So what is your big idea?

This was posted a while back and on my stats page it is always the most read. This is becoming an exercise in learning what my stats counter is counting. Anyway I haven't read this post in some time and found it OK. Again an apology to those who have read it. I do want to see if the stat counter increases the page views of this post. Cheers Gord

I feel very bad. I have not been posting and it weighs heavy in my heart.

This is not because I am in the throes of LOVE or because I have a high profile job that takes up all of my time. No, this is the result of CABLE TV

The hundreds of channels that I have at my disposal has become a millstone around my neck

This brings me to a topic which I have tried to put down in print before but have found it too large a topic for this blogger.

It is really two things which are related.

One is the constant confusion in choice.

By our western standards "choice" is at the top of our list of things that we relate directly to Democracy.

Of course Democracy has little to with the choices availed to the consumer but most of us blur the line between politics and finance.

The choices laid out in the market place are more directly related to competition in a free market than to the politics of the day. Even without a free market there is competition, the closed market is always infiltrated by goods of the free market.

The closed society (USSR in the day) would thirst for choice and they would get measured amounts of it, albeit through a black market, and they were willing to pay large sums for these items.

Now we have consumer choice in a global sense and I think we have too much choice.

How is it that we end up with 15 different lighters, 20 different chocolate bars from 5 different companies, 2-4 different milk companies.....it's friggin milk from a friggin cow already. The list can go on.

Through this type of competition we have resulting choices and for the most part we don't like having too many choices.

The competition is more of a charade than anything really organized.
WTF?

So what are the drawbacks to these battles of the store aisles and mall promenades?

My thought is this.

Think about the resources spent on producing different types of the same shit. It makes me wonder "what would happen if all those resources were spent on something meaningful?".

Could you imagine a company like Sony taking their total ad budget and give it to Habitat for Humanity?

That only starts this exploration into "something different".

The other limb or thread of this is design.

We are all affected by bad weather, bad politics, bad situations, etc.! Bad design affects as much as anything else. For both the good and the bad.

We do not need 20 different name brands of computers, we do not need to have 30 different automakers making varied autos with varied results.

This is a place where the North American will have the hackles up and that is in choice of car maker.

Does it make any sense that somehow magically one car maker is producing vehicles of better quality in both design and material? Of course there is nothing at all magical about it, there is such a thing as the best designed and produced vehicle. Thing is We can't have one because of two things.

Competition and proprietary rights.

At this point we will never see the "best" produced and designed cars leading the way because of a third thing and that is "entertainment" We want to be entertained by the notion that we have something different. We have as a society been programmed to believe this by the people who hold the coveted post of Marketeer. We have been told too many times that we are what we have and for the most part believe it.

This attitude is reinforced by the entertainers of our age. They have the best and so we want what they have. For you Christians out there that is called coveting the neighbors shit. It has been throughout time called the supreme evil, the common denominator, the test of wills, yes ladies and gents it is Coveting and it's twin Greed.

So it seems to me that our social problems are pretty much as old as time itself and the same walls are here as existed back in the day. The same petty self satisfying greed holds the human race back from being truly awesome.

It is unfortunate that the human race seems to be led to decimation by forces that are human inspired. I really do not fear a world wide calamity, what I fear is that after the dust has settled that we simply start the cycle all over again.

Don't think of this as being representitive of my over all world view.

It is just one view, a negative one to be sure, I have others that are very positive. Thats for a later post.

So what is your big idea?