Essay- on Consumerism -Copyright Robert Fullarton 2012

Essay 1.                          Where consumerism stands today




The cavernous exercises of western civilisation seem to threaten us
with a sense of belittlement as if we ourselves meant nothing in
totality. It would seem that exercises in good self-esteem,
self-discovery and assertion were desperately needed amid the throngs
and clamour of great publicity, entertainment, sensational attention
and big business.

The tiniest show of nature, the hidden activities of the world and the
forgotten people of our nation seemingly appear to become a nothing.

The attitude of our mainstream people is a typically laize faire
attitude of utter reliance on the politic naiveté of our time.
Science, consumerism and government has to be cleverly assessed and
watched with the suspicious gazes of a madman, or perhaps an alien, a
caveman or a hermit, in truth a third party as a witness to the
crumbling pillars of western society and how in the final hours of the
western world there is this ritual dependence on consumerism. Pleasure
has become currency, men are no longer men, women are no longer women,
they are all the stereotypes of the apparently benign sugar-sweet
media- the cunning, deceptive media- that is layered with the
statistical information of popular science, –for what is kept within
the lines of public knowledge and all that is censored and withheld-
indeed- people live on the tip of the iceberg and few can escape from
the temptations of cheap pleasure and mass entertainment, but never
before has such a seduction been possible on such a level, through a
mass accumulation of surplus wealth, through crude materials, through
flesh and blood and great business sense. Supple movement of
persuasion and the illusory message that we are utterly dependant on a
product of domestic use has throughout the longevity of capitalism
become the catch 22 of the modern era or the final chapter of the
Western world (the Roman world). It is indeed so to be, the actual end
of the world, as we know it.

As we all know the power of advertisement lies in two indelible facts,
which make the offer and the contract of the product so irresistible.
First of all the company owners, and the chairmen that market the
product want to present an illusory image, namely that their
particular brand or precise product will fit the needs of attention
and your specific fancy. A sense of dependence is needed, a sort of a
tempting offer, flaunted by the television, can make a man explode
with sheer orgasmic delight from his settee, with every add that airs,
as each new patented lie fills the viewer with delight as a promise of
comfort and happiness is proposed every time. Each add, covers every
aspect of an economy –in even the most fundamental form- a man
explodes in his pants when he sees a new Nissan Primera shooting off
into the sunset, or explodes in his pants when he sees something tasty
that takes his fancy in a hungry hour of slovenly delight. Add after
add, our thoughts are invaded, with computers, entertainment offers,
beautiful women, the manly tones of our televised models.

We can be happy because the “normal” and the standardized man or woman
is beautiful, happy, popular and deoxygenated at the brain. Now that
is the second powerful illusion propagated by own typical advert. The
fear of abnormality, ostracism, peer pressure, alienation, sexual
redundancy, and isolation can be promoted through popular culture,
through public figures and particularly through an advertisement.
Note! Not only will you be happier if you buy this car, but you will
be a more attractive specimen, a more important man with your friends
–who will respect you in a new light, you never even knew before. Of
course the beautiful girl next door or the girl you always fancied
will be giving you dirty glances and be approaching you for unknown
pleasures and each woman will take time to stop and stare at the man
in the silver Primera car that drives off down the beautiful,
meticulously trimmed gardens and richly opulent houses of the lavish
suburbs of Los Angeles.

The people must be convinced at all costs that they must keep spending
for the good of their sanity and their own health, for to do so would
be a national disaster and would only create or worsen a financial
crises and thus further plunge the country into debt and disarray. The
circulation of commerce must continue at its present rate and
eventually grow, so that the benefactors can indeed continue to be the
beneficiaries and let the zombified buyers believe that they need the
latest I Phone, “because if you don’t have an I phone, then you don’t
have an I phone, and any way you wont be able to impress your friends
with old phones and you cant impress girls without the latest craze or
fashion, because that might just show you up to be poor or cheap.”

