SUCCESS means a change of state for the kind of issue one faces. Success is usually declared with a sense of completion, of accomplishment in the realization of a goal. Most success has been defined in regard to a goal achievement that was perceived as a good challenge. Common things we all assume about it right?
The greatest accumulation of success often seems to be defined in career or goal achievements of an intellectual or economic nature. And of course, there are things such as sports and gambling where these can occur incrementally "on the run". The goal in view achieved equals success. This is a pure and simple my gain way to put it, but wrong. Terribly wrong.
Children are encouraged to be successful in school, to learn, yes, but to be prepared to be successful in life. Relationship success is often assumed to be a component of a great success emotionally. If the adds and the statements regarding "making a good living" are considered, we see that much success is a kind of code word for making lots of money.
Success seems to live in its amorphous zone, where the rest of the world is not necessarily drawn in to the achievement. Success is abstract, along with the potential of being highly subjective. Depends on how high ones sights are set and what exactly it is that they are resting on as the goal. Existential relativism can seem to detach success from any other reality considerations.
Success is like many things; in the eye of the beholder, for in much competition based success, there are relative losers, especially if success was solely being defined as winning, or being first. Many seem to compare success in this way as well; not relative success but number one in some respect. Success, although sounding very positive, in not necessarily so. The kind of achievement orientation we as a culture profess, has no accountability to The Whole. The Whole? What the hell is that?
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Well, let's say in my early youth, an uncle showed me how to change the oil of his car and how to complete this process by dumping the oil into a hole in the ground. A successful change of oil; good for the car, but even worse for the environment and our garden. We can question the success on many levels as far as the Whole of Life is concerned, and that is what must be considered for the goal as a fantasy to attain the most legitimate reality upon completion.
We can be motivated, then, to deny the extending consequences of our actions if they are somehow brushed aside. This creates a "need" to deny The Whole. One of the most trusted ways of doing this is to praise the abstract success, while condemning those greater questions as being illegitimate; wrong factually, or from negatively indited sources of information. You can imagine my hypothetical uncle and I with two likely scenarios; be appalled that we were doing something wrong to the environment, or condemn the insinuation that we were somehow bad, for what else was a guy to do? Cognitive dissonance can step in to accuse the factual indictment as coming from bad kinds of people, lets say eggheads, who do not respect real folks. Should be beginning to sound familiar.
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Successful auto manufactures, oil companies, race car drivers, and the many things we all use cars and oil for, no longer, nor ever factually did exist in abstraction alone. Now things are on a different level; that oil may have been successfully changed, but what is driving a car doing to The Whole? Sure dumping the oil will be recognized as a bad to be corrected by recycling, but what of driving itself? When driving began, and horses, carriages and bicycles, plus walkers were pushed out of the way, many bemoaned the success of the car on many social and other grounds. But the cars success as a dominant transportation paradigm pushed us into our own automobiles.
The trouble is in the paradigm; Auto companies worked against mass transportation so they could develop the individual travel module mindset. This truism emerges; the more subjective and abstract the definition of success, the more likely negative elements, for in most all situations, 2 or more heads are better than one or none.
The success of this individualistic concept of freedom of transportation has helped create huge and wasteful repetitions of devices that eat up the environment and produce accumulating toxins at the fastest rate. We more or less have a need, now, to not think of The Whole, to wish questions of appropriateness or sustainability were marginalized or gotten rid of. Just this one big success example or cars and oil, and its many offspring, including families and individual fortunes created by them, all have participated in producing a huge failure into the environment. That our culture has those who seek to deny this, is obvious and dangerous to all. And yet narratives of success, and the enemies of it, continue to flood the media's.
(As far as the Liberal Mainstream Media is concerned; 6 corporations own the vast majority of the media, and they follow the standard corporate paradigm that is a perfect match for psychotic personality disorder rationalization. I think a magazine called Mother Jones runs a commercial that declares it is offering 'That famous liberal media bias you just cannot find anywhere else.')
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The kinds of denial, and obfuscation of cause and intention, that dependency on the systemic failure's not coming to the attention of success in identity tagging, needs to be psychologically controlled for self respect and societal value to exist amidst contrary indication. This has helped to spawn whole new propaganda and identity tagging industries to validate the unbridled and self actualized success of success. Questions as to its failure are represented as unreasonable, as false and misleading. Science must be attacked, since it is the main source of feedback observation and theory coming in from The Whole environment, where peer review puts the pressure on proof.
In the USA, the conservative party has become the gathering grounds for the majority of anti-science reasoning, and ad-hominem rationalizing. By essentially killing introspective questioning coming from other sources, they do not know it they are validating a failing paradigm for those who resist changing to accommodate environmental or other mandates upon behavior's other cost and its negative impact. This science denial need, makes these economic conservatives, unlikely bed partners in politics with anti-science religious institutions. Both these groups can then see some mutual advantage in both their positive identity abstraction campaigns which entice good and successful folks by definition, and then uniting that effort with their negative science campaigns. They both need critically thinking impaired followers to make this alliance work. Along with leaders who will be the stand-ins for the Successful and Holy narratives, which generally need no true reality testing, especially to be evaluated in context to The Whole.
The success of media corporations to consolidate their interest to basically just 6 corporations, might be big personal success stories for those involved, but for the truth? The less competition toward diversity of perspective means less "need" to seek out information. Many news departments have been decimated over an ensuing change of the news from investigative information to entertainment and appearance. This also means the success of consolidation and reduction equals less information for voters in a democracy. It certainly also produces less information of the damaging nature of consolidation and corporate bottom lines to the service they are performing, or could be performing.
We can say that success in business has come to institute institutional failure, when The Whole is not considered as being primary. We are then left with companies that are winners, and a public that is undoubtedly, in The Whole context of democracy, rendered a loser. Yes, anarchy capitalism socializes its negatives to the public, becoming socialism for the "winners", while the public picks up the loss.
In the economic consolidation paradigm, we have just witness the creation of entities that fail on such a grand scale, they are declared too big to fail. Which is a misnomer, since they are failures thanks to all their self serving success? The same would hold true to we individuals; when I do not include The Whole of responsibility and accountability in my actions, I am ignoring some truth that will assert itself eventually. Greed and self centeredness do not create permanent subjective voids in the creative context of Life.
Yes. Success is just another dualistic abstraction that can actually be the opposite of what it may seem. We are trapped in blinded union into this ignored dichotomy unless we come to see with eyes that include each of our own places in the Whole of Life, and how that life of ours can exist in harmony with the nature of being. Otherwise, with the unchecked cancerous paradigms too many of us still insist upon, thanks to ignorance and or avoidance, it might be life on earth that will hit the restart button, for humanity will have become stuck into its own built in obsolescence, or annihilation.
Life Itself, always seems to intent to move on with or without us...
Each American produces an average of 22 tons of co2 emission per year, compare to 6 tons for the rest of the world. The price of success may well be terminal degradation of the earth.
Exploitation of societies and individuals in other ways, creates whole new balance dynamics in their relevant cultural and other ecosystems. In general, conservatism blinds its adherents to the Whole; to The Other, and the repercussions that emanate out from any act.
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