three kids during the depression. Somehow she managed to obtain and maintain an enormous, beautiful house for cheap and she did an awful lot of work on it by herself. She painted, she sewed clothes for all her children, she could stretch a dollar to infinity. She never thought this was some kind of curse over her head: it was just her life, her responsibility and her home and family.
Around her the neighborhood was in squalor, but hers never ever was. Terrible things befell her, terrible choices had to be made, and she made them and kept going. She never believed for a minute in anything but working hard at what was in front of her. Tell her she was in a decaying society and the rich people took all the money and left us with all the work, and I think she’d think that was absolutely nothing new and go mow her lawn.
“Honor is a gift a man gives to himself.” from the movie, Rob Roy, one of the best scenes, ever. Probably too much for a kid Vid’s age but a short clip is on YouTube.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g28pOEo0OKE
Oy…my grandparents were incredibly poor in the depression and at one point were stuck with the body of their dead 13 year old daughter in the house for days, while my grandfather walked from farm to farm in vain, trying to find someone who’d help him take the body to town.
I have more horror stories of the depression, come from the people who fared poorly, worked hard, fucked lots of things up, were filthy and reviled. LOL. Sorry, I have Moon/Pluto, natally and now by transit, and it shows!
No doubt many too many are even **personally** responsible in all this world situation, no doubt on this. But you know the old saying: “Dìvide et ìmpera”, Divide and command, that is: Divide **in order** to command, divide with the aim of ruling.
So they put the world into a never ending survival fight, destroying any security in work and in future. They did it in the name of Liberty. The Liberty of someones **against** the rest.
After having been preciptated in this – another Latin saying – “Bellum omnium contra omnes” (T. Hobbes), the fight of everyone against anyone else that cannot but give still more power to the ones who just owned it! – after this never ending battle, we cannot be surprised of the dacadence that, starting from economy, has just passed into anything else in society. The great danger is called “anomy”, the lack not of laws, but of norms, the unsaid rules that **really** are the forms that govern society and let the endemic egoism of human species to be focused and released in and on precise objects. In this way, egoism and insticts may become a source of force, it is like canals for water. In fact if water is not “canalized” it finally will lie on the ground, becoming mud…
But the whole world is perceiving that the wind is changing: It cannot continue with this sort of world dictatorship for much time still…
I have definitely noticed this trend and it frightens me. My husband and I are more and more suspicious of others now. We protect ourselves in whatever ways we can. We don’t offer assistance to others any longer, we don’t open the door when a random stranger knocks. It’s sad but true and I will do whatever I have to to keep these people from taking advantage of me and mine. Even if it takes the charity out of my life. Why should I give money to random strangers on the street just b/c they CLAIM to be war vets? Bullshit, I say. It’s just another way to take advantage of others.
Another side of this trend, as I see it, is that it seems I am constantly having to call one company or another about them overcharging me for something, or my tab gets rung up incorrectly, or my payment doesn’t post when it should and I get charged late fees, a discount doesn’t post correctly, etc. I feel like I work SO HARD to keep money coming in and then have to fight tooth and nail to keep it from draining away due to others’ mistakes. Drives me round the bend!
I can relate to having no career and working in dead-end jobs. I have Pluto in 10th myself, square Mars and Jupiter.
Back in 2008 when the economy started going to Hades and peoples’ lives were being turned upside down, I remember getting the feeling that everyone else was climbing into my boat. Ah, NOW you all know what it’s like to worry about money, to work at a dead-end job, with no savings, no retirement fund, no job security, no money for vacations so ALL vacations are “staycations” (what a lame word!), to live near the poverty line and to question the so-called “experts” and The Powers That Be to know what’s good for the rest of us. Welcome to my world!!
Sorry if this seems insensitive, but Pluto in Cap kind of feels…familiar to me.
I watch my son, at near forty, when he comes to visit us in our very tiny spaces in the woods. Our hotwater heater is an 8 cup coffee maker, and our kitchen is a creative Quonset Hut built by hand and income from one social security check. He has seen me in big, small and no house, and works in systems that are wasteful as well as hopeful. He was raised in a small country life by young hippies who could garden, fish, and cook. His parents are divorced and living extreme lifestyles. His Libra-packed chart seems to be serving him well as he balances the decaying society with his study-practice as a native Hawaiian healer.
That coconut dropping from the top of the building scenario, Elsa, is vivid. Thing with coconuts is they smash what or who ever is down there as well. I dig deeper into what I value, and am really glad we are living in a small rural community where like someone described, only the respected biz and honest workers keep getting the work.
Living with as little as we do, we know we can do it. Cutting corners? We have a life where there are no corners left to cut, so we live with rounded edges in more than a metaphoric definition.
You love that Vid boy, and that will matter most no matter what.
The reasons for the fall of Rome.
1) art becoming freakish and sensationalistic instead of creative and original;
2) a widening disparity between the very rich and the very poor;
3) an increased demand to live off the state;
4) concern with displaying affluence instead of building wealth;
5) obsession with sex and perversions of sex.
I do still see the paralells to ancient Rome.