Well this is what the add should really say, because it’s the
subliminal message that is fed to us. “Buy this watch; because David
Beckham models it”, the agent and the principal work in contractual
agreement to trap the interest of the buyer. The agent is the company
or the brand name for which the principal works for, the principal is
the model that poses and gets sales to skyrocket for the company. The
very sales themselves might rely on the very name or image of a
celebrity.

Actors, multi-corporation businessmen, media tycoons, entrepreneurs,
blah blah blah blah blah are a fancy way of galvanising and endorsing
the new 21st century hierarchy of the plutocratic class, that has
replaced our old aristocracy. Perhaps it is true to state that the
most unknown man is indeed the most powerful one, and the mainstream
imagery of attraction are the means by which this alpha male or hidden
man grows in the insatiable lust of his own schemes for power. Yes the
pretty face of a celebrity can just barely present an image on the
mere surface of a lie –a shallow shoreline- but when one digs deep and
hunts for scandals, deceptions, material falsities and the
hypocrisies, one’s fingers go right through the hollow crust of the
face and the smile to find that the tender attraction, with the
dependency of the viewer and the buyer are disturbed by the truth and
the childlike dependency is shattered like the foundations of an
illogical cult.

The life of a modern public figure –for whatever reason- has never
been so damn good! All the privileges of each class’s aspirations seem
to lie in the lap of the figure of great public and sensational
attention. Money, materials, women, drugs, public popularity, media
adoration and favouritism have presented the public with a new raison
d’etre; and that is to pursue a life of notoriety, emulate the life of
the public figure or at least to buy the very stitches, fabrics and
accessories of the public figure in question. Buckets of money may
fill many mansions, on the level of which new television contractors
pay or football clubs pay for their beloved spoiled brat! But alas it
still does not hide the deception that this is all a fantasy, a
neverland like deception, as the cyclical and rhythmic tempo
continues, new business prodigies are being scouted, new profits have
soared and been reached, new faces tempt the commoner on the bus and
new deals are brewing right through the night, as the people sleep,
new conceptions are being conceived for quicker, bigger and new means
of profit. People –particularly children or adolescents- are a
fantastic way of making the financial gaps on a company memorandum
disappear, to fulfil the quota rights of their shareholders and to
overturn the annual deficit.


Never before have we seen –or have I been amazed to live in- such a
generation as this one here present. The movements of youth in their
singularity, in their sheepishly, sheep like coming together, as
something of the blind, brain dissolving agents of a fanatical
ideology, looks something similar in this regard to the singularity of
lets say the wild fermenting crowds of Nuremburg. Hitler was the
celebrity; the Nazi movement was the new pop philosophy, fashion or
god of the time. The standards of acceptance, normality, the
fanatical, mouth foaming rhetoric of the movement were the boundaries
of knowledge and intelligence. The minorities, the dissidents and the
old intelligentsia were been beaten back and squashed. Some were
exiled, some had been concentrated in camps, some had been imprisoned
and many others had been secretly destroyed. The image or shibboleth
of the movement has shown us what is “good” and what is “bad” it has
told us what is “scientifically correct” and what is “scientifically
incorrect” it has used statistics from certain administrative powers
and ministries to inform us on the correctness of these statistics and
the legibility and credibility of them. Scientifically and culturally
man is told to be one thing and woman another, man is persuaded to be
one thing and woman another thing and also thoughts and ideas are
through advertisements, subliminally “corrected” and good clothing,
and bad clothing, good tastes and bad opinions spring forth. A good
man is thus- he wears such and such for the promotion of his country’s
interest and the commerce and regularity of the biggest businesses
that run the country and have their fingers and their noses, not just
in the media, but also in the minds of many people, in the brains of
little children, old men and young girls alike.

 Likewise the deception runs both ways, the instinctive hunger of the
people for happiness, for company, for belonging, for power and
shelter finds place in the new man made religions that crop up once an
old state religion evaporates. Man centralises himself in the
indulgences and entertainment of new design and notoriety –pleasure
can often be the sole motive of the struggling or complacent mind in a
drowning world of constant trouble.
A little advertising magic, sends the crowds in awe and that is all
that is needed, the great magician or chef cooks something special for
the crowd, the dependence of the mass on the rulers for stability, for
gravitation and thought shows the vertical ascendancy and continuance
of the old anthropological power struggle that has been going on since
the dawn of time.

