We live in a world where it is taken for granted that the people who run our society -- the government, the politicians, corporations and the media -- routinely lie to us and distort information. In a globalized world, our only way of finding out what is happening in our society is to consume the information as neatly summarized and put through the lens of the media and the government, who are more interested in maintaining the status quo and avoiding questioning the way things are run than they are in providing objective information.

This overflow of information which we recognize as often blatantly delusional is one factor in the increasing alienation of modern man from his society and from other people. It is but one part of a giant system that currently manifests itself as techno-industrial capitalism, which is essentially the continuation of the system we've had for 10,000 years, only the kings have been replaced by politicians and the slaves by slaves who sell their labor out for money to buy housing and food instead of directly for housing and food (because that's cheaper for the slaveholders now).

I think this system is going to implode sometime in the next few decades. It has allowed for overpopulation and gross mistreatment of the environment, which will surely combine to create one heck of a chaotic state of events sometime soon as we can no longer feed everybody, especially with rapidly diminishing topsoil, acid rain, droughts, etc. Plus, we may be running out of petroleum ( http://dieoff.org/ ), which if true would also make things interesting.