Finally watched this movie a year or two ago and it's fantastic. You reminded me I need to watch it again soon!

And for anyone saying this was 40 years ago and nothing has changed...that's because we're not mad enough yet.

Exactly right.

People just can't even visualise an existence that is in any significant way different to how the world is now. They can't imagine having to grow their own food and cleaning up after themselves, they just think it's normal to go to a shop and spend money on stuff, money you earned by slaving your life away. Money you spend on shit you don't even need, sold to you by people who don't give a fuck about anything else but your money.

We may be advancing technologically but we've fucking regressed intellectually and spiritually, as a species. It's pretty depressing.

I try to remain positive because in the midst of all this shit I remembered a valuable lesson. We sometimes need to see the bad with our own eyes to appreciate the good this experience has to offer. Its horrible for sure. But knowledge is self-empowering.

We are lucky to be living in these times. We are all part of a great evolution of consciousness. The technology is here now to take us to the next level.

I guess. I do think that the Internet is one of the most valuable tools because it allows for lightning-fast mobilisation (if need be) as well as alternatives to force-fed media for people who are aware there is an alternative to it.

And you are right, we are lucky to be living now. I think it's almost upon us. Even if it doesn't get resolved in my lifetime, I think a revolution is well underway, a revolution of thought and self-identity. Moving towards a united existence as a species with some very, very unique responsibilities on this planet.

I think if the Earth were an organism and reacted to "pain" instantly, this would be a very, very different world. Because we can't see the effects of this Earth rape. But they are there, and they will all come back to bite us on the ass. Some day.

Well said. With that knowledge for myself I've chosen to clean up my own backyard. And in that process things have really turned around in my life. Its amazing how that works. Fortunately I'm in a situation where this is possible for me.

Working with the earth and interacting with plants and nature is one of the most amazing feelings I have ever experienced. I think it's because that side of us is in such a state of dormancy on a daily basis that when we do experience something like that, it washes over us, and we can't really explain why we feel the way we do.

In this sense, I think one of the reasons we are taking so much shit is because we have forgotten what it's like out there, amongst the trees and the shrubs and stuff. We have forgotten that we can live in nature, we can survive out there. Because we did for thousands of years. We abolished that for security and whatever else, but then we took it a step further and ended up with these tight clusters of millions of people, and it does us no good. No good at all, I think.

EDIT: words and spellings.

I watched an episode of the Joe Rogan Podcast which you reminded me of. It's featuring Les Stroud (full episode Here) and he talks about exactly that. He had a quote like "people just need to go out in nature and stand next to a tree for a while".

Its so true though. I feel amazing when I'm outside growing food and herbs. This feeling comes over me from time to time that's truly powerful and makes me feel really lucky to be here, whatever here is.

I think it's because we are witnessing another form of life, majestic and unaware of our own petty problems, and it makes us feel kind of small, but in the right way.

I think that most people are very much unaware that there is this whole other world that exists outside of their day-to-day reality. This world has existed for millions of years, but because we live in these cities and have basically conjured up a reality around ourselves, we completely forget that there IS something else, something calm and beautiful and eternal.

To me, it's very comforting indeed, to look around myself in a natural setting and realise how small my struggles and troubles are in comparison to the vastness of our planet and also to the infinity of our universe.

EDIT: spellings.

There are a lot of us growing our own food, hunting, living a sustainable and hardworking life like our ancestors did free from a crumbling system. Many people and communities have broken free from the "normal life". Not only are we working to construct a new paradigm but we live in it. For many it was because we did get mad as he'll and chose to do something about it. Making the transition is not easy for many but I can say that is the most rewarding way for me to live. However old fashioned we may seem we do balance it out with technology. I see a lot more people waking up and stepping into a life that embraces sustainability and community. Even if just baby steps, they are steps in the right direction.

The end is pretty telling though.

Please take this speech to its conclusion in the movie. Its meant to llustrate the pointlessness of "Getting mad as hell" in todays world - you fight the entities which provide the infrastructure which you rely and depend:

You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations. There are no peoples. There are no Russians. There are no Arabs. There are no Third Worlds. There is no West. There is only one holistic system of systems. One vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multi-varied, multi-national dominion of dollars. Petro-dollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars, reichmarks, rands, rubles, pounds and shekels.

