"Advertising, commercialism, and cultural anti-intellectualism have run rampant and dysgenic pressure has resulted in a uniformly unthinking society devoid of intellectual curiosity, social responsibility, and coherent notions of justice and human rights."
StagNation
Junk Food and Junk Culture are the root cause of Stagnation
The common theme across all nations right now is stagnation. The globalized ponzi scheme has generated overwhelming inertia and total inaction in every direction. The entire globe is lurching inexorably towards economic collapse. We can ignore it or we can blog incessantly about it, but absolutely no one has any plan to fix it. There is no way to "fix" a Ponzi scheme. The only option is to let it collapse and then hopefully learn from the mistakes.
Peeling back the layers of the onion, there's the greed layer, the incompetence layer, the regulatory failure layer, the fiscal/monetary policy layer, the fundamentally imbalanced Globalization layer, the reserve currency layer, all of these no doubt contributed to this historical fiasco. However, the epicenter of this uniquely massive collapse has been the proliferation of junk food and junk culture - worldwide. Only a society that has been dumbed down to abject oblivion would consider all of today's malfeasance, just "business as usual".
Soylent Idiocracy: 7 billion people made junk food necessary
The planet can't create and sustain real food for 7 billion+ inhabitants, so frankenfood filled that void. Any typical supermarket bears witness to the fact that 90% of today's food is mass produced factory food either devoid of nutrion or artificially "refortified" with vitamins that were stripped from it during "processing". Buying labelled boxes of food outside of the produce section now requires a PhD in chemistry just to navigate the various artificial ingredients designed to create "food" that can sit on a shelf for 3 months straight. Even the produce section itself is a minefield of GMO-laced disaster that most of us roam with plausible deniability. And only in the age of the yuppy would the term "Whole Foods" get hijacked by a high end grocery chain which is beyond the financial reach of average families. That fact alone rests my case. Today, eating real food has become a luxury of upper middle class families for whom the price is the last artifact of concern.
Under assault from the knife and fork:
All of this toxic waste, inappropriately labelled as "food", has destroyed health on a scale that alcohol and cigarettes couldn't possibly achieve. The 1960s' two-pack a day cocktail swilling "Mad Men" where paragons of health compared to today's average junk food addict. Since 1990, women without a degree have lost a staggering 5 years of life expectancy while men without a degree have lost 3 years. All of this damage occurred under the false idol of "consumer choice" which was really just a trojan horse for amplified corporate profits and the mass degradation of nutrition. Junk food is an addiction without any treatment. Unlike booze and cigarettes, society turns a blind eye to treating our own children like toxic waste dumps as they are exposed to high fructose corn syrup and other artificial additives, leading to rampant childhood diabesity - a life sentence for those afflicted with type 2 diabetes in adolescence. And needless to say, the "healthcare" system, now comprising 17% of U.S. GDP - and growing, is a total fucking disaster in dealing with this epidemic. It's just another massive profit grab for the health care cartel - patients who never get better and are never weaned from their pharmaceuticals. This epidemic is by no means uniquely American of course. Some of the highest diabesity rates are to be found in developing nations - China now has the world's largest diabetes epidemic. The degradation of food is a global phenomenon. Mammoth land whale governors and crack smoking mayors are now venerated as "one of us", because everyone can identify with a four hundred pound crack addict. If we play our cards right, that could be us one day.
In a world, where billions live on $1 a day or less and constantly struggle for food security, we find that
In a world, where billions live on $1 a day or less and constantly struggle for food security, we find that
Junk Culture is the Handmaiden to Junk Food
Junk culture, like junk food, is the end result of popular culture that has been incessantly degraded by a population no longer capable of learning or knowing anything of consequence. Minds and bodies that are contaminated by toxic waste have no capacity to learn, retain, or even seek meaningful education. It's a world where the Learning Channel contains no learning and the History Channel contains no history. It's the Idiocracy writ large. Every aspect of the media has been commercialized and therefore must make as much money as possible. There is no mandate anymore for anyone to tell the truth and/or provide unbiased information in an objective and straightforward fashion. NPR/PBS is the closest variant and yet those outlets have been branded 'liberal', because for a bloated and stagnant society, the truth is now liberal. Any aspect of reality that is considered "inconvenient" to today's rapacious mass consumption is now the enemy of the bloated masses.
Democracy is a Privilege, Not a Right
In legal terms, our "democracy" such as it exists on paper, is a legal right. However, in the context of a society hell bent on self-destruction, that right has been freely yielded to billionaire elitists and their well-placed bukkake whores, to run the asylum as they please. And by all accounts they have seized the day with gusto, abetted by thrilling epidodes of American Idol and the Kardashians.
The bottom line is that no society that has had its health and intelligence systematically degraded will ever be able to properly govern itself under "democracy", hence today's political circus was inevitable. Under the current paradigm it makes literally no difference who is the next "president" in this globalized clusterfuck. Just as it has made absolutely no difference for the past six fifteen years.
