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On a somewhat different, less existential-crisis-naval-gazing-etc-etc, note I was in the grocery store today trying to find just, some sort of pack of cookies for a buck. I'd gone to the grocery store to pick up some energy drinks to fuel CRUNCHTIMES, so I'd have something carbonated to go with the coffee, grabbed a four pack for 8 bucks, and thought to myself "Well, I have absolutely no sweet foods in the house -- and I have a tenner here, and I'm going to be breaking it anyway. Why don't I just grab a little pack of cheap-ass cookies for a dollar and keep them around to eat after meals and take to class for breaktimes?"

So I headed over to the isle and was struck by... Americaness. That is, I've had globalization, culture, and rationalism all on the brain the past week, and t'ole "Americans like their culture BIG -- quantity over quality -- quantifiable calculability, rationality, yadda yadda." came up here and there in the discussion, thank-you George Ritzer*. There were lots of BIG packs of cookies... all over 2$. I went "huh". I did not want big! 6-7 cookies would do it for me!

In a discussion of American obesity the subject of portion sizes, in comparison to European portion sizes, often comes up.

Yeah, 2$ isn't that much for a pack of knock-off Oreos. That's a lot of caloric bang for your buck. But at the same time... couldn't they give me y'know, a quarter of that pack for a buck? Not that I blame it all on the companies -- they're not there to be our parents, they're there to sell what sells and make a profit. And people want BIG and they want sweet. So there you go.

Eventually I found a pack of cookies for less than 2$ (They were $1.19). They were European 'biscuits' on deep discount, in a much smaller pack, costing more per ounce than the American cookies. I bought them anyway, because, overall, I did not want to spend the extra 80 cents for food I did not want.

They're higher quality cookies than your average oreo -- and a lot less sweet.

I was bothered by all this though. In order to buy food for lower absolute prices (though, higher, relatively, per ounce) and in smaller portions I had to buy something imported from Poland. I've spent enough time recently hearing about the death of the nation-state and the level to which global economies are intertwined to know that in the scheme of things it makes little difference that I'm sending money out of the country, I mean, heck, it's basically unavoidable to do that to some extent due to the fact that most manufacturing occurs overseas now. But at the same time, with food... that can be more localized. Cheaper.

Ideally the best thing for me to do is buy the ingredients myself, and make my own damn cookies for cheaper where they can be customized and portioned to my particular tastes, but, time man, time. I'm spoiled. And I have a lot to do due to the division of labor and specialization required for the career I want to take part in.

It's all such a mess. Rationality has taken over and in it lies a core of irrationality. I'm talking about cookies here, but, the entire theoretical process could be extended to everything from healthcare**. Max Weber predicted this would happen about a century ago. Not in medicine, or food production in particular but... well... in everything.

And it's happened.

In today's globalized world Marx and Durkheim's theories can cover some of it. But, they never predicted anything like this. Weber's still relevant. The Marxian aspects of global exploitation are created by transnational companies functioning on... You guessed it! Rationalization.

We live in a world teetering on the economic brink. The system we have now can't last forever, but it careens onward. Right now we use pre-industrialized, and industrialized countries to provide goods for the post-industrial world. But what happens when they catch up, in terms of modernization? We can't keep finding new markets to exploit -- the world is limited. Marx predicted this. But it doesn't look like it's gonna go the way he thought it would, with everyone banding together and overthrowing the capitalists.

The option of war lies there, like a sleeping monster with one eye half open. But can we go to war now? Now, not only do we have to cope with the fact that nuclear weapons could destroy us all, we have to deal with the fact that since the cold war the economies of all countries have become inexorably intertwined. China scares us. We scare China. But we have to smile, and awkwardly shake hands because China holds the money and the goods, but the US holds the markets and the information.

The tribalism of our past has created fundamentalist backlashes, religious and otherwise, to the intertwined world and death of nation-states. We put up fences physical and otherwise to keep our neighbors out, in surges of violent ethnonationalism, But, really, what is the point? technology has brought us all closer together, and yet we cling to our differences. Can we keep up a world of distinct cultures? Is it a good thing to do so? Due to disproportionate power, will the entire world end up being Americanized***? Will rationality's emphasis on quantity over quality take over everywhere?

...

I totally can't buy cookies like a normal person any more.

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* Doing "The Globalization of Nothing 2" for one class and "The McDonalization of Society" in another. The first was mandatory, the second was voluntary, as I have to give a presentation on where Weber's theory's gone in the past few years and I remembered a reading from my undergraduate days on the McDonalization of society, and how rationality/bureaucracies are manifesting in modern society. I go back to review the reading and LO AND BEHOLD George Ritzer had written that too. I was like "Oh Ritzer, you theorist you." and a lot of the "WTF, man, this is just Weber" moments in "The Globalization of Nothing 2" suddenly made sense.

He's a good read should you ever want to feel sad about all we're losing in comparison to what we're gaining as we modernize at a crazy crazy rate. At least he isn't as bleak as Weber, and, hey, that glocal thing just might keep us from turning into the borg.

** It's like Weber in action, dude. Iron cage of rules and regulations trapping people! People struggling to break free of the ridiculous bureaucracy offered by insurance companies! The only solution offered is to turn it over to the government... another bureaucracy that, mark my words, will develop its own set of stupid rules and regulations in an attempt for more rationality. But due to the modern nature, and cost, of healthcare it seems that there's no way out, as private practice becomes less and less feasible for doctors and HMOs rule the world of medicine. Insurance is already bureaucrasized, and has pushed medicine to being bureaucrasized to some extent with the majority of it being heavily bureaucrasized.

And the thing is, we fight like cats and dogs on who will run the bureaucracy, but the fact of the matter is it's still gonna be one at the end of the day, government run or not. There's still gonna be problems innumerable. I believe firmly in a public option as I think it will make healthcare more accessible to people who can't afford private insurance. I also do not believe it will be a magical land of rainbows and puppies with no problems. There's gonna be a lot of problems. They stem from the irrationality of the rationality exercised in a bureaucratic form.

God, I want a "Weber was RIGHT" bumpersticker. I want one so bad.

*** Or, with the way things are going in terms of power distribution Americanized/China-ized? Was Joss Whedon, of all people, right in his vision of the future in Firefly? IS HE THE JULES VERN OF OUR TIME? I will let you all ponder this.

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