Toxic masculinity, consumerism, new age bullshit, and a bunch of other semantic bullshit floating to the top of the rancid bowl that was 1990s society. Things only only festered and gotten worse for the most part but this piece of art and others like it help us identify this stuff and give us a vocabulary with which to discuss it. Similarly to how Marx created the modern vocabulary we use to discuss and analyze class issues to this day.
I think one that gets forgot and shouldn't is Office Space. Because that's literally the world, that's the exact scheme the global financial terrorists have used to steal from everyone at every possible moment. Except it's worse, because they monetized the idle Internet browsing we all do - which we all do a lot more, since nobody has any fucking money to do anything anyway. But yeah, it's Office Space, on an unimaginable scale.
More abstractly,
Similarly to how Marx created the modern vocabulary we use to discuss and analyze class issues to this day.
The only class is human. That entire idea is obsolete. Rather than hierarchy, think of society like a restaurant. There is front of house and back of house. Nobody is above any other. We're all equal, with different responsibilities, and everyone supports everyone else. Some people need more support, at different times, and some people are more capable of giving support, at different times, sometimes due to their own abilities and sometimes due to their disproportionate rewards they have accumulated through sheer chance - because that's all any of this shit is.
Don’t mind your ceo that make $20million a year and doesn’t pay you a living wage
Though clearly it is these people, and the billionaires, most responsible for our issues, focusing only on that is part of the problem too. Because, like I explain in that second linked comment, everything is relative.
Thinking about things hierarchically is part of the problem. Flatten it. Instead of top vs down, think of it as front of house and back of house. Each different "house" then helps another "house", sometimes multiple. Sometimes that is by feeding the back of house with resources, sometimes that is by feeding the front of house with information - or vice versa.
Or instead of thinking of it that way - and none of this is meant to be absolute or 100% rules, it is descriptive, rather than prescriptive, which I say because this next one can sound bad if you don't think of it metaphorically - think of it like horses and a chariot, which includes the driver. The horses require feed. The horses can go for a long time with what they know, but they're not going to really be going anywhere with a clearly defined goal. Similarly, the chariot driver can't actually go anywhere nearly as fast without the horses. And, to bring in that metaphor about the houses feeding each other, I don't think either the horses or the chariot driver built their own chariot, which is another part of the equation. Further, the chariot is probably being used to transport resources to another house, so that it may contribute in its own way.
Or more abstractly, think of society as if we all have a chain binding us in two directions. One forward, where we are pulled, and one behind, where we do the pulling. In a perfect society, which is impossible, everyone is 100% equal. The reason that is impossible is due to time. If we were all born on the same exact day, in the same exact place, we could be 100% equal. That is clearly not possible. So, the function of government, business, society and so on is to make it so no single person or group becomes too big to pull. The way that is supposed to work, in a natural system which functions, is that when an individual or group becomes larger than they should, they should then take on more of the "pulling", because it is impossible for those who are small to pull something which is huge.
The reason things are totally stopped is because all of the largest do nothing and don't understand why the little people can't pull them. The worst part is that isn't necessarily impossible, but there's also no direction which makes sense, so the little people aren't even going the same direction. It's like a giant unmovable mountain with billions of people pulling in different directions. And the mountain says we need to pull harder. Even more problematically, many of the little people aren't pulling at all, and are instead telling those of us who are trying to pull that we need to pull harder, in a different direction.
This is not sustainable. The system is supposed to balance things. The system is supposed to counteract the natural way things flow - which is, truthfully, mathematically proven, that large amounts of money accumulate more money. We are doing literally the opposite of what makes sense. It's like trying to put out a fire by pouring on gasoline. And that same thing is true across all of our systems, whether money or the way the algorithm serves up content.
We can measure all things against fire as a standard; there is an equivalence between all things and gold, but all things are not identical to gold. Similarly, fire provides a standard of value for other stuffs, but it is not identical to them. Fire plays an important role in Heraclitus’ system, but it is not the unique source of all things, because all stuffs are equivalent.
Ultimately, fire may be more important as a symbol than as a stuff. Fire is constantly changing-but so is every other stuff. One thing is transformed into another in a cycle of changes. What is constant is not some stuff, but the overall process of change itself. There is a constant law of transformations, which is, perhaps, to be identified with the Logos. Heraclitus may be saying that the Milesians correctly saw that one stuff turns into another in a series, but they incorrectly inferred from this that some one stuff is the source of everything else. But if A is the source of B and B of C, and C turns back into B and then A, then B is likewise the source of A and C, and C is the source of A and B. There is no particular reason to promote one stuff at the expense of the others. What is important about the stuffs is that they change into others. The one constant in the whole process is the law of change by which there is an order and sequence to the changes. If this is what Heraclitus has in mind, he goes beyond the physical theory of his early predecessors to arrive at something like a process philosophy with a sophisticated understanding of metaphysics.
We are the fire. But we are also what is transformed by the fire. We are the yin and the yang and the symbol as a whole.
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u/According-Insect-992 23d ago
Toxic masculinity, consumerism, new age bullshit, and a bunch of other semantic bullshit floating to the top of the rancid bowl that was 1990s society. Things only only festered and gotten worse for the most part but this piece of art and others like it help us identify this stuff and give us a vocabulary with which to discuss it. Similarly to how Marx created the modern vocabulary we use to discuss and analyze class issues to this day.