Mr Goebells himself was a great magician of sensationalism, he
conjured up great tricks, created the objects of fantasy, which the
German people at the time aspired to. The movement reduced the intake
of knowledge, filled the minds of the commoner with statistics (which
were monitored), with a new pseudo-science of racial superiority and
then censored every thought or opinion that was not within the control
of the movement. They could convince the average German citizen that
the war was being won, right up until the final year of the war, that
the war was necessary, beneficial, that the movement and the nation
were in a stable and progressive position and that the movement was
once again correct. Of course such discrepancies in the form of Allied
propaganda that countered their own propaganda exposed the fallacies
of their containment and burst another bubble from the bubble making
machine –that is the movement- and it is true that the bubble was the
society that the movement had forged and profiteered off on the
co-operation and religious worship of the state. All the energies of
the people acted to the nucleus of the state protector or father and
the individual who thought differently, such units would fade out and
disappear altogether if they thought against the omniscient authority
of the movement.

One of the greatest lessons in history, manipulation and mass
distortion of truth through media, came in the form of Herr Gobelles’
propaganda, perhaps it was a signpost to the future, a premonition, a
warning of the thunder of the imminent days when propaganda would be
completely injected into the mainstream bloodline of society and
hardly ever get acknowledge as such, because once again, pleasure and
promises, comfort, flattery, mere statistics and sensational
attractions are fed to the starving masses –who are starved of
self-knowledge and the truth- who become the adherents and the laymen
and women of the new movement, that becomes a religion which feeds the
populous with a million subliminal messages, flatteries, promises and
headed by the handsome faces of a thousand rich Californians.

Image is powerful because it leaves a drug like hold on the impression
of the viewer, it can tempt and seduce the lonely, the unhappy, the
impoverished, and in total try to feed us with false consolations for
every hardship and difficulty we endure. For every headache there is
an aspirin to be taken, for every dull moment there is a bottle of
Carlsberg and a for every bemused, spoilt teenager there is another
computer console coming out the year after the last one and in it may
be much more expensive than the last model but it is alas more popular
and has greater effects and graphics than the last one. Perhaps some
celebrity has signed the box cover for the console.

Perhaps, on a subconscious level man thinks that he can attain
immortality or at least a great bounty of pleasure through cheap
material pleasures that are often a frivolity and a waste of space.
But indeed man is trying to keep up with his neighbour, he must show
of his latest products and purchases, he must add another storey to
his own house, extend his driveway by at least several cubic metres
and have his children wearing the finest designer clothing. Not only
do ego’s go on parade in the modern display of property and
consumerist culture, but the very psychology of a family or individual
is wrapped up in the relative nonsense of the competing pressures of a
society. Frugality of course is by all means dissuaded because
happiness can be attained through expenditure.

The material settings of a man’s domain, the atmosphere which he is
born into can create the anxieties of which leave us confused and
lost, the escalation of more competing expenditures and modelling
goods to be produced. Mass produced food –gravy and pie- mass produced
footwear, mass produced entertainment, social networking and the like,
all are the comfortable lies we choose to believe either because we
are afraid to take up the challenge and think for ourselves, or
because we are simply too comfortable and too nervous of disturbing
the social order, which seems all powerful and invulnerable. Indeed
these days with the focus given on genetics, one might say, “the state
plays host to the genes of the unassertive and gives them meaning in a
world where they would otherwise find no meaning.” Of course it is
true that it is an unquestionable truth that crafty men will seek
power through whatever means necessary even if it be in the most
supple, subtle and ambiguous of means and terms imaginable. In each
case the unassertive man and woman fill the ranks of the radical
movement itself, there we find the sheer force of the moving tide, the
energy and the destructive power of the growing momentum of a movement
or state.

In each case it is the work of the elite to live off the
unassertiveness of a select group of subordinates and in this most
modern of examples, we find within the west the meteoric rise of each
celebrity or businessman through a product, a name, the endorsement of
the product through the name, the fulfilment of a secure market and
the advertisement of the product itself; this we call the consumerist
age.

