Recognition as an individual in today 's western world is one of the most targeted qualities of human existence. Both financial and social rewards come to those who create unique identities for themselves and work beyond the safety of crowds. It follows that as our culture praises those who act as their own persons that their opinions and behaviors toward the supernatural would begin to diverge from any one established group, and even those groups themselves are permeated by breaking and branching ideologies and practices. The entire concept of a religion as a fixed point has never truly applied to reality. This is especially true in the world we inhabit today, with each person able to custom order their faith, picking and mixing whatever parts
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But to what degree can one truly make themselves, and how severely are we in fact contained within the bounds society has set forth? Under the theories of Foucault, there is a social prison that we are raised in, one that defines and constrains us without our knowledge. “It programmes, at the level of an elementary and easily transferable mechanism, the basic functioning of a society penetrated through and through with disciplinary mechanisms,” (Panopticism 10). This kind of soul is built and shaped to feel individualized and autonomous but function within strict bounds by internalized law strikes at the heart of desires to be truly unique and carries the ramifications of a hidden uniformity to the people that can be sensed as unwritten social rules. The genres that we live our lives in, and are marketed to, without even knowing it. Encouraging these subsets proved effective for capitalism, as explored in Century of the Self, letting the consumer have choices as to how they express themselves while still living in specific categories. The structuring of the prisons come first from the parenting during childhood, imparting that which the caregivers know as order onto the children, perpetuating itself through the generations, and gives the implication that there cannot be any real change in society over …show more content…
Freud felt that concepts of gods or anything divine were in actuality a mental extension of the protective figures of our youth, designed to explain the world and protect us from it, and to impose rules of morality on us rather (Future of an Illusion 16). In this definition, then, whatever one does or thinks beyond the logical is some type of mental short coming, one that Freud postulated we would possibly be able to move beyond as the human race matured in the same way that a child matures beyond the micromanagement of a parent. This definition nicely wraps itself in that all types of beliefs and rituals can be encompassed as neurotic behaviors unique to individuals, the solution to it simply being to get to a point where they are no longer needed, to essentially “get over it.” This theory takes a somewhat brutal approach to individuals and their beliefs, trivializing them down to nothing but an artifact of man 's fears of the unknown and need for imposed morality. Freud 's theory applies particularly well to the diverse spirituality in the western world today; everyone has their own degree of mental maturity and responds to the unknown in their own ways. It also fits that, if this theory is to be assumed, that dialog can be cleansed of religion and that the direction of growth in society is towards
But to what degree can one truly make themselves, and how severely are we in fact contained within the bounds society has set forth? Under the theories of Foucault, there is a social prison that we are raised in, one that defines and constrains us without our knowledge. “It programmes, at the level of an elementary and easily transferable mechanism, the basic functioning of a society penetrated through and through with disciplinary mechanisms,” (Panopticism 10). This kind of soul is built and shaped to feel individualized and autonomous but function within strict bounds by internalized law strikes at the heart of desires to be truly unique and carries the ramifications of a hidden uniformity to the people that can be sensed as unwritten social rules. The genres that we live our lives in, and are marketed to, without even knowing it. Encouraging these subsets proved effective for capitalism, as explored in Century of the Self, letting the consumer have choices as to how they express themselves while still living in specific categories. The structuring of the prisons come first from the parenting during childhood, imparting that which the caregivers know as order onto the children, perpetuating itself through the generations, and gives the implication that there cannot be any real change in society over …show more content…
Freud felt that concepts of gods or anything divine were in actuality a mental extension of the protective figures of our youth, designed to explain the world and protect us from it, and to impose rules of morality on us rather (Future of an Illusion 16). In this definition, then, whatever one does or thinks beyond the logical is some type of mental short coming, one that Freud postulated we would possibly be able to move beyond as the human race matured in the same way that a child matures beyond the micromanagement of a parent. This definition nicely wraps itself in that all types of beliefs and rituals can be encompassed as neurotic behaviors unique to individuals, the solution to it simply being to get to a point where they are no longer needed, to essentially “get over it.” This theory takes a somewhat brutal approach to individuals and their beliefs, trivializing them down to nothing but an artifact of man 's fears of the unknown and need for imposed morality. Freud 's theory applies particularly well to the diverse spirituality in the western world today; everyone has their own degree of mental maturity and responds to the unknown in their own ways. It also fits that, if this theory is to be assumed, that dialog can be cleansed of religion and that the direction of growth in society is towards