'THE MAN'

‘The Man' is a term used to define a powerful class of people in the upper echelons of society, who supposedly rule the world and control the life of the common man. Do you believe you're subject to this mysterious entity? If you do, you're disempowering yourself to an enormous degree, because 'The Man' is YOU.

Whether you're aware of it or not, you make all the choices that affect your life. The choices that appear to be made by others are a result of your having passed responsibility for your life over to the social collective. As you grew up, you took on the values of your society, and built a life based on a convenient social framework.

Remember: even as we complain about a lack of freedom at the hands of our social order, we're making the daily choice to buy into that very scheme. The idea of an ideal life has become twisted into a paint-by-numbers picture of what society tells us we should be and have. A nice house; a nice car; nice clothes; a lucrative job. These are the trappings of a life lived through someone else's values, and the term 'trappings' is a very appropriate one, for our need to have them traps us; requires our on-going subordination to the social order.

Because we'd rather ignore the fact that the responsibility for our dissatisfaction is our own, we need to look elsewhere. And so we've created a convenient scapegoat in the intangible entity called 'THE MAN'. The socially accepted term affords legitimacy to the concept itself, as well as a welcome sense that we're in the same boat as many others who are suffering similar 'injustices'.

So what's the alternative? What ELSE is there? Certainly, when we were growing up, there seemed to be no alternative to the social scheme we saw plotted carefully and effectively around us. We learned to think through the values of the social collective, and not for ourselves. A person who thinks for themselves is not subject to social values, and is therefore the last to define themselves as victims of the social order. They are free to carve out a life that they prefer.

The issue is very much one of learning to think for yourself, to recognise the choices you have, and to make them yourself using your own logic. Part of the journey to achieving this very probably requires the abandonment of many cherished aspects of a socially defined life. It's not easy, but it's honest. And honesty is key, because people across the globe have a view of life that's daily becoming more transparent, and it's getting harder to hide the convenient excuses we use to avoid taking responsibility for ourselves.

More on this subject, and other issues regarding thinking for yourself, in the book

'THE WILLING MISFIT' by Derek Pearson, available here for free online: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/137307

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