It is not solely materialist, it is idealistic on the most part, the
consumerist age espouses a philosophy of quantity over quality and if
quality is measured, it is measured in the worth of its advantageous
nature, its potential profit, instead of its essence and essential
quality. There is indeed a utilitarian element to our society today;
it is quite honestly the notion that our businessmen and our rulers
may appear honest and trustworthy for the sake of the regularity of
state business or corporate business. That society can be held
together, that solicitors can get rich and criminals can be moved on,
while money is made, while newspapers have headlines, egos inflate,
fashions contaminate the collective intelligence of the populous like
a viral disease and everything can appear to be moral and democratic.
The people may believe in the inalienable rights of private property
but they most certainly don’t believe often in forgoing the legal
procedure of suing those that transgress their property and their
possessions. If the west truly is irreligious, then it is nothing of a
phenomenon but the signs of a time where free thinking and analysis,
where education and private insight are measured by the weight of
televised entertainment and advertisement. Our sub-conscious minds are
indeed the warehouses by which popular culture grows and takes effect
over our singular opinion.

If one wants to take a glance at the ruthlessness of consumerist and
capitalist power, one has to take a look at the unconscionable rule of
the elite in say India or China. Not only does the old feudalism of
each country’s history come into play –for the disgusting figures of
poverty and mortality that continue- but also the western capitalist
model, of say new corporations, company’s expanding their corporate
empires into the boundaries of the Punjab and the districts of
Shanghai. The third world is being taught how to lie, like never
before, it is being taught to advertise and to glamorise the truth for
the first time into a lie. Of course these feudal countries need not
preach to the poor –for they don’t give a damn about them- but they
can preach to the middle and upper classes, to absorb influence,
attention and affluence into the prestige of the rising elite class
–which is the class of modern businessmen and celebrities- those with
money can buy a share of happiness, a product of global worth and
prestige. Globalisation is essentially, the most obvious competition
for the worst kinds of businessmen; it is the recurrent trend of
supranational, continental needs on the global market. These companies
are at the very heart of the consumerist lie, they have their fingers
dipped in many pies and many proposals, they exploit the poor of many
nations, they deforest and pollute the natural environment from their
bases of trade for resources, outside the west, for their own ends.

The terrible truth is that that mankind does not need such excesses in
material wealth and ownership. The “untouchables” of Calcutta and
Mumbai, the beggars of Bangkok and the industrialised “slaves” of the
wastelands of China’s growing empire, all squashed and crushed under
the force of the obesity of the corporations are the very malevolent
reality that is buried beneath the sugar coated consumerism that is
available on public auction. Man can build his mansions to the sky, as
long has he can accumulate enough surplus wealth and material to
“modernise” his “humble abode”.
Of course some one has to suffer for the extravagances of the world,
for all the pomp, pageantry, ceremony, prestige and glory, that the
west likes to flaunt and the media is the mouth piece by which we can
depress ourselves daily on how much money we lose and how poor
“unfortunate” big spenders at Wall Street are going down the toilet
for the financial gambles they made, that did not pay off. Match
fixing, money laundering, the tampering of the law for a solicitor’s
pocket, all these headlines, these realities and hidden truths in
themselves are the causes of the post-war Americanised society of
financial avarice –the American lie- of course it was Uncle Sam that
lead the way into the consumerist idealism, we currently are embedded
in. The business world was focused on nationalising and cornering the
market; it was the birth of globalisation and production rates
excelled like never before. Brand names that associated and advertised
the “standardized brilliance” of a product from the American
motherland, found influence in Britain, France and the defeated German
nation, for in peace time, money could be made on a greater scale and
scope, that the nationalised war bonds of the united states’
plutocrats. In peacetime, the advertisement of “idealised” property
and wealth was fed to the children of the post-war generation, that
material wealth could equate happiness and pleasure from the desperate
days of war, poverty and aristocracy. This new generation honestly
believed that it could escape from the conservatism and the poverty of
the previous generations, as the standard of living generally
increased with the bloated swelling of western economies over time.

