[MD] BBC documentary 'the trap'

[ARLO J BENSINGER JR]

[John]
We just need this minimal shell and the fact that we don't have it anymore
makes us all at least a little insane.

[Arlo]
Agree. But you can't lose something you value... to my next point...

[John]
But how does that interact and create change in a real world?  Where is the
interface of modern culture with metaphysical shifts?  Two places I can think
of, Academia and MediaWorld.  I have no hope in either.

[Arlo]
And if we are examining the loss of community, where do we look as something
that spread this devalue? I can tell you in my life exactly when it became
noticable, and it was not in the 70s. The devaluing of community, even if you
see it as a "final nail", was part and parcel of the rhetoric of "rugged
individualism" of the 80s, the outright demonizing and ridicule of any of the
"commun-" words, not just communism, but communal, community... We started
having it beaten into our skulls that caring about one's neighbors, thinking
about community, acting in any communal way, was un-patriotic, anti-freedom and
outright evil. 

The greed of the 80s decade, the "yuppie" thing, all the focus of the glories
of selfishness, this was the drumbeat of the new patriotism. As I said, you
don't lose something you value, when society valued community it held onto it
strongly. Somewhere, someone, it devalued it. And you place the blame on
"Academia"? Hell, if anything "academia" is continually assaulted for even the
most remotest considerations or valuations of "community". Most of the
"academics" have been pointing, with sadness, at the erosion of neighborhoods
and community for decades.

Still, many academic disciplines contributed, and many adopted a non-social,
isolationist view of the human condition. I don't deny this.

Joseph Campbell talks about this from a de-mything of culture, lamenting that
social humans need an "effective general mythology", a shared set of symbols by
which they can orient their understandings of the world, through which they can
be part of a larger thing than just their own lives. He attributes (if I
understand him) the high rates of psychoses in modern life to the void created
when western culture abandoned all "myth" and scientific rationality was the
only thing offered in replacement. I think this maps accurately onto Pirsig,
another post though. 

I'm not sure the level of blame to place of the "media", other than its role in
promoting via advertising the crass consumerism and selfish behavior of people.
Certainly if you look at all the books, movies, music, magazines, etc of these
decades you will find a large segment of the media that resisted the loss of
community. But overall a dollar had to be made, and making one's fortune
was(is) the only thing that mattered.