Wylie E. Coyote and the American Dream

Western Civilization

One thing that all of humanity has in common with each other is the pursuit of happiness. Where you are born does not affect your want of as much happiness as attainable. Happiness is the one thing that 100% of us want and are always actively looking for. There are many problems with this pursuit. For one thing happiness, like everything else, is transient and must be balanced. For as much happiness as you are able to attain there will be an equal amount of sadness due. Equilibrium is the state that nature is constantly in pursuit of. Man also has an equilibrium and it goes by equanimity. In order for nature to be equalized and man to be abiding in equanimity both must be healthy. As hard as man tries he is bound irreversibly to the Earth. Terra Firma literally sustains man on an atomic level. We used to be the dirt that surrounds us. We murdered that dirt. We have become the chemicals that we created, and the dirt's only function has become like a synthetic womb impregnated with those poisons. The poison that we have become.

First, I'm going to dissect happiness. Most of us grasp after happiness without even knowing it on a daily basis. We are all aware that we are after it but many attempts by us are largely unconscious. The mechanisms we use to attain it are all vices that usually release serotonin and or dopamine. Happiness is controlled by hormone release in the brain. This allows us to see how transient the state of happiness actually is. It is nothing more than a chemical high. We have been chasing a drug. Our lives are largely about getting as many large doses of happiness as we can, indeed many of us have gone to the doctor and had it prescribed to us by way of serotonin re-uptake inhibitors such as Zoloft and Xanax. I'm not placing a judgment on those who have used this particular option because there are people who actually need these drugs because of faults in their brain chemistry. It's just been my experience that Big Pharma pretty much runs the medical field and that doctors prescribe medications because it makes them rich. This has an effect on society that causes people who refuse to be responsible for their own well being to seek these “happiness” drugs because it's legal and easy.

Whether by doctor or by other mechanisms such as sex, drugs (illegal, legal, alcohol, cigarettes, nicotine, you get the picture), food, or foodotainment depending on your information, and consumerism we chase this state of happiness.  Consumerism is the one vice that the Western world uses unanimously. We buy stuff to feel happy. How many times have you been on your way home from a box store with your vehicle stuffed with a bunch of useless stuff. You know the feeling I'm talking about. The feeling of well being you got when you charged all of that crap onto your credit card and now you get to go home and extract everything out of the plastic that it's wrapped in. That's the actual high where your serotonin levels are peaking. That felt good. You want more. You need a bigger place to house all of this pointless crap that you have to go buy in order to get your fix. Enter owning a home.

Owning a home not only gives you more space to house all of your crap, but it also gives you an unending reason to continually have to go to these box stores to buy more crap that you need to keep your house from falling apart and to keep it looking good. Even if you have it built, it's still going to fall apart because it's made as cheaply as possible so that all involved can maximize their profits. It's also made in such a way that you have to have electricity to stay warm, have hot water, wash all of your stuff, and run all of the crap that you needed the space to house to begin with. You see, most of that crap you bought requires an outlet to be plugged into. All of the crap that you need to run your house requires an outlet and some of it is just wired directly into the house. Dishwasher, clothes washer and dryer, oven, stove, hot water heater, central heat and air, lights, television, DVD player, hair dryer, computer, cell phone...everything. All of this stuff is designed to break in short order. All of this stuff requires a place to remain and an outlet to be plugged into. All of this stuff is considered necessary to have within the home. None of this stuff is made in the United States and so it all has to be transported large distances before it arrives at your house.

Now one of these big ticket items breaks and needs to be replaced. You can't very well have a house without heating and air conditioning. Problem is you don't have the cash to run out and buy a 3000 dollar heating and air unit and then pay somebody to deliver and install it. You need credit for that. The first time you swipe that card it's empowering. You swipe a piece of plastic and whatever you needs pops into existence just like magic. You have just entered into the greatest delusion perpetrated by man on man in the history of man. The “American Dream.”