The recent controversy over the banking crisis, has not only shown up
these white collar criminals as the antithesis of the jaded notions we
now call democracy, of course it showed the levels and figures of
their indifference and how in a time of excessive spending –when
people spend as if there is no tomorrow- the banks and businessmen
that perpetrate the crimes of capitalism and how easy it is to
conceive these crimes until public scrutiny comes to bear. Quite
frankly there is enough eco-political squabble and ego in the papers
for me to just glide over and gloss the effects and the causes of the
ongoing recession and the banking crisis without opening up another
contrived can of worms. Too much attention alone has been given
without the requisite sociology needed to assess the way we live
today, and the atmospheric growth and root of greed, the political
source of spending, the moral corruption that is existent and the
circumstances of capitalism as it stands in this country and within
the European Union at large.

Indeed capitalism does allow for the growth of elitism, the elite have
come in the form of the businessmen and the corporate officials, but
it has never been on such a large ratio and percentage as before and
now more than ever, it is propagated in the form of the celebrity. The
people religiously need their products, the chains of necessity,
demand and popular psychology. The cult of demand must be fulfilled,
the foreboding sense of estrangement from ourselves comes in the form
of estrangement from the crowd, what the crowd is doing must be
logical –so we think- if it has so much popular support, the
psychology of the growing hominid and its search for power, still
seeks power in number and almost subconsciously wants the security of
the crowd, whether it concerns the taking of alcohol, narcotics or the
buying of great quantities of expensive goods. Quantity is relative to
popularity, quantity is relative and relevant to our own social
position, so much these days relies on the pageantry of what the
public thinks –what our neighbour thinks- and so much regard is given
to the opinion polls, for comfort comes in the statistics of the
crowd. The irrationality and insignificance of fashion continues to
burn holes in our mind and plays tricks on the most confident of
people, its hold over young men and women, is credited to the consumer
generation and the sheer psychology which the elite and the statistics
of the majority hold over the masses. The masses bind the masses to
themselves and few even instinctively step out of line with a rational
question on the illogical waste of thought, practice and material on
the fancies of mindless crazes.

Is it true to state that we are trapped in the cycles of spending?
Does national debt rely itself in all its burdens and liabilities in
some part on the shortages of collective expenditure, where businesses
are folding and going under because not enough crude material and
enough targets are met by the shoppers and the customers of the west.
Does economic viability partially owe its allegiance to the sales and
the rates of expenditure? Does unemployment spring from the frugality
and caution of consumers who abstain from over spending and from
buying random junk solely for the attractiveness of the offer? Or
perhaps we need to spend simply for the competitive spirit of our
nature to match and mirror our neighbour’s possessions in quantity and
quality.

The unhealthy private benefits of a company chairman, and the
preferential treatment that is given by the chairmen and the elite and
their own interests conflicts with the interests of the investors and
the common shareholder. One has to only look back over the past fifty
years to see the headlines, the numerical and financial errors that
came through the nullity of false promises that were made –one only
has to think of Enron to be reminded of such instances- and the
proportion to which the common shareholder loses out over the
interests of the corporate mogul who proportionally is far higher on
the financial ladder and far richer than the average shareholder. The
rights of the investors and the common shareholder, do they need to be
gambled and threatened by the growth and credence given to the wealth
and avarice of the board of managers and the chairman? Sure enough the
citizens of the state need work, business managers need workers and
depend on the citizens to spend to keep their businesses intact and to
protect them from liquidation and from receivership. Well the more we
buy -we may, little enough- grant the business a valid reason to
exist, but nonetheless the sheer social phenomenon of consumerism
cannot be ignored for the gross over spending many are guilty of, for
the entrapment of advertisement. The more we depend on our material
ownership of objects –random as it may be bought- the more perhaps we
set ourselves up for a fall, on the philosophical and psychological
dependence that is attached and placed on the importance of public
spending. With the sheer figures of debt and unemployment, a certain
level of frugality is needed, an aversion from the utter slavish
dependence that too many have measured themselves upon for the
expected privileges and benefits of consumerism.

