Sometimes I feel like I’m following in the footsteps of the movie characters, musicians, storybook heroes, or socialites in my media sphere, without even wanting or trying to. After watching a compilation video of people eating cactuses, I had the sudden urge to bite the cactus on my front deck a couple of days ago, complete with mental impressions and imagery of the spikes on the inside of my mouth. This is a frequent occurrence with what I am subjected to experientially, which is why I like to tightly control my subjective experience and keep things on the level.
I guess this is as good a day as any to remind everyone not to bear or bestow (put up with or force on others) any false idolatry or idols (emulation of things we don’t truly love and admire), and not just in the sense of competing religious symbolism. In other words, it’s ok to model yourself after personal heroes that you’ve studied and want to align your ideals with, but it’s not ok to let yourself be led in the footsteps of people you don’t truly want to take after. When it comes to false idols, don’t bear them. In other words, don’t put up with that shit, whether you’re a traditional monotheist or not.
It’s very hard to say what causes these types of unwanted situations, and even harder to say if a person, or group of people, armed with advanced technologies would be capable of inducing them in others via globally-applied social controls. When it comes to the ability of technology and trolls to incite strange effects in people, my experiences in life have led me to be a believer in the idea that the human condition has been ultimately mastered and anything can be foisted on a person, including desire to imitate a norm or behavior. This is in some ways evidenced by the virality of memes, and the suddenness with which memetic phenomenon switched from a medium which was previously used primarily for jokes, into one in which the memetic medium was used primarily for marketing and forced social adherence to norms.
Happy Easter (for you sheepishly pagan monotheists) and happy 4/20 (for you hedonistic secularists). Much love to all my friends and family around the world.
/confetti-egg-smash!
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