It is strange watching the behavior of certain industries like the fracking industry or the pesticide industry. With the fracking industry, you have this incredibly destructive and energy intensive process that really doesn't produce much other than a few additional huffs of gas for us oil junkies. They're blasting chemical laced water deep into the earth. That can't be good. Plus they're using WATER to do this, which is kind of alarming, considering the oncoming droughts and growing water crises in certain parts. There have been reports of insurance companies in Pennsylvania refusing to insure people's houses in frack territory, and then you have the actual industry shouting and waving that its totally safe and its an energy revolution and such and such. Pure nuts!
Then you have pesticide companies that continue to promote pesticides that have been found to be implicated in mass bee die offs. And yeah we kind of need bees to pollinate things. And they get lawyers to threaten to sue activists and beekeepers from protesting. On a related note, there was a recent report of Facebook removing an activist rally page to protest Monsanto. They all support each other. They come together with the same values and world-views and they just sort of vibrate together.
And then you have the banking industry...well, hah! It would take a library full of books to rifle off the extent of the social destruction and economic chaos they cause.
The self-interested yet collectively self-destructive activities of industries like these can be incredibly puzzling, but make more sense when you take the culture into context.
In this culture (and I'm not saying everyone adheres to it) you are on your own and you have to fend for yourself, and if you fall, you only have yourself to blame. There is less social support for such a fallen individual, and so if you fail, you are to go down in flames completely. This is more true in a social sense: a family will take care of its own materially, so long as it possesses the means (the number of families of which are dwindling), but due to our individualist and action-oriented culture, one is what one does, and this is where the social power comes from, or even social sustenance, and if one fails at the one defining thing that one does, well one is shit. It is comparable to death.
I sympathize with that fear, no doubt. When I was very depressed, I temporarily lost function of my thinking, writing, and musical faculties, and with that a huge loss of pleasure. I felt I was good as dead. With someone in the middle class like me, and then so on up the food chain, survival becomes less about material subsistence (that is already taken care of, more or less) and more about social meaning. One feels one is surviving when one has ability that is worthy of being socially esteemed. Even this is changing of course, as material subsistence itself slowly comes into question. Everyone will have to deal with that fact eventually, including myself.
But that's the experience of living in this culture. Don't fall. And so these CEOs and entrepreneurs and politicians spend their entire lives struggling to climb atop this silly heap of ours, and whatever structures of power they use to become something, they are stuck with it, the poor dears. You climb to the top of the jungle gym and you better not let go. The jungle gym is all there is.
It is tempting to try to imagine a society in which people are nurtured and encouraged as individuals, and that whatever they set out to do is supported (granting it is not destructive). That if you fall, everyone is there to catch you, and set you right back on your way. I have to wonder if these people would continue to insist on their destructive activities. I'm thinking here of a shift from a masculine mode of organization to a feminine one, though the principles are always mixed in practice, nor should one adhere to any pure extreme. However we are at a masculine extreme now. Thus the growing awareness of and enthusiasm for the feminine.