Indeed it is as I have analysed earlier before, it is a catch22
dilemma for the consumer in both situations, it affects both sides of
a financial polarity, between thrift and public demand. But it cannot
be ignored that there is the fact that the western lifestyle is
susceptible to so much amending changes and truth. The ideological
aspects of consumerism as a religion and as a way of life are all
there, with the control and the whip being extended over us, with
great subtlety and subterfuge. The happiness of the individual is not
relevant to any company or its managerial board, but the attention is.
If the happiness is somehow relevant to the company prospectus, then
it is in relation to maintaining good customer returns, good public
ethos –or the appearance of it- or similarly enough to attract numbers
and potential customers to the name and notoriety of a company.
Ideologically so to speak, consumerism offers happiness through the
availability and abundance of great material wealth –of course every
business policy is without question a profit in disguise for the
business elite in question- and the belief that wealth sustains and
builds the social norms and the rules of appropriate behaviour. It can
also be stated that wealth is the dividing line between popularity and
social normalness, but of course these so called “conventional truths”
are the lies that have leaked through into our subconscious mind from
the great magicians in the advertising business. A great tour de force
of advertising grows in the psychology and the dreams of the common
man, how it has offered salvation to the poor and the desperate
through the attainment of produce and the hoarding of great mounds of
materials. Of course we are taught through the persuasiveness of our
media, through the inductive addictiveness of the advertisements, when
we watch our television or sit in the cinema with our pupils dilated
in fascination by the sheer normalness, the sheer comedy and the
attraction of a great offer. Of course the whole things is the theatre
for the absurd and the absurd mind, perhaps we think –which is true to
a certain extent- that the more flash we become in appearance and the
bigger our castles extend to the sun, the greater we stand being able
to woo the pretty girl off the street. It has a very Darwinian,
narrow-minded truth behind it, namely the fact that man seeks power
through his materials and his ownership of such materials and seeks it
to be the adhesive for which he can yield to his own social
aspirations. The flexibility of an individual who is frugal and
non-materialistic by nature and the philosophy could be seen in the
modern religion of consumerism to be a renegade that is different on
so many social levels and is nearly short of being called –on a
symbolic level- a heretic, worthy of the damnation of poverty and
ostracism. “He who does not spend puts his nation at greater risk!”
This is one of the consumerist commandments and a subversion of the
truth from a government deal to galvanise the trade and the capital of
the nationalised and the privatised interests of each company’s
agenda. Indeed I cannot totally disagree with the credible and logical
idea that perhaps a total rationing of the materials and the ownership
of surplus and collective wealth, may be required for the maintenance
of public interest and happiness, the credibility of the masses may
find more freedom once the attachment of consumer goods and materials
have been greatly reduced and rationed. The servant class remains, but
not in the state of wretched poverty –in the west anyway- only this
class has widened in number and scope right through the middle and the
working class for the servility of common man. The mastery of life
comes in the complete power of persuasion –as I have said time and
time again- that is the power of appeal and attraction. The release of
the common man of each class comes in the intellectual and spiritual
freedom of each man and woman, each citizen of a nation or a
supranational union, to have increased power and control over their
own richness of life, a new philosophy and a new lifestyle that is not
based on the plundering of resources and ruthlessness of profiteering
at whatever cost, this is unquestionably needed.

