Some things as to why shit is happening in American cities

[Newest Reality]

4. We are a product of conditioning...

And that conditioning is geared towards a very myopic, one-sided view of reality. That view is very useful and valuable as a way to focus on one side of a problem while avoiding the other. That's a tactical approach.

We may have been told, emphatically, all of our lives that we are responsible for everything that happens to us and it is only our choices that determine our results. In some ways, that is true, but only half true. We can't make choices or be responsible without a context that exists in which we can act. Remove the context, and there is no one who makes choices and can be responsible. And, for the individual, when we are not in that context, there is no doer of said actions.

We deal with many abstractions, and, in a way, we are easily hypnotized by falsehoods based on assumptions that those abstractions are concrete. We have a society, but that is an abstract construct that stands as a symbol for a collective version of all of us combined. The same applies to what we call "culture".

Now, when we invest our attention to much to either side of the individual or society equation, there are going to be imbalances and problems that may not be obvious to us unless we carefully take the time to investigate and look into the matter of the relationship between these two, abstract concepts.

Currently, in our natural tendency to fixate, we seem to be focusing intently on events and individuals while ignoring or avoiding the very factual relationship to a far more complex set of events concerning history, economy and total environment--which, in total, represent the society or culture they are occurring in.

When we cannot or will not consider both aspects of this as important and relevant, we are then liable to project only our subjective fears, hopes and views on what is happening in current events. Then, we simply resort to bias, how it was or should be, and find ourselves discussing and arguing, not about the real event, but about our distortions and expectations.

Let's hope we can expand our views to be more inclusive and begin to see that our culture and society are also involved in creating the events that erupt before us as much as the individuals whom we observe behaving in a certain way. They go together and you really cannot have one without the other, no matter how the movers and shakers and powers that be would like you to ignore the fact.