It is the international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet. That is the natural order of things today. That is the atomic, and sub-atomic and galactic structure of things today.

And YOU have meddled with the primal forces of nature. And you will atone.

Am I getting through to you, Mr Beale?

You get up on your little twenty-one inch screen and howl about America and democracy. There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and ITT and AT&T, and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today.

What do you think the Russians talk about in their Councils of State? Karl Marx? They get out their linear programming charts, statistical decision theories, mini-max solutions, and compute the price-cost probabilities of their transactions and investments, just like we do.

We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable bye-laws of of business. The world is a business, Mr Beale. It has been since man crawled out of the slime.

We may rely and depend on these infrastructures, but we do not need them. People are scared. They are scared of a world without these things. But it wouldn't be the end of the world. I would rather live by the sweat of my brow, a sweat I would break keeping myself and my loved ones alive than a sweat I break for someone else to get rich from my misery.

It's simply a difference of opinion when it comes to the question, "Who do you work for?"

I don't want to work for someone else. I may be making money for myself, but this job does not exist FOR me, it exists for whoever needs this shit doing. I would rather work to live, than live to work. And by that I mean, hunt and gather and build shelter and all those things we have abolished in favour of crippling financial slavery.

The world is a business, no doubt. Money makes it a business, though. We put a price on everything. We raise our children to believe they will be better off if they make money, not if they are better people. Our schools teach our kids that they need a good job to survive.

This is not the only way of living, is all I am getting at. This way still works in the same sense that a body with cancer still works. But only until it doesn't. And at some point, this cancer that our society is infected with is going to reach a terminal stage.

Because if you really think about it, what is it we're doing here, really? If you take everything we do, on a weekly basis, you realise that everything that isn't work is just there to kill time until we have to go back to work. The entertainment industry exists to keep us "entertained" during our down time. My point is that so much in this world is seen as something good, but in reality it only exists to keep us busy in a way we THINK is something we chose to do in the first place. It's to have a contrast between hours spent working and hours spent not working.

Art has always existed and people have always needed to express themselves through art. But most of this garbage is not art. It's just something we pay to experience in order to feel like we're doing something worthwhile with our down time. I would much rather keep busy keeping myself alive as opposed to what I do on a daily basis now, which is, as most people can attest, MUNDANE.

Say what you will about civilisation and progress and what have you, but this is one boring fucking existence. Nobody can deny that. And I think we can do more with our time. We can exist differently. Better.

EDIT: content and spelling.

And at some point, this cancer that our society is infected with is going to reach a terminal stage.

I think it may be coming sooner than we think - we're on the fast track to a far worse economic collapse than we had 5 years ago.

GOOD. lol

But honestly, fucking great. There is no point trying to keep something broken from falling apart because it is flawed. People need to fucking wake up and let go of their security blankets. Yes, people will die. Those of us that cannot fend for ourselves will die. Things will be ugly, things will be harsh and brutal and chaotic.

But it will balance out. And we will have learned a valuable lesson about letting invisible hands pulling invisible strings control us. We will have learned to not trust people when they say "this is safe to eat" or "this will never cause cancer", because we will have understood that MONEY makes people LIE, because money is a way to fuck a person over without ever meeting them. A way to enslave someone without even knowing their name.

Honestly, if these people, these master slavers, had to go and physically take things from each person while looking them and their families in the face, they would have killed themselves long ago. Nobody is that out of touch with their humanity, when faced with the horrors of what this system is doing to us, as a species.

I agree with most of this except for the last part:

Nobody is that out of touch with their humanity, when faced with the horrors of what this system is doing to us, as a species.

While difficult to fathom, I think that there are those who are indeed that out of touch with their humanity. How else can you explain some of the horribly depraved shit that humans have done and do to each other like ritual abuse of children, human experimentation, torture, debt enslavement, etc.

I think the mistake is underestimating how fucking evil some of these people are. Psychopathic in the most literal sense of the word.

That's pretty true, to be honest. I was speaking in a hypothetical sense, if one of them were to actually go and take the mortgage payments from ten thousand households in a row, sort of thing.

