{"id":1670,"date":"2006-10-09T19:25:19","date_gmt":"2006-10-09T18:25:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.dandavats.com\/?p=1670"},"modified":"2006-10-09T19:25:19","modified_gmt":"2006-10-09T18:25:19","slug":"unnecessary-illusions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.dandavats.com\/?p=1670","title":{"rendered":"Unnecessary Illusions"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"From The KC blogger<\/a><\/p>\n

My local student newspaper, Gair Rhydd (yes its Welsh!), printed this absolutely blindingly amazing KC article entitled “Unnecessary Illusions” just last week! I still can’t believe they did and it’s not even written by a devotee.<\/p>\n

The person who wrote it used an alias but this article is so well written that all students I’ve asked to read it can relate and not only that but start to emphatise with it! I kept ranting about it all week. It’s completely amazing…if you want to write KC articles for student magazines\/newspapers then this is the Bible!!!<\/p>\n

Please whatever you’re doing stop for a few minutes and read this article. Also forward this to others and add your comments at the bottom of this page.<\/p>\n

“We are decadent. We can see this in the way our culture tells us to pursue ideals such as happiness. This is the view democracy lives by, trying to create the largest amount of happiness by promoting pleasure and absolving pain. A noble cause if ever there was one.<\/p>\n

But we go about this all wrong. In our pursuit of eradicating unhappiness, we actually create more. We are spoilt; we have become used to receiving pleasure and absolving pain too instantly. Got a hangover? Have a Paracetamol. Feel hungry? Want something supremely tasty but takes no effort to prepare? Here’s reconstituted carcass-meat packed with chemicals. Hey, at least it tastes good.<\/p>\n

How do we promote happiness and condemn pain? Our society offers a wide range of hopelessly quick-fix, short-term solutions to our problems. The tragedy is this instant gratification culture has permeated into every level of society and even into our deepest relationships. So now we have sex without intimacy, children without commitment, and friendships without loyalty.<\/p>\n

Why should self-control and the repression of desire be such a bad thing? We pig-headedly insist that the greatest good lies in the instant gratification of desire. This view is not just muddle-headed but physically destructive. The great thinker, David Hume, said that the human creature is a ‘bundle of habits’. Take a casual sex habit. It will demand constant gratification and will produce pain if left unsatisfied. If we do not learn to control it, it will eventually control us.<\/p>\n

Our culture offers us happiness via quick-fix solutions to our desires:,unnecessary illusions. The trouble is true happiness takes time. This is obvious when you think about it – would you rather eat Microchips or carefully prepared home-cooked southern fried wedges? It’s obvious that anything worthwhile will take time, effort and commitment.<\/p>\n

This quick-fix culture offers us illusions instead of anything substantial. We are not offered a life but a lifestyle. Take your average nightclub on a Friday night. How do these clubs give us pleasure? The answer is by feeding us illusory desire-gratification. For that one night we are united in the common experience of drunkenness; strangers now have something in blurry common; friends are united.<\/p>\n

Unlike something substantial and lasting, this faux-unity has a limited lifespan and when it is gone, the pain of its absence seems all the more poignant. It also sacrifices true friendship. How can you build a substantial relationship with someone if most of the time you spend together is in deafening nightclubs getting drunk? We go out together instead of really getting to know each other. The next morning, there is no more quick-fix illusion left; we are left with our suffering.<\/p>\n

For another example, let us take the music played at the clubs. Overly-sexualized, it gives us the illusion of being desired. “Don’t you wish your girlfriend was hot like me?” The illusion of happiness provided by this particular song is based on being sexually attractive, as if that is the be-all and end-all of life. Both sexes forget their worries and for that moment, are happy.<\/p>\n

Beneath all the suave music production and all the killer dance moves lies an essential degradation of humanity. The girl who says “I am sexy, I am better than that guy’s girlfriend” has now reduced herself to nothing more than an object by which to satisfy male desire. The guy who hears this lyric is offered nothing more than sexual gratification, as if that was all he could ever gain from a relationship with a woman. A terrible perversion of what a relationship should be.<\/p>\n

To become sucked in by these illusions and to seek to become like them can only result in suffering. We think that if we dress and act like these pop stars and celebrities, we will become like them: our desires will be satisfied, and our pain eradicated. For the guys, having spent all night drinking and being fed illusions of beautiful, available women, when they then find themselves on a cold, hard street with nothing but unsatisfied desire, many deal with this pain
\nthrough the violence we see on our streets every Friday night.<\/p>\n

Our night-off, the culmination of the working week, the point where we ‘let our hair down’ and have a ‘good time’, is nothing more than an exercise in feeding our hungry souls with meaningless illusions. We receive nothing substantial; we want a loaf and instead get one slightly depressed Quaver.<\/p>\n

To give a somewhat less discouraging example of these illusions, The Daily Mail (I know, I know) has recently been promoting the idea that we can all ‘Learn French in a week!’ Now, call me a pessimist but how can anyone, (except the most talented linguist), expect to learn French in a week? Instead of putting in the work over a period of time, giving the language the commitment it deserves, we are given another illusion: ‘You don’t have to work hard because you can get your result in a week!’ There is no respect for hard work, commitment and self-control any more.<\/p>\n

Full and substantial desire-gratification is a valid wish but it demands work and commitment. Sex is best when in a committed relationship. This is fairly simple stuff but people are not prepared to put in the effort that relationships require, but still demand sexual gratification. It doesn’t work like that. This is why we are in an unhappy place right now.<\/p>\n

We all have a hope that one day our suffering will be gone and that we will be happy. A hope like this is essential to the human heart, it stops us sliding into catatonic despair. Society used to look to God for this hope. Now instead of God and with a church that is, and let’s be fair here, fairly meaningless to most people, we have illusions that pander to our more destructive natures: arrogant psychology, superficial music, competitive relationships.<\/p>\n

Don’t delude yourself any longer because there is no truth or value in any of these things. It is easy for me to criticise and rant, but to come up with something new? A solution? It will not be easy; it will not come quickly, and it will take effort. But we need to put our hope in something more substantial than this crap.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\"HareBy the KC Blogger<\/strong><\/p>\n

In our pursuit of eradicating unhappiness, we actually create more. We are spoilt; we have become used to receiving pleasure and absolving pain too instantly. Got a hangover? Have a Paracetamol. Feel hungry? Want something supremely tasty but takes no effort to prepare? Here’s reconstituted carcass-meat packed with chemicals. Hey, at least it tastes good.
\n<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1670","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dandavats.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1670","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dandavats.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dandavats.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dandavats.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dandavats.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1670"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.dandavats.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1670\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dandavats.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1670"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dandavats.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1670"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dandavats.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1670"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}