THE SELF AS PARADOX

Contemporary global economic and political rhetoric espouses the notion that all of mankind should be united in everlasting peace even while nurturing a division and separation of nationalities and civilizations. This inherently flawed rhetoric goes on to assert that the most expedient way to achieve peace is through war and this, along with suffering, inequality and injustice has in turn become the rallying-call around which a fragmented ideological unity has been sought.

As a species we have an innate propensity to judge before we understand and this tenuous relationship with right and wrong or good and evil is the very foundation upon which the dominant religions and ideologies have been built. By extension, modern society is thus through its very own predisposition, ill-equipped to cope with the complexity of unity as it strives to reduce the relativity and ambiguity of human existence to fit its own inadequate censure and dogmatism.

Furthermore, the nature of modern society has successfully reduced the significance of the individual to the social function it fulfills. This generally accepted, yet flawed value system further reduces the history of a people to a series of events that are then further reduced through interpretation and thereby allowing for the ultimate subversion of what is the essence of life and living by equating the historical evolution of the modern social species with political struggle.

The myriad expressions of this subversion is then repackaged as culture which is then codified according to political ideology and left almost entirely in the hands of the mass media whose modern function is to distribute throughout the world the same simplified stereotypes that are most easily accepted by the greatest number of people who are generally just an indistinct echo of the one voice of authority within which the nature of individuality is revealed as mere compliance and subscription.