Dr. Bourgeoislove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bonne année

Life in North American society embodies a basic contradiction between capitalism - the luminous bourgeois ideals of peace, freedom, opportunity, love, and community and the harsh, brutal realities of the irrational economic system which encourages these ideals and feeds off their unobtainability. The whole function of trade and commerce is to exacerbate this disjunction.

Business destroys the coveted bourgeois values and the familial structures set up to secure and nurture those values. Social mobility, success, depends on brutality; this is the primary law of capitalism. Capitalist competition severely limits the ability of most people to become very close to any other people.

Religion is an important prop of bourgeois ideology, the Church represents a community of sorts. And in it's inability to comfort anyone the church shows its impotence. It is one more bourgeois ideal that does not work.

Family ties, social mobility, quest for security, companionship, and even religious values all relate and correspond to real universal human needs for community, love, respect, support, appreciation.

Social institutions which function in four levels of familial affiliations — the nuclear family, the extended family, the ethnic community, and the Church — upon which the we rely to provide and protect these values, wither before the irrational, destructive forces of capitalism, the main goal of which is profit, not the meeting of human needs.

Each institution strives unsuccessfully to create an ideal community. In all cases, the needs of business destroy whatever communal aspects these associations might provide. In fact, it is the very effort to conserve and support these families that becomes corrupted by business and destroys them.

Capitalism, at its best, must destroy human life and associations to exist. Thus, the more vigorously bourgeois society strives to achieve the ideals it has set for itself, the more destructive and corrupt it becomes.

Economic dependence is a debilitating experience for anyone in this society.

Afterthought: May the new year bring light to more people. From their own personal darkness, may each one be emancipated by his/her own free will.