The exchange of pleasure within the confines of acceptance causes the individual to develop a sense of pride. A pre-occupation with the past, which is an ignorance of the present, becomes materialised in boundaries of perception. Everything is ring-fenced so the contents can be studied safely from a distance. Decisions are easy to make if there is precedence within the boundaries of acceptable behaviour, but charting fresh territory - turning the old into something new and fantastic - can only be made with the guidance of the intuitive truth. Without this, decisions are made with a sense of abandon: the abandon from history where pride is at stake. In the modern world, the individual without pride is stripped of value. There is no safety net of intrinsic trust, or sense of community, by which he is saved. Privacy does not have this certainty. The individual stands and falls by his decisions. Decisions which become regret, turn to decay.
Life is a sequence, experience a consequence. The individual every moment of conscious existence is thinking. Thought which is the product of experience becomes decision for activity. Breathing air is a decision, albeit not one that requires conscious thought for the vast majority of the time. We are only appreciative of our lives when we develop a strong awareness of this consciousness. We can accept or reject. Life is an unknown landscape that is given light by decisions, and the individual either sees the sense, or is blinded by the confusion.
Difficult decisions put us at crossroads. Experience that is commonplace requires less thought. If we feel hunger, and the need to eat, the decision to prepare food is not as hard to make than for someone who has been proposed to for marriage, and has to decide yes or no. There are decisions required for basic existence, and decisions which help to shape, define and change. Privacy of the individual - where intellect assumes a different value from the environment it perceives - reduces the immediate moment, if necessary, to an experience to be foregone so greater pleasure can be realised in a perception of the future. The future is an illusive anticipation which provides a more attractive thought than the present. In the barracks of privacy, the pressure of decisions is to realise the anticipation into a here and now reality. The grass, it seems, is always greener on the other side.
Decisions are intuitive steps into the unknown, and a fear of the unknown - the fear of regret - prevents change. The intellect which has a strong sense of value - value which brings it closer to the intuitive truth - is the intellect which is capable of understanding the need for change. A fear of the unknown is a misunderstanding of the present, where any semblance of certainty is held onto tightly. Institutions of the modern world perceived as representing certain value - beyond doubt - such as the family, the law, the teacher have become benchmarks of value. When they are considered at threat, it causes fear. The competitive market needs these institutions for its own well-being, and whilst people are happy if they benefit, they become wary of an inevitable alternative. A spectre looms. One eye always looks over the shoulder.
The institutions privacy has produced are now in flux, undermined by the value they seek to preserve. Formality is a whore in these confines. They pacify and legitimise conflict into democracy. This is a state where the fragmented progression of value produces winners and losers in the stakes of existence. In the democracy, the intellect which assumes greater money value over others is the intellect which has made stronger decisions. Privacy - by the very nature of money value - will always produce regret, but those of greater money value will have fewer regrets than others. Pleasure which has become rigidly ordered, alienated from true intuitive experience, becomes measured by an opportunity cost of the foregone alternative. Those who assume a lessor value are those who have been unable to make intuitive decisions for value, and the cost they pay is that of regret. This is a cost which has the compensation of cancer.
Decisions for change are the realisation of thought by practical activity: of them becoming physical. The individual who achieves something that has no real precedence, is the individual who needs to possess a strong belief and resolve to defend decisions. This resolve needs to be strong from derision and dismissiveness. The disagreement that is made on the grounds that you should not try to change something, or challenge some superior entity, or become involved in matters that you know nothing about - as it will be doomed to inevitable failure and frustration - is the repetition of regret. Stale air pervades. If people did not have the strength or resolve to defend their decisions then nothing would ever progress. There is no modern immaculate. Irony is people attacking ideas for change, and then complaining about the plight of their own situation. They are happy to stick to the accepted line, because it does not pay to do anything else. The line that leads to the expression of regret, the individual who harbours regret does so at great personal cost. Regret is a rotten history which makes us weary of the present and sceptical of the new.
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