Do you think our pop culture teaches us to be co-dependent?

Post Reply New Topic

I would say so. I hear so many songs on the radio where the underlying theme is basically that we all need love and life just isn't worth living if you're not in a relationship. I think this can be incredibly harmful to the psyche. You should never allow your happiness to be contingent on someone else. That's how you get taken advantage of. You need the emotional leverage and detachment to be able to end a relationship when it becomes parasitic or abusive. Being needy is how you attract manipulative psychopaths who will use you and then leave you high and dry with nothing to your name.

I follow more of a Zen philosophy, which is that you should want nothing and fear nothing. Desire and fear are the two forms of leverage other people use to control you. They figure out what you want and fear most, and they promise you what you want or threaten you with what you fear to get you to give them what they want. Once you eliminate all fears and desires, you will be completely free and no one will be able to take advantage of you.

I'm so glad that someone else has finally noticed this. Yes, it's true that factitious desire for sex and romance is stimulated by our idiotic pop culture. This is the consequence of a society which allows businessmen rather than tradition to determine its values - the creation of artificial desire for the purpose of stimulating unnecessary and irrational consumption. And people - some of them on this site - seriously believe that their desire for this sort of nonsense is spontaneous and free

Of course, this dastardly trend began when the Tavistock Institute decided to use the findings of Freud, and more so Bernays, in the field of mass psychology to engineer the Beatles and the rest of the "countercultural" movement into the public psyche.