But yes, you are quite right. The human being has the capacity to be very sick in his nature. But we also have the capacity to be in equilibrium with each other. At least that's what I need to believe in order to not completely lose my faith in everyone I meet before I even speak to them. Which does happen, on occasion.

But when it comes to a lot of evil in the world, do you not think that it only exists because there is a system in place that can be gamed for the benefit of those who are at the top of said system, and by those that strive to climb higher up the ranks of said system?

EDIT: content and spelling.

If your world is boring, i suggest pointing the blame on yourself... And not the outside.... I can already tell you have a problem with responsibility for your own life.

Your existence is boring, mundane as you put it, because youve made it that way. You think art is crap, make better art that excites you... Make the world less mundane and help people feel what makes you think life is worth living.

Be responsible.

Way to take away all the wrong things from what I said.

I did not say art is crap, I said that most things that are being passed off as "art" today are crap. Sitcoms are not art. Reality TV is not art. Mind-numbing game shows are not art. And so on.

On the topic of being responsible for my own life, I take full responsibility for how stimulated (or not) I am by it. And it's not that my life doesn't stimulate me. It's just life in general, whatever passes off as exciting by most people's standards, is not to me.

Travel is nice, learning about things is neat, but in general, I don't think going out on a Friday night to get shitfaced with some buddies is very exciting. There is more to it than that.

And I do try to make my life worth living. I try my best to engage people on an intellectual level and discuss things that interest me and things that I feel are important. What I find though, is that most people are fucking dumb and will not even engage in conversations like that because it makes their brain hurt. Nothing against dumb people, I was dumb once, but what grates me is people's inability to expand their mind and speak on a subject they might not know much about, to learn about it and get informed. But no, that's too much to ask from the average human being nowadays, apparently.

When I say that life is mundane, I mean that the way most people see life and what it's about is mundane. The birth-work-death routine that has become the basis of life for human beings on this planet is mundane.

I think you should read more of what I said in this post about what I think constitutes a healthy, natural existence before calling me out on being irresponsible with my life. I take full responsibility for everything I do, I don't expect people to fix my problems. My point is that some problems are with societies and their values, not with individuals. Which is why I try my best to surround myself with people who I find interesting and engaging and exciting to speak to. It's just a shame that those people are few and far between.

EDIT: spelling.

Why not just move to rural India? There is no infrastructure to be scared of - people live in their more natural state, and rely on the land to grow food and live off. It will be decades if real roads even get to parts of the country, if ever, never mind Coca Cola. With just $10,000, you would be a king there.

I was thinking Canada, I like the cold better. =)

Thanks for the sarcasm by the way, I was waiting to see how long it would take for people to start doing their usual asshole thing instead of trying to engage in an actual conversation.

This right here, this is my problem. Some dick thinks he's the most poignant motherfucker in the room and wants to show off his mad subtle dissing skills in front of a handful of people that will never know his name or see his face. Validation from complete strangers, unaware of your existence prior to reading your comment and completely over your existence by the time they're done reading.

Thanks again, buddy.

Either way, you owe it to yourself to just travel to the East for even a few weeks. Save enough for a flight, and you can live well on $10 a day. India, Nepal, Thailand, just go see how people are and how they live. Nothing can really prepare you for the reality of such an experience.

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Those are countries where I met genuinely happy people.
If I wanted you to go somewhere impoverished, I would have said visit Cambodia.
But do what you want.

the arrogance of the infrastructure, "better", "smarter", "needed"

we could lose 90% of our laws and government and not notice a damn thing

Great and powerful clip for that movie.

It's times like these you learn to live again
It's times like these you give and give again
It's times like these you learn to love again
It's times like these time and time again

Can anyone teach me how to edit this properly? I copypasted it broken down each line of the song but it keeps showing up jumbled together. How do I do a line for line break?

Thanks in advance, forgive my dumbness.

It isn't intuitive - you need to put two spaces at the end of the line before going to the next one (I think).

The other option is to do two line spaces which will start a new paragraph (like I've just done here).

Thanks, much appreciated.

Two spaces at the end of each line works.

Great fucking movie.

totally about the FOX network before there was FOX .