The San Diego Effect

          I imagined a good number of papers would be called "What is _____," so I figured I would title this something more energetic.  A wonderful series of questions have been examined by Kant and Foucault in our text, so let us suppose another.  If individuals are pondering existence, and France has posed the question of "what is meaning," and individuals have thus begun studying the same existence as their peers, then a new culture of self-evaluation must be in development.  I just watched the first season of Game of Thrones, based around an imagined medieval kingdom, and the most valuable lesson therein is that our community values have shifted from the land of valor.  I observe a culture based off of a search for personal value sets, wherein each individual defines the values most essential to their self.
          There is another moral pursuit in Game of Thrones, where the lover chases dreams rather than duty.  I take this as a modern construction of a culture that was not quite so prevalent in times of arranged marriage and universally tragic breathe.  We do not pursue valor as in the past, but rather opportunity for escape from the reigns of society.  The Enlightenment is a primitive example, the civil rights achievements in the last century are a full execution of what has been on minds for centuries.  When Veronica Corningstone in Anchorman achieves her aspirations to be an anchorwoman, she has overcome the barrier that society has placed, barriers that are quickly coming down in this increasingly tolerant society.  In Game of Thrones, a peasant could never sit on on the Iron Throne.
          This is what I call the San Diego Effect, after Veronica's achievement and because I wrote this overlooking the beautiful blue expanses beyond San Diego.  Take this developing culture of achievable aspiration, and try to explain it as anything other than a culture.  People pursue opportunity differently than in the past.  We can actually choose to do what we want to do! Government imposed freedom has a wonderful effect- tactical use of the expression free country to watch football rather than mow the yard, and a simultaneous impression that dreams may indeed be pursued and are likewise achievable.  Freedom feels like sunshine, but responsibility weighs like a sack of bricks, we are free to carry as many as we want.  We have a human nature to enjoy the freedom of aspiration that we have earned from three hundred and more years of pondering, but how can we judge what happens when too much responsibility takes its tole on the overambitious? Maybe these are the corrupt politicians that we hear about, or people who turn Batman into a battlefield.  Or Ron Burgundy talking to a dog with night braces and matching pj's.  To make it clear, I am not posing an argument, or asking "what is questioning?" but rather "what effects does questioning have?"