The Value of Practicality

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"Practicality is now our great idol, which all powers and talents must serve. Anything that is not obviously practical has little value in today's world."

I disagree with this completely. I don't see how i-pods, gaming systems, TV, fast food, pop music, skate boarding, etc. are practical and yet these are the things our society seems to worship. These are the things that we export to other countries that they also begin to worship. If anything we worship the ability to escape that which is practical!

It seems that if we were striving towards the practical, we would have solved things like the AIDS epidemic and world hunger by now. After all we do have the resources to solve these problems as a global community yet we are unwilling to solve them because that would mean being distracted from our multileveled escapist entertainment and media.

Being practical means being responsible which means work and, in our culture, work is directly related to social class. Hard work is a sign of poverty and leisure is a sign of wealth. This culture already worships wealth so why in the world would it turn around and then worship being practical like the lower classes. It just wouldn't make sense. Essentially, the practical, if anything, is what we value least.

aww i feel sorry for this topic. heres a reply

I only disagree with that statement in the sense that I don't think the balance of that has substantially changed a bit in probably thousands of years - the balance may manifest itself differently in different times but there's really not much else to say on it.



Well, doing that with AIDS means that you'd literally have to control them and FORCE them to use contraception or not have intercourse unless they've been tested. Since we tend to frown on violations of civil rights, things like that bread by human lax and apathy will continue to spread unless they can just find a cure - you can kill the disease but you can't effectively make anyone do or not do anything when it comes to private matters.

World hunger is also another ugly mess where in many places its used by the powers that be for controlling the people. Some countries if you try to bring in food you'll have the local convoy get hijacked by the local warlord's henchmen and being your supplying a political enemy there's a good chance that your people who went in to help will get worked over with bolas or tied up and dowsed with gasoline.



I think because of genetic hardwiring and our unwillingness to change it we'll probably almost always give far more value to social butterflies than to hard workers.

You are right that we contradict ourselves in consumerism but practicality is the weaker counter-pull to practicality. Consumerism dominates the mass culture and practicality dominates our view of success in society. Ultimately, everything that isn't consumerist ends up that it must be pragmatic.

I was not thinking of force but rather better education and medicine. There are many men out there who still believe that having sex with a virgin will cure their AIDS. This kind of myth only makes the problem worse whereas, given better information, these men would not think this or then act on it. Giving these men and all people for that matter a better education is a practical matter that could be accomplished given the recourses. However most of the worlds resources go towards impractical escapist entertainment.