2006-07-10 - 10:59 a.m.
If we consumed only objects for use value than a car would be a car. Obviously a car is more than a car. We do not really drive cars, we primarily drive the space between cars, the differences among them.
When we buy a vehicle say a brand new Ford Taurus, it means that we can and will drive, it connotes value type meanings as well, middle class for instance, by purchasing a Taurus we have consumed the relationship somewhere between a Pinto and a Rolls Royce.
Driving a brand new Ford Taurus alerts the other drivers "I am of use to society, I fit in, I am normal, I work hard enough to afford this car, look at me, look at me now world." This is not necessarily being truthful, what if all drivers told the truth of their economic situation, would the highways of this world still shine? Fortunately, credit cards, banks, money lenders know that the human is an animal who is fairly comfortable with not the truth.
Objects, this stuff around us absorbs our sense of loss. Wrist watches help to mitigate the fears of dying, (When will your Cold War comes) the tick-tocks distorting a reality of one's unimportance in the grand swell of time. To be caught in the spell of some author is to empty your pockets willingly like a Navy man in a red light district. To own a watch, to always have somewhere to be, is to lie in the way of exaggeration, and to admit that the North Pole is not your idea of a good time. To own a watch is something like an ancestral relationship of having a personal relationship with God, probably a useful outgrowth of what Veblen said better, more methodically, logically, as logic is the crown of a civilization over Capitalist vision.
To be asocial is to have a personality disorder. Disorders can be treated, cured, various versions of Soma only with more image presence/persuasion. Soma for the passive, the introspective, in essence, soma for the saver. The average spender per month knows something of a normal lived life. The saver is like he who is from the North pole. The uneager, the unenthused, how do we turn the spender and pretend he can make a commitment, to drop off one way gifts to the Carribean?
The sign of a person paranoid (stark awareness of verisimilitude against backrops of differentiation) is the same rare sign of a person still unimpressed. What deviates from the normal is frequently amplified into disease, the doctors in their training to make myths factual use logic to come up with answers for their exams but the answers are limited, remain rigid. Instead of asking is the Western approach to Medicine right or is the eastern approach to medicine right? Questions like which one generates more capital, or which system is more dominant, then we reache the T?R?U?T?H? or right answer, the truth is never subtle, the person with the truth is never very receptive, usually on a mission to convert others to the doctrine by which he is the author or primary beneficiary of royalties. The fact that we need an answer or believe we need an answer is more revealing than the answer itself.
Western medicine driven by the strong center of a fear of death. This fear of death could be generalized as a fear of the unknown or a fear of the unfamiliar, a fear of the strange. American society trains its citizens to be frightened of the new the more that it portends to represent the new. Similar to the paradoxical relationship between changing technology and the need for or secret desire of familiarity among chain stores. Modern Western medicine effectively places patients on devices to sustain life, all sorts of measures to preserve the last drop of life, CPR, a constant changing set of instructions, CPR is a dynamic fiction placed within the larger dynamic fiction of Medicine.
On Medical Students
The Proud, the Professional, the few with a strong sense of pride comes a proportional difficulty in opposing the mechanisms responsible for the pride. The difficulty of saying "no", I refuse to work extra. Medical students must undergo rigorous training, be put through years of study to essentially earn initials after their names. The more qualifications, the safer the hands. "This person was liscenced by the state and the country, what could possibly go wrong?" The need for safety increases in an increasingly unreal society where plastic flowers are more aesthetically pleasing than the real version. "The red paint is chipping a little from the stem but at least they don't leave those crumbly things behind."
Each medical school, like each high school injects every student with the proper amount of pride, the feeling that they are pulling together for a cause. The cause is often select, special, "not just anybody could do this" etc. The micro trainings of the young, congeal later into "the national interest." There is little more remote from the cuases of joy or anguish in everyday life but if our national teams do well, we can all celebrate together later at the bar.