Of course today it must be acknowledge that society has become
compacted through technology, we travel large distances in a matter of
hours –even within a single day to the ends of the globe- mass
communication has made the world connect via the virtual construction
of the internet. Outside the hemispheres of western civilization and
luxury there are the more despotic regions of the earth, were brutal
hegemony and feudal practices continue, where old fashioned ideologies
clamour and clash together, were men and women live in rural fiefdoms
and tribal communities, there the consumerist haven has not reached
nor conquered. In fact in these regions you might just find a great
intolerable and greatly irksome, suspicious hatred of the western
lifestyle of consumerism and its missionary work through globalisation
to plant a few Mc Donald’s in the back regions of the Hindu Kush. Some
communities and ideologies refuse to endorse or indulge in the “new
craze” of economic and social change. The more ascetic and
historically contrasting and opposing elements of the Middle Eastern,
the sub-continental and the oriental regions of the earth, some have
referred back to the old traditions of their forebears and some have
instinctually either merged with the industries and the lifestyle of
the “civilised” earth or have merely become the alienated victims of
the transition of a feudal society to a more marginally democratic
one. Of course “the untouchables” of the Indian metropolis –in a
Malthusian crisis of over population and the shortages and sheer
control over resources- have become the slaves and the victims of an
expanding nation of rising entrepreneurs and growing industries,
without the social liberties and privileges that came with western
civilisations’ democratic and social revolutions. The old maxim of the
“rich deserve their wealth and the poor deserve their poverty” still
prevails in the Ancien Régime of modern India –the Caste system- over
the ethics of the west. Of course consumerism is just another excuse
for a hierarchic system to prevail over the poor, as the means for
material and financial superiority.
The consumerist markets and the world economy relying on the annual
goals and targets for sale and merchandise, not only have been
geographically extended to the latitudes of the equatorial regions of
the earth but have found their conversions in the peoples of emerging
third and second world economies. It appears that old cold war
nations, the nations of new found wealth and newly tapped resources
want the privileges and the domain of material power that comes with
the consumerist craze. As I stated before this generation was
predisposed to the consumerist phase or craze of western civilisation
through the historical efforts and policies of its forebears. As I
made the comparison earlier between this generation and that of Nazi
Germany, I now want to clarify on this comparison to state that the
rather Epicurean or hedonistic philosophy of our generation has filled
itself with the false illusions of an insecure happiness, that is
based as I state once again on the quantities of civilisation for
private pleasure and the daily competitive spirit that yields and
drives us as a species Each generation is exposed to the worst systems
of fashion and the more violable epidemics of their time, it does not
take lone for the general public to take up an idea and embrace it in
the face of overriding opinion and popularity. An anthropologist and a
Darwinian psychologist looking and drawing up a brilliant synopsis on
the human farce, would point out the crude measurements of the human
species to live and enable itself to think and then minimize the
motives of the pool of the sub-conscious mind, to divulge the human
obsession for popularity and adulation. Even sociopaths like attention
every once and awhile, who knows who far removed their minds are from
the mimicry of the common assertion. Yet I state to point that this
generation, at the point and stage it is at in time –at the end of art
and the western world- has come to a vacuous period of moral decline,
of spiritual decline –on a far wider perspective than expected- and
even on a philosophical level, as technology has limited our manual
capacities to make and think for ourselves we are dimmed down, we are
the prototypes for a world in which others do the thinking for us, for
a repetitive cycle that rolls on and the trappings of pleasure and the
cubit measurements of our material worth continue to paint a falsified
reality which we endorse and embrace. This generation has no role
models worthy of attention –but fools form groups and make idols for
more fools to worship and give names to their imbecilic squabbles and
screeches- this generation also has no knowledge of what life would be
like in feudal poverty, in an eternal recession, in a world without
electricity, without convenience stores and fashion fares, without
makeup –to hide the blisters, warts and boils of real hardship-
without the older generations to pay for their spoilt offspring,
without the products of devotion and the adverts of an hallucinogenic
power, with celebrities living debt and squalor, with names and
reputations meaning nothing and where people crowd in soup kitchens
for a days survival. How far gone, it may seem to the old days of mass
poverty –where no social welfare existed and no pension either- where
the open division of men, formed rank, to the classes that toiled and
perished and the rich that lived in leisure and oppressed the poor.
The decadence of our time lies in the gluttony of our philosophical
and spiritual values –we are not to think on a moment to moment basis
