Thank you 1800 Repasado, you are always good company: A thoroughly socialized person is one who desires only the rewards that others around him have grafted onto genetically programmed desires. He may encounter thousands of potentially fulfilling experiences, but he fails to notice them because they are not the things he desires. What matters is not what he has now but what he might obtain if he does what others want him to do. Caught in the treadmill of social controls, that person keeps reaching for a prize that always dissolves in his hands. In a complex society, many powerful groups are involved in socializing, sometimes to seemingly contradictory goals. On one hand, official institutions like schools, churches, and banks try to turn us into responsible citizens willing to work hard and save. On the other hand, we are constantly cajoled by merchants, manufacturers, and advertisers to spend our earnings on products that will produce the most profits for them. And, finally, the underground system of forbidden pleasures run by gamblers, pimps, and drug dealers, which is dialectally linked to the official institutions, promises its own rewards of easy dissipation-provided we pay. The messages are very different, but their outcomes are the same: they make us dependent on a social system that exploits our energies for its own purposes. - Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Posted on: Sat, 11 Oct 2014 06:59:16 +0000
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