I found this rant on my computer, I think it was written some time this past summer…

One of the fundamental sources of conflict is incompatible goals, that is, wanting different things. But, what do we want? Why do we want it? Is the problem wanting? The solution can hardly be simplified to say that we should stop wanting. Granted, this would spare us most conflict, but few are willing, as is apparently manifested in society’s lack of will to change. I mean, look at us, we’re boxed in, what are we striving for but what is immediately placed in front of us? Are we not, then, just animals feeding at the trough of capitalism? Isn’t the point to be a consumer… what is capitalism but the ism – that is, the means by which something is done– of capital accumulation. So, we have become the functional particulate elements of a grand machine designed to build wealth, somehow attracting the masses with it’s glitter and sparkle. We chase at some remote dream, dangled literally in front of us in fasion and celebrity, spinning below us the treadmill of a thousand golden temples built for those who can pull the strings. Are we, the masses, to accept a lowly pittance and humiliation at the merest assertion of a meritocratic hierarchy… do we not see that this is a false dream, a mirage of what has descended upon us? So convinced of the necessity of our slavery we accept the prescribed design of life for fear of a well designed hell where the careful controls of the wealth generating machine can no longer save us from That Which We Do Not Know.
Yet no one blows on the house of cards, because no one thinks it will do anything.

-joel