and realise how damn short life really is and for the most part, it is
composed of pain and suffering- the pleasure of the classes is candy
coated in consumerism, the drugs of alcohol, narcotics, reefer, sex,
fashion and sport. For all the money wasted on mere reputation and the
extravagance of all our vainest ambitions –I have included sport and
fashion in here too, because both have replaced the old comforts of
religion, but sport still subconsciously feeds the egos of the people
with the same old provincialism and tribalism of the species- it has
become a pain to live a time of segregated blindness, where youth and
crime are a juxtaposition of a growing crisis that come both with the
failure of the liberal ethos of the state and the corruption of our
legal system. Nothing is taken seriously for its moral consequence and
its moral reality, pleasure has emphasis because philosophically many
want to escape from the hardship and not face the deepening realities
that come and the answers that are refused.
Television to be honest has been the greatest killer of the
imagination in certain forms and ways we cannot imagine, –it has left
the old farmers and labourers and transformed them into in the
suburban devotees of cheap pleasure- a satellite dish does more for an
entire family than the theatre can do in a different thousand
productions for a thousand different plays. Likewise the temptations
of produce offer us unimaginable freedom from our own repressed
unlived, undreamt existences, we have become the conjurers and
entertainers of great fantasies to live out our lives on the Internet
and on the computer. It could just so easily happen as I briefly
mentioned, that the technology of our privileges-partly our slavery-
could just as easily be exhausted, become non-renewable, obsolete and
ineffective through the erroneous forces of time, nature, human
calamity and entropy together. Man could just as easily become a
farmer once again, a hoarder of massed quantities of stolen food in
the fight to survive. Man could return to the early bronze age and the
power basis might shift to the old Fertile Crescent where man is
reduced to labour once again on a global scale, working manually,
using primitive tools and working mathematically and geometrically on
the old methods, the basis of daily life and construction. Produce
would return to the individual and be the means for the individual,
trade would become more effectively personal and business would be
reduced to the means of the cattle driver and market dealer once
again. But of course this pipe-dream is merely a wishy-washy tangent
of my own deliberate purpose to paint the contrasts and the individual
productivity of the private individual, in the days of antiquity.
Produce is made as cheap as it can by a subsidiary company or perhaps
and outlet in an impoverished third world country, where workers
labour for less the pay, for less benefits and for no questions asked,
the rights and privileges –where they exist- belong to the consumer of
the first world and they may enjoy their cheap thrill and the company
may receive an annual boost through cuts in spending, profits made and
the rise of the value of company shares.
The crux of the dilemma lies in the fact that western civilisation
cannot live on its own accord -perhaps we have been domesticated by
the elite of each generation to be trained to think, to walk and
perform to the central means and popularity of the basis of society-
to be left like housecats that have never known the wilderness of
their forebears and who have forgotten their past and their wild
instincts for adventure and discovery. Indeed we are like housecats
that have been pampered and spoilt on the cream and the fat of the
wealth of our time. Our carcass of economic viability has been
stripped bare to the fundamental bones and the bones are the only
thing left with what we have to view and the debate on. We have to
live with a situation and in a time where resources are running on a
minimal low, where the sources of produce have been sucked dry and the
damage runs at a greater price and a cost than we can even picture.
This fast living philosophy and fast living economy of ours, for all
the splendour and the notions we are being fed from our televisions
–and our bi-polarised newspapers- and from the omniscience of the
advertising agencies, we are still squandering our livelihood, we are
still living to work during the week and pleasuring ourselves by the
weekend, to live in the monotony of the times. There are regions of
the earth, across the bush and scrubland, across the deserts and the
impoverished town lands, across the jungles and the swamps where man
lives –as both C.G Jung and Claude Levi Strauss have declared- are
living still in their primitive innateness. The cultural
anthropologist must declare and inspect the age old remedies of the
basic commodities of man –in tribal communities and the poorer peoples
of the earth- and declare whether or not –not scientifically- but
literally, symbolically and psychologically if these men and women are
really deprived of happiness, for happiness is relative to the growth
of what survives and thrives in the basic economies and belief systems
of a tribe or people. In Bhutan the motto speaks for the generalised
development of happiness, for happiness is in essence what the human
psychology is rooted and affirmed in, the thriving of policies and
livelihoods that appropriate happiness also equate or emulate that
most ancient and wonderful of utopias, that of the individual and the
basic fundamental nature of human life for creativity and the triumph
of the twists and turns of imagination in all momentum, over
splendour, squander and unnecessary waste.