Brave New World

So...  black Friday has come along.  What a wonderful day.  A day of people spending money they don't have, buying things for people they don't like, and 70% or so buying themselves something just in case.  Seems like a good plan to me, right?

What about grayish Thursday (the day before Thanksgiving), and Cyber Monday, and all of the other rather ridiculous shopping holidays that exist?  Still a giant waste of time?  Yep.  People getting beat up for the privilege of saving a few dollars?  Yep. 

Crazy, isn't it.  But that is how part of society operates.  And well, they can have it.  During my lunch break, my next door neighbor and her kid were over, glued to Netflix watching some popular TV show or another.  Both could tell you everything about what was going on in a collection of a dozen different TV shows.  They could tell you the actors, the plots, and everything else about what was going on.  In someone else's fake life. 

Really?   Soma, anyone?

Problem is no matter where I go, you find the same complete disregard for what is happening in our lives.  It's almost like people hate their lives so much they would rather think and talk about anything else than their own life.  And that's rather depressing.  Is this the great new world we were promised?  We don't need some heavy narcotic or the legalization of drugs.  We just need a collection of people that have been raised by a system that tells them failure is OK, and success is a waste of time. 

Mass indoctrination is a simple process if you start early enough.  That, and you have to push it just right so as not to overwrite the sensibilities of the current power generation.  Everything has to be just slightly off to make people think "well, that's different but I guess it's okay".  Go too far, and people will stop you.  But if the indoctrination is close enough...  large scale deviations from specific plans generally start as small variations, not large ones.  Large variations are eradicated.  Small variations become large variations over enough cycles. 

Maybe science has got something right.