To Orwell, the societal control is top down and we're sort of trapped by our limitations, fearful and in denial of the benefit to anyone's attempt to defy them.
I've always been more in the Aldous Huxley camp myself, but that's because I am such a nonconformist. :p To Huxley, control just is. We have evolved to incorporate it in our thinking and now it's intrinsic. Indeed, society is deeply engaged in a sort of perpetual mockery of itself. One giant mash-up. But to be fair, it's just that we've reached a kind of "creative critical mass". Truly "nothing new under the sun". We're deemed pretty darn harmless, but for those few very far-out fringe elements. It is nearly impossible to be original unless you're on some fringe, and then you will feel the eyes of the world upon you. If it's new, it's very likely to be quickly deemed suspect. We hear about the attempts to quell this sort of thing daily. Much about the fringes of society can be dangerous, no denying that. But in this mash up of all things deemed innocuous, has all else in between extremes been subdued?
To be cool now is to conform... and sort of just deny that one has done so. Denial is really an overarching theme now in so many aspects of life for so many...
Or, rather than go the denial route, some seem to jump right onto bandwagons knowing full well that it's total conformity... This seems to have really taken off with the Internet and all this endless "connectivity".
It's all very Orwellian and Huxleyan... Huxwellian? Orwhuxleyan? I do hereby take full credit for mashing these terms for perhaps the first time ever. :p You heard the inevitable meme here first!
We basically have a free market, where the buying and selling of just about anything legal, (and many things not so), are offered up to anyone wanting. Our freedoms are now defined by the marketplace. Our freedom comes to us in the form of the various "choices" available to us, by which we are able to exercise our free will.
A marketplace is kind of a living thing... it seeks to purchase or provide what other people will value. It isn't a new phenomenon by any stretch, what's sort of taken hold in the past decade, is this wreckless-feeling drive to conformity. We live, work and play in a worldwide market, much of our time is spent in the virtual environment open to the world. Most people have an online presence that has begun to overwhelm their physical, real time presence; Myself included. The market senses our need to survive and connect, and it responded with the products that facilitate us. So now our survival is tied to this sort of "perpetual conformity machine". It is energized by the things we do to survive in societal constructs.
The cosmos of cool might not revolve around one set of trends to one target market, but it's not any one force that's driving that, it's buyers themselves, and this market-entity responds to our preferences, which drives trends. If it sells, make another one! If it sells more, make more and charge a bit more! If it sells endlessly, make mountains of it and sell them to everyone relatively cheaply!
Considereth if you will the "Breast Cancer Awareness" Campaign. People mindlessly get on board with this stuff assuming it's good, when a lot of what's happening is bizarre, and ridiculous. Say I buy a pink can of campbells soup. (This wouldn't happen, but just humor me and pretend...) They donate to the Awareness Campaign. The Awareness Campaign is a non - profit, so their profits must go to producing more of what it is they are seeking to do charitably, which is, raise awareness of the issue of Breast Cancer. (note these are a compound "proper noun" in this context). It's been a very successful campaign, because, well, people tend to buy soup anyway. But now, packaging tape is pink. Bottles of rubbing alcohol are pink, tennis balls, pink, many many things are pink, and more and more support for this campaign is garnered every time you purchase any of these items. You're actually also supporting some products that may actually cause breast cancer with your dollars!
This from Think Before You Pink:
Pinkwasher: (pink’-wah-sher) noun.
A company that purports to care about breast cancer
by promoting a pink ribboned product, but manufactures
products that are linked to the disease.
This type of increasing conformity is disturbing. I think the important thing is that barely anyone is actually thinking about it. Is it that "not thinking" is not only a recent trend, but a classic case of ignorance that's here to stay, at least until we're fully devolved into the Idiocracy foretold in the movie of the same name?
Please think carefully about how you spend your money and your time. These, your freedoms, are what's left for you and they comprise the larger part of any impact you have in the world. The choices you make are the main ways you exercise freedom and control of your life and contribute to making our future society a place for engaging in freedom to think and behave in ways that others may not find familiar or comfortable, or a prison where any deviation is easily spotted, and quickly called out and quelled.
If this isn't disturbing enough, when you consider the "bullying zeitgiest" (thank you Madonna for that term), you see the forces of conformity at work in a very acute way. Some may think that to be PC is to quell deviations from a norm, but one can be considerate of others and speak and act accordingly without conforming to any labels if they have the intellectual capacity to express themselves and their concerns with some degree of integrity, and without denigrating others.
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