Obama Deception You tube video

[SLCPUNK]

There is only mass marketing and the manipulation of the human mind to redefine happiness. That's it.

Only?

As it relates to my argument in regards to financial irresponsibility yep.

[Bandita]

See, now when SLC throws a bunch of words on my screen at least they make a valid point.

[Jim]

This the world you are born into. However at the most fundamental human level, we do not necessarily have to participate in it.  You can always revert to hunting and gathering, nobody is stopping you.

Land owners could become a problem, though... At least over here. Not to mention companionship! I would imagine that many of us would class that as a fundamental necessity.

In fact there was a study done maybe thirty years ago that these nomadic types were just as happy, if not more so, than those who got up and went to work everyday.

I haven't read the study, but I know that Richard Dawkins talks about it in the introduction to one of his books (The Ancestors Tale, I think).

Omitting the working class poor from my argument, I'm  referring to middle income individuals/families on up the ladder.

But you are also leaving out the less intelligent, the naive and the ignorant (I use those words with their actual meaning, not as the insults that they are often used as).

Nobody forced them to do this, they made their own choices.

Yes, they did. But to say that you chose... Well, yes, you did. And you chose well! I have a deep respect for your views on not borrowing in order to buy what you can't afford (though you'd be hard pressed to believe that, if you saw my bank balance...). But do you not think that you are making the assumption that all people have the capacity to think like you? Maybe capacity is the wrong word... But what you are exposed to, how are you raised, greatly affects the degree to which you will think like that! The desire to want something runs much deeper than merely wanting it for the sake of having it, and want it now because you are impatient... It can be psychological, social, have any number of much deeper causes. Which is why I think that to shrug it off as being "only the manipulation of the human mind" seems to imply that because this manipulation hasn't had so great an affect on you that it wouldn't have had a much deeper one on anybody else, as well as making the assumption that all men are born equal (yet, apparently, nowhere are we in chains...).

Is everybody born equal, SLC? Do we all have the innate ability to reach the same conclusions as you, and act upon them? And if we do... Then why don't we?

[SLCPUNK]

I respect your question, and you raise a valid point. However there are plenty of people that are smarter than me, and have a better education (That I personally know) who are stuck on a financial hamster wheel and probably will be for the remainder of their life. What got them there in the first place? Greed? When is enough enough anyway?  Is it human nature to want more or are we taught to think that way?

Those with less brain capacity or less education are often doomed to repeat the same thing over and over again while expecting a different result each time. That, or they are merely trying to scrape by. The only thing that would help that segment of the population IMO is education, and as I've pointed out there is no guarantee that will save you from a life of financial serfdom. Greed (ie consumerism) often trumps intelligence.

I knew a waitress (about ten years ago) who paid her house off by the age of 26. Our society thinks of that job as a rather lowly position. But her house was paid off (no mansion mind you, a simple home), her cars, and no debt. Why was this person able to understand the true value of ownership and money vs the majority of people she was bringing food too? At that point in her young life her money was now hers. No bank "owned' her, her money was hers to do with as she pleased. With less education and supposedly less income how was this woman bound by the monetary system? She prioritized and that's it.

That's my point in the end. The system is what it is, it is not inherently malicious by nature.  There are those who will thrive in it, and those who will fail. The poster's argument was that it's out to screw you, which I disagree with. If you are greedy, don't understand or respect money, lack sound judgment, or simply don't possess the intelligence then yes it can be brutal.