TELEOGENIC PATHOLOGY

TELEOGENIC PATHOLOGY: THE ORIGIN OF POST WWII NORTH AMERICAN SOCIETY.
The root origin of post WWII North American society, one which is based upon the automobile as a putative expression of individual liberty, freedom, prosperity, unfettered mobility and ultimately of the collective good through a micro-level emphasis on individual fulfillment, was predicated upon a teleogenic pathology. This is so in that as the word ‘teleogenic’ implies, the advent of the pre-eminence of the automobile in western society was predicated upon the pathological premise that the ‘final cause’ or ‘definite end’ or ‘ultimate purpose’ behind the libertarian idea of everybody owning a car and a single family dwelling was ‘suitable to’ or ‘having the nature of’ being a universally appropriate goal or outcome of and unto itself for the individual person and their family in the western world.
This was especially pathological in that, not only did this vision of society increasingly show itself to be socio-economically and spatio-temporally unsustainable as well as environmentally unsuited to the conservation of the planet’s human and mineral wealth, but it is even more so in that fundamentally, it was conceived and wrought originally in the pre-war era at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York City by an elite of architects, urban planners, petroleum interests, and other American corporate mavens, who explicitly organized the eventual (ironically enough) collectively construed and carried out corporate-sponsored suppression of collective modes of public and privately owned forms of rail transportation in many North American cities, such as Los Angeles and elsewhere, by buying up the tramways, removing them and replacing them with highways for cars and Diesel buses, thereby substituting a collectively based and oriented form of transportation, designed explicitly for the benefit of the collective and common good, with a solution which was and still is individualistic, posing as something which everybody supposedly agrees on.
This solution, which has been put into its place since the end of WWII, was and still is corporately-driven, individualistic, which espouses the arguably mistaken ideology that advocating for micro-level individual rights and outcomes through passenger vehicle ownership and the ongoing construction of single family dwellings is somehow teleogenic (i.e. suited to the ultimate purpose of society, which is putatively the defence and promotion of individual liberty), being a form of ‘best practice’ from a social engineering perspective, and can continue to be justified in continuing to subvert and pervert the attempted pursuit of any efforts at reconfiguration of North American society’s land use and socio-political, socio-cultural, and socio-economic value and belief system more towards the adoption of a more balanced ideological framework which leans more equally towards the collectively-construed and executed outcomes regarding the rehabilitation, resanctification and resacralization of passenger rail transportation in North America, both at the intercity and commuter train levels.
This would go a long way in alleviating the egregious problems of urban traffic congestion and despoiling of the rural-urban fringe through the continued spread of urban sprawl, which arguably continues to blight the physical landscape with an endless plethora of big box stores, fast food joints, and parking lots, all of which are aesthetically garish and ungainly to the eye and morally besmirching to the soul, not to mention gobbling up reams of crucial farmland and wetlands for drainage, wildlife habitat and flood control.
So it is clear that teleogenically, the automobile and its partner the single family dwelling in the suburbs, all backed by the North American consumer-based capitalist notion of individual liberty, freedom, and mobility rights is most certainly predicated upon a teleogenic pathology because ultimately, continuing to physically and metaphysically edify our civilization upon such faulty foundations and structurally unsound superstructures, have all led to the ultimate irony of the individual’s rights and freedoms, and hence those of the collectivity writ large, in the final analysis, being potentially terminally infringed upon by the Gorgonesque Medusa of traffic congestion, air pollution, aesthetic degradation of the inhabited landscape, flooding, poor agricultural stewardship, including the potential of not being able to even feed ourselves as citizens, all as a result of a sacred cow which was originally foisted upon us by special interest collusion in 1939.
So one can only hope that citizens in North America will at some point band together and lobby our governments to enact legislation which once again favours rail transportation over road transportation. Our teleogenic ‘raison d’être’ needs to be redefined to being something more sustainable. Maybe if we looked at life on our continent before WWII the answer would be crystal clear: Choo!! Choo!! All aboard!! (Not ‘Chew, Chew!! All ON THE board!!!) That’s what got us into this mess in the first place: eating too much crap in our houses in front of the TV!!!
Take care, folks: Let’s start learning to TRAIN our brains all over again. It’s time to take our foot off the gas and let ourselves be taken for a ride for a change!!! (In a good way, OK?) No traffic headaches, no fog or ice on the windshield, no 18 wheelers passing us on the right and splashing crap onto our windshield, no wondering ‘is that my exit coming up?’ Or ‘gosh did I miss my exit?’ Or worse: ‘Is that the cops in my rear view mirror? Are they coming after me? I only had two drinks! What if I blow over the limit?’ AAArrgh!!!
Folks, it’s time to RE-TRAIN!!!

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