Rich Slavery

What is the most depressing word in the English language? Suburb.

Here's what happened.

Companies saw that people were making lots of money after WWII, stemming from the GI Bill and the flood of government spending that started with the New Deal and continued with the weapons industry during the war. They wanted to make things for people to buy with their new money. But people didn't need the shit they wanted to sell. So, they hired advertisers. Advertisers convinced people that their lives were ugly and arduous and ignorant and backward, and because they were ugly and arduous and ignorant and backward, they were not happy. They convinced people that they needed to buy things to have modern and comfortable lives, to ride the sweeping current of inevitable modern progress, and that would make them glamorous and important and sophisticated, which would give their lives meaning and make them happy. People started going to college, because that would allow them to get the jobs that would get them money to give their lives meaning. People abandoned the pursuit of useful skills that gave them some minimal degree of self-sufficiency, skills like carpentry, farming, sewing, plumbing, and engine repair to pursue academic success. They moved to the cities to manage factories and run businesses. Then, the schools were desegregated, and their children had to go to school with black kids. They thought those black kids didn't have stuff, and weren't sophisticated like them, so they thought those folks were ignorant and meaningless. They were dangerous, cause they might infect their own children with the plague of low ambition, which might lead to lack of meaning and unhappiness. So, the white folks moved to the suburbs, where they had more room to store the shit they wanted to buy (that would be the shit that gives their lives meaning).

And now their kids grow up, and are slaves to the same fate, regardless of how they really want to live, because nobody knows how to live a different way, because those skills were lost in the fog of the past, just like the languages of decimated indian tribes are lost when they were forced into white schools. Nobody knows how to build or make or fix anything, so they are enslaved to the owners of knowledge capital. They have no choice but to follow the same path toward the suburb so that they can make enough money to buy the services and products that their great-grandparents provided and made themselves.

The advertisers pulled-off one of the great swindles in history, creating a permanent slave-consumer class. And the best part? People still actually believe that they can achieve real happiness if they can just purchase One...More...Gizmo! The consumer-slaves are not just captives...they are true believers in the very cult that has enslaved them! There is almost no end to the sacrifices they will place on that alter...their families, their children, their marriages, their friendships, their health, their time, their hobbies, their passions, their dignity, their morals, their environment. It would be sad enough if they killed these things simply because they have no other...simply because they know no other way, which they don't. But, they justify doing it...they believe in doing it...because they believe that the things they can buy will make them happy.

OK...END OF OVERBLOWN,OVERSIMPLIFIED, AND EXAGGERATED TIRADE.

Those lefty economics books are taking hold.