So, back to the switch concept. I still consciously decide to remain asocial rather than social, and for many reasons. The primary reason is that in America today, or at least in the part of America that I live, I find the vast majority of all social interaction that takes place completely repugnant, devoid of any meaning whatsoever. Humorous conversations are even beginning to seem lackluster, since so many people's senses of humour revolve around quoting one-liners from movies, being "random", etc. I get sick of small talk, I do not wish to contribute to any modern discussions of artless television soaps or sports-spectacles, none of it interests me to even a miniscule extent, and I would much rather be thought of as that weird guy that can't or won't talk to anybody than to contribute to bland social discourse. It's as simple as that, really.

Of course, there are both positive and negative by-products of asocial and anti-social behavior. I think that the negative by-products are typically construed as being the cause of asocial and anti-social behavior, and find myself in disagreement with the professionals that prescribe drugs to combat these avoidances of the social by targeting the effects of the life-style, such as fear of crowds, soft-speech / mumbling, inwardness, fidgeting, depression, etc.

It was a deliberate change of my personality, and I can go back and forth on it depending on what suits me at the moment. 

The war, for all intents and purposes, seems really to be a war simply for oil, and that may explain your confusion over why it is that America considers itself violently opposed to the ideologies of the Islamic world. It isn't, honestly, and I believe our goals for this war are really that ignoble. It's unfortunate, from my point of view, that some would allow lives to be lost to provide economic stability for this nation, I would much rather give up energy and work together with others to find a better, more utilitarian way of living comfortably in the west. It's very frustrating that innocent lives are being thrown away on both sides for an empty war, a war sustained by capital and oil tycoons.

Diverting the disaster we will be faced with once we hit the peak oil crisis is of utmost importance, but the same corporations fueling the research into developing alternatives to oil have mostly abandoned the pursuit ideologically and have diverted much larger sums of money into security and weapons technologies which they hope will allow them to isolate themselves from the emerging collapse of the western world as well as help them to continue plans of war for oil, which we saw set in motion under the guise of a "war on terror".

The best thing we can do is to work toward our own independence from popular energy; we should endeavor to learn to raise food for ourselves, demonetize whenever possible and make a variety of other lifestyle changes. It would also be very beneficial for us to develop mutualistic relationships with others in our communities to a larger extent than we normally would, whether the communities we live in believe in the coming crisis or not.

If we were to do that, now, and not wait as we so often do for the media, television and so forth to catch up with reality, we could expect to make it through this ok. Maybe even better than ok. We could all perceivably benefit from a new-found independence - personal and environmental health benefits at the least would be extraordinary.

Nation-wide secession seems like a practical alternative to the NAU, and having things shrink to a community level would pave the way for a more direct level of democracy within the states. I think that we are technologically prepared to sustain ourselves if the states were to begin breaking up. It seems as though with all of the dissatisfaction so many of us have with the federal state, federal bank and corporate concentrations of power we should all try and push for secession and the liberation of our state-wide communites.

It seems that if media were completely uncompromised, stories related to the (still running) Monsonto corporation or America's support of terror and of fascist third-world regimes, for example, would see more air time. I find it so often repugnant that media will de-humanize the news to the extent that a tragedy can read like a statistical survey.

It also seems ridiculous that when media presents people to debate or speak about any important subject, they are given only around 30 seconds to a minute to condense very critical and complex views as well as, in debate formats, raise their voice to compete with whoever else is trying to get a word in. Public access interviews and debates I've witnessed seem a lot more human and relaxed, allowing everyone to get as many words in as they like. As a result, they also appear more vital to an informed public, in contrast with major news media.

Most importantly, because major news reads and sounds to me typically like an officially handed-down statement from either the corporate system, wall street, the state or other powerful institutions and figures of authority, I find it very unbelievable that in most cases major news outlets do and say what they really want instead of just parroting whatever is handed down by the establishment. It is all the more unbelievable given that practically all major media outlets are owned by the biggest corporations - that alone compromises the journalistic integrity of every major media outlet.

I somewhat agree with Noam Chomsky, who surmised that most members of the major media establishment are not lying when they say they are not told what to do by anyone else, but that the problem is that to make it into a position of wide-reach in a journalism career, one has to internalize the values of the establishment. One cannot simply print any news they deem worthy if that news happens to be something that runs against the interests of the powerful institutions that own the media establishment. I doubt we'll ever see a story on the nightly news exposing the fact that half of the world's money is owned by 1% of the human population as well as offering professionals a chance to expound upon alternative social and economic systems we could use in America to supplant capitalism and curb corporate power, something perhaps closer to what the founding fathers of this nation invisioned.

Of course, the idea too of a cubical map of political extremes is a little bit ridiculous. So, then, is the problem with political thought a result of that most typical of failures: confusing the maps we have made of reality with reality itself?

To provide an example, one of the major problems I have with the alleged balance between the two perceived American extremes, is that the sides that are considered within the larger American political structure - Libertarianism and Conservatism, Democraticism and Republicanism, both member of the left and right, respectively - are both entirely capitalist; no attempt is made by either to stifle the excessive power of corporate entities, though both do in fact debate constantly over how important our individual liberties are. This has led me to assume that the American value system as we know it today is quite far flung from the American value system of previous centuries, which seemed a great deal more balanced, at least perhaps because there were more political parties that were acknowledged and each stood a chance in elections.

I think that in order to achieve a greater sense of balance, America will have to begin to understand, listen to and acknowledge the values of all alternative ideologists and allow them a platform on which to stand. That is, if America isn't already dead-drunk on it's unwarranted power and influence.

Let's shrink the world down in scale to the size of a very large house, every room in the house representing a nation and maybe 3 - 5 people in each room. We might create representational dilemmas based on real-world decisions made by each country in the house and view the effects these parallel situations would have on those within the house. It's my guess that it would take very few reproductions of modern American policies (both national and abroad) to get most of the entire house up in arms, including those few non-decision making members in the American room.

The thing is, it's a small world, but Americans are made to feel it is very large and alien. We may as well begin to think of the world around us as a house though really. America is just detached and alienated so much of the rest of it. One of the many large problems is the media. Suffering, as experienced practically all over the rest of the world, isn't humanized by the media except in those cases that humanization serves an American agenda.

Another is that criticism in some amount can help filter art & music of obvious pretention as well as allow us to recognize the unskilled charlatan from the skillful genius. I think music knowledge and criticism goes hand-in-hand. Without overt criticism, the art world would become saturated with DeviantArt-esque hangings in galleries, and without an appreciation for art through the histories we would see several artists doing numerous re-tracings of the Mona Lisa, each receiving admiration and the highest of praise.

Some artists & musicians are inclined to put "expression" on a pedestal above "talent" or "skill", and this degrades both the artist and their art. Whenever possible an artist should take great pains to work on their craft and to develop skill in order to better express their vision, as well as study the past to gather an idea of what's been done and what hasn't. Self-criticism, constructive criticism from others and an objective approach to one's art are essential to the open-minded artist.