[pf] Picking the aim and group to commit your life to.

· This is Sunday morning and I've just turned off the radio as the first
few words of a hymn were being broadcast (after the hourly news). Those
words were: "All for Jesus".

· My second son told me, at about age 20, that he wanted to be a member of
a group all working towards the same goal (probably not religious).

· Our oldest son joined Scientology (in Sydney) when he was mid-20s - he'll
be 30 in a month or so - probably because he wanted to do the same: be in a
group with a common exalted aim.

· When I was a similar age, I wasn't interested in becoming part of a
group, a movement, but I did decide to stop doing something I saw then as
selfish (going for a PhD) and switch to "helping others", by getting an MSc
and then teaching Physics in high school.

· I'm wondering whether those of us who are critical, scornful of what
Americans are (and are doing) now-a-days, are battling the urge on the part
of almost all Americans to join in "working toward The American Dream". 
  That seeing their leaders with feet of clay, and their dream crumbling
into dust, subsiding into slime, is not something the masses are willing to
even consider is possible.

· Do people actually, psychologically, _need_ an exalted aim?
  Are people actually lost, when they don't feel themselves part of a group
with aims they all share?

· If so, the purpose of Positive Futures, YES! magazine, and others working
fo a sustainable and enjoyable future, must (maybe together) create an
alternative, possibly more attractive aim and group, for people to be part of.

· Should this be a criterion for our posts here?

{· I feel no need to belong to a group, have an exalted aim, so I have not
seen this "more attractive aim" as the purpose of PF; have I been wrong?}

David.
David MacClement davd @ ihug.co.nz (remove spaces)
http://www.geocities.com/davd.geo/index.html#top
http://davd.tripod.com/GrAPR-020118.html#top
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