Even as the seemingly monolithic structure of the post-war world comes crumbling down around our heads, an urge towards homogeneity continues to spread like some vast, insidious fungus across the socio-cultural order of the New World.

The media tells us that the interactive, five-hundred channel universe is causing us to break down in to ever more insular clans; isolated tribes centered on coincidental collective interests.

They tell us we are becoming strangers in our own communities. We ignore our neighbours to hold long e-mail discussions about the pious frauds in the Book of Daniel, or debate on boards about why the internet is not making the world a global village.

According to the media, we are breaking down into smaller, more aggresive special interest factions, hell bent on getting the vast, innocent, Norman Rockwell majority to bend over and accept some wild, anarcho-communist-feminist-homosexual-ecoextremist-godless agenda.

On the other side of the pond, there's a bunch of illiterate yokels wearing NRA caps, armed to the teeth, pumping round after round in to dummies dressed like ATK officers. According to the pundits, most of those living in the New World are going through a massive identity crisis. Or, at least, that's what they were saying up until last September. But then everything changed, didn't it? Actually it was only a percepual change on the part of Americans. The rest of the world carried on as before.

Take a look around, count the McDonalds, count the Starbucks. Check out the Tv channels and the FM dial ~ sameness creeps. Diversity seems to be a thing of the past and globalisation is the new buzzword.

There seems to be a willingness to allow the sweeping away of all traces of individuality, letting it be replaced with pre-packaged, ready made, demographically-tailored franchise outlets. People seem to fit so easily into these preordained slots because, since birth, they have been twisted and massaged and compacted in to a vast, generation-spanning, collective molestation.

Thinking for oneself can be dangerous. For instance, thinking for oneself can lead to long, lonely nights in the basement, thinking up ever more explosive and/or virulent methods of outwardly expressing one's vague yet undeniable rage and disappointment at a society seemingly oblivious to the wishes of all but the wealthiest of the power elite.

I suppose that society does it's best to supply any potential loose cannons with an endless stream of mind-numbing, stultifying opaite in the form of round the clock television programming. After all, you can't build bombs if you're busy watching Friends, and you can't successfully develop a new strain of anthrax if you're preoccupied with what's going on in Fear Factor. As acts of cultural rebellion are so rare and ill received as to be statistically insignificant, the ploy seems to be working.

Aristotle said that when man lives alone he is either a beast or a god, but is not a man. As we struggle our way through the psychic flux of everyday life, the key to true, liberating independence of thought lies not in total independence from your fellow man, which is impossible. It lies in learning to recognize the difference between being enlightened and having your chain pulled. It lies in developing the skills necessary to accurately judge information based on facts, logic and reason. It lies in learning to let go of beliefs that you know to be false, but to which you cling out of either habit, convenience or superstition.

Ignorance is bliss. Thinking for yourself is hard work.