Sunday, April 17, 2016
Love and Trust
In most traditional hunter gatherer societies, the people you spent the most of your time with were members of your family or clan; or extended family. Most of the people you spent your intimate time with were related to you and knew your personal history. These people were more than "just friends." These were people that you loved and trusted with your life.
Today, in USA America, the majority of people that we spend the majority of our intimate personal time with are absolute strangers who have no interest in our lives at all. On any ordinary day, the majority of time that Americans spend is in the work place. In my career of thirty years I frequently worked eight, ten, or more than twelve hours a day -- frequently working six days a week. I rarely worked less than eight hours a day, five days a week. The majority of my waking time was spent "at work." The majority of my work time was spent with people that I no longer even remember. These people might have been polite, or sociable, but they were not really friends and I have little contact with any of them today. In fact, a sizable number of those people could be classified as enemies as they actively tried to 1. make me look bad, 2. take credit for my work, 3. take my job position away, or 4. effectively kill my career.
One of the major problems with American Society is that there is no friendship in most of our simple and intimate everyday relationships. There is no love and trust. And worse, many of those people who you are intimately connected with do not care about you. They may even want to hurt you. In many cases, you are unaware of these motivations, because everyone pretends otherwise.
There is no love and trust in the American workplace. And since the American workplace makes almost the whole of society, there is almost no love or trust in most relationships in America; especially when compared to the "hunter gatherer" social system that we evolved to be a part of.
There is no love or trust in America. There probably never was.
copyright (c) 2016
William Schaeffer
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I will forever be haunted by the memory of a quiet young man whose name I can no longer remember. I was just promoted to "graveyard shift" 3rd shift QA at CST. This colorist was having a trivial difficulty with a shot. He was shy and seemed embarrassed to ask a simple question. I was impressed with his integrity and conscientiousness and desire to do a good job. He was doing acceptable work.
ReplyDeleteThe next night he did not show up for work. Two days later the supervisor informed me that he had committed suicide. No one ever spoke of him again and I have forgotten his name. I still remember talking with him and still feel sad about the whole event thirty years later.
I sent a copy of this link in an email to twenty friends and former coworkers. Only two of those twenty bothered to respond. One was sympathetic with sadness and the other was sympathetic with anger. I assume that the other eighteen people had no feelings whatsoever. To me, THIS fact alone is a sad confirmation of the truth of this article.
ReplyDeleteA society without love cannot last and it will self destroy itself. You are busy making plans for the future and you do not realize that there is no future. Just wait and see what happens this summer 2016.
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