Delusion is the main vehicle we use to maintain a state of happiness. The majority delude themselves that this thing called the “American Dream” is actually attainable. This is the lie that the man has sold us and that we have all signed on the dotted line for. We sold our obedience for a phantom that will never exist. The “American Dream” gave birth to globalization which is destroying our planet. Globalization has been made possible by we the people. We made it profitable for the man to exploit the planet so that we could have the epitome of the American Dream which is the house. The modern house was the consolation prize that our fighting men came home to after WW11. We crawled out of the depression to fight the war. When we got back home the economy was still fundamentally the same broke economy. Except we learned to make a lot of stuff during the war and this seemed like a feasible way to run an economy. How were we going to continue making stuff when we didn't need planes, tanks and bombs? The answer was hair dryers, microwaves, houses, roads, cars, and all of the other trappings of Suburbia. All of this stuff requires raw materials and a source of energy to create. The United States had plenty of energy via petroleum and plenty of natural resources to exploit. We began exploiting the Earth at magnitudes that are astronomical by any standard. 

 We created machines to do this gargantuan work for us. Machines that run on petroleum. 

 We began cutting down trees with a vengeance. 

If you have ever cut down a tree or simply worked with wood than you will understand the magnitude of this machine.  

We began drilling, stripping, exploding, ripping, tearing, digging, dredging, and most of all polluting the Earth. We cut as many trees down as quickly as we could and while doing that we burned as much carbon as we could. The trees are what breaths for the Earth. This would be the same as removing a lung and then chain smoking for the rest of your short life. Delusion.

We didn't stop with just this stupid act. At the same time we were doing this we were synthesizing chemicals out of the petroleum by-products we were left with. Poisonous chemicals such as pesticides, herbicides, and fungicides. We turned natural gas into synthetic fertilizer so that we could have nitrogen to trick our huge moncultures of plants such as corn to grow. This resulted in genetically modified species of food that required chemicals synthesized in a lab to grow. It resulted in high fructose corn syrup (what I have shortened into "petroleum sugar") as an ingredient in everything.  It resulted in chemicals such as monosodiumglutamate (MSG) to tell our brains that the food taste good, to make it more addictive, to maximize profit.  All of these chemicals seeped into the Earth and into our water tables and into the ocean. All of this pollution creates massive hypoxic areas in our oceans appropriately called “dead zones”. These are areas where only algae and Jelly fish can live. The rate of species extinction is estimated to be 100 to 1000 times that of the normal rate for the planet. We are killing the planet in pursuit of happiness.

The Gulf's Dead Zone

Willful delusion is responsible for this nonsense. It has become every American's goal to own a home. We get married, we buy a home, we procreate, and we get into irreversible debt. This is how we are controlled. Once you enter into this pact with the man you are seemingly trapped and helpless to do anything about any of it. The problem is that the entire thing is a lie. It's a lie because it's not sustainable for the long term. It all depends on extracting more and more from the Earth and replacing what is extracted with pollution. We take the Earth's ability to absorb pollution away by the very act of our extraction. We are committing genocide by pursuing this way of life. The Earth is a living thing and like all living things it has an immune system. It's not fiction to state that at some point the Earth is going to respond to us as our bodies respond to infection. The Earth will do that because we have become an infection. 

 The American Dream is a delusion and it's pursuit has made the Earth sick and in turn is going to kill us. We live on a planet that has a limited amount of stuff that we can exploit. Our population has already reached a level that is not sustainable and it is being propped up right now simply by the momentum of the system we have created. We are at the Wylie Coyote point in human history. The point where he has ran off the cliff and is just now realizing it before he plummets to the ground below. Problem is that he is in a canyon and he has a long way to go and plenty of time to reach terminal velocity before smashing into the Earth. The Earth is not going to cushion our fall. Why should it?

The economy has just begun imploding. The idea that our recession ended is a hallucinated idea. The fact is that the economy is simply reflecting the deeper truth behind the state of affairs in our world. The real value of money is derived from the resources of the Earth. We have been steady taking those resources, extracting the wealth, and turning the remainder into waste. That wealth has largely been turned into an increase in the human population. We have gone beyond what is sustainable. What do you think the result of all of this insanity is going to be?