Reading a forum, I ran across the advice “Play to your inspiration, not to your aspiration”.  This has come to reinforce the idea that as fully functional elements of society, we are engineered to generate an aspiration and then, quite conveniently, issued recommendations for best practice in the pursuit of this aspiration whatever it may be.  The aspiration itself can be incredibly superficial, or it can have all of the hallmarks of deep meaning and significance.  It doesn’t really matter, because for all of this, we are mostly judged for how we contribute to society and not for Who We Are.

As I say this, I also acknowledge that culture must exist.  Culture is what happens when humans interact.  It makes no sense to get rid of culture.  Culture even has a role to play in how we deal with ourselves.  I want to validate the belief that it is possible to redefine culture both as individuals and as a group.  I want to discover that it can be done in such a way that individuals are valued over the collective.  I’d really like to find our that people have not yet lost sight of the idea that individuals have power over the cultural zeitgeist.

It seems that the current cultural ethos is one of consumerism.  With global trade, this culture has been spreading in viral fashion everywhere there are resources and people to consume them.  In Peru last summer, I spent some time with some of the Shipibo tribe in the Amazon.  The thing that struck me about the experience was the description of tribal youth, one by one, forsaking the traditional value system in favor of the glitzy “stuff” to be obtained in nearby towns and cities.  Their traditional value system emphasizes knowledge of the jungle and tribal relationships.  The concept of wealth has relatively little meaning in a place where clothes are barely a necessity, and food is literally growing all around.  The saddest commentary is in the destruction of the jungle, as it is the result of indoctrination to a value system that places greater value on tv’s than the natural resources that surround them then ultimately deprives the tribe the foundations for their traditional culture.

As I write this people in developed countries all around the world are by necessity stopping their own consumerism, at least for a time, in order to preserve the resources at their disposal.  The people of the developed world (including myself) are having to contend with the idea that we have consumed ourselves into a corner.  Our consumerist culture is beginning to fracture.  I don’t mean to say that the end of the world is near (I hope not),  but it does appear that we as a collective are beginning to wake up from a dream where we lived in a place with endless resources.  A place where your value could be quantitatvely related to your wealth.

In this dreamland, we happily go to work creating consumeables for others and ourselves.  We are parts of an engine that converts raw materials into shiny blinky stuff.  After work, we exchange the fruits of our labors for shiny blinky stuff that someone else made, and the cycle is begun anew.  Unfortunately, the shiny blinky stuff that we make isn’t particularly suitable for use as raw materials, so it ultimately becomes waste…  The reality is that much of this shiny blinky stuff really functions as cultural reinforcement to keep us going back to work, happily functioning as a part of this consumerist engine.

I need to understand my connections to this culture.  I need to wake from the dream and instead of spending the better half of my waking life being a consumerist, I’m going to spend the rest of my life trying to understand what it means to be a creativist.

I don’t think that this is something everyone can do right now, but anyone who reads the stuff that people smarter than I write about the crises that exist now relating to economy, environment, and the human condition, has to admit that a sea change is happening.  What that means in terms of what individuals do to change their relationship to material existence has as many implications as there are individuals.  People want to be happy, they want freedom and peace for themselves and their children, and they need knowledge.  No one that I know looks forward to an existence marred by food and water shortages,  social unrest and disorder, or worse.

It’s as if we’ve been flying in a powerful jet, cruising high above the clouds and somewhat unexpectedly, we discover that we don’t have an unlimited supply of fuel.  What everyone is going to try to do is find a new source of fuel for this thing so that it doesn’t crash into the ground.  The thing I fear is that if we find a source of fuel, we won’t do the sane thing and bring the plane in for a landing, we’ll just keep flying;  oblivious to the inevitable end of the next fuel supply or the one after that.

People all around me have spent their lives pursuing the happy ending to this dream we’ve been living.  Some have even made it.  No one in this position wants to hear that it was all really just a dream, and that the material inertia they’ve spent their lives developing is for naught.  This doesn’t change the reality.

Knowledge is both priceless and free.  It is the ultimate consumeable, because the experiences that come from it simply beget more knowledge.  Knowledge is the ultimate energy source and the ultimate measure of wealth.