The American dream is that consequences do not exist.
Strong argument found on Medium about the lack of customer control over services of many consumer cultural stripes, but it certainly extends to healthcare and education and anything else made for profit. I think psychology begat the idea of an ongoing service, and it extended every which way as mask for a leash. I feel not enough folks observe how prior to Freud, problem-solving was a thing, rather than an ongoing business. There were light-bulbs a century ago that stay lit today, just as cars manufactured 50 years back can still be spotted cruising city grids. Now, cars are guaranteed to require servicing inside a handful of years. Constant necessary updates. Services are more direct about it than physical products, but products are every bit as finite, from fashions falling regularly out of favor to my lil sis missing a car payment and experiencing the vehicle being remotely shut off while we were on the freeway. Everything temporary. All you own are your bills.
Before the airport in Louisville was constructed, there were about 15 homes and a hog farm there on those grounds, the farm enduring through 4 generations. The family refused the insulting payout, and were physically removed from their own land with no compensation. Governmental imminent domain is grotesque. But corporations never actually relinquish physical ownership to begin with. Unless you build your own laptop from scraps, it is monitoring everything you do, the connections to its makers never severed regardless of settings supposedly just harmlessly there for upgrades.
Gilbert T. Sewall has written a perfectly valid set of arguments where concerns what ecologically-minded idealists such as Greta Thunberg and Peter Sunde are missing, the article itself nonetheless still ignoring how the greediest among us entitle themselves to what is simply not theirs to claim. The mass of industry is co-opted from advancing life or liberty to further enrich the ego. Imagine if all the billions gone to film and TV, from production to after the fact ticket sales and streaming subscriptions and the marketing throughout, were instead gone to revolutionizing agriculture, housing, education and healthcare. Imagine if the cost of living was not so astronomical, where we are obliged to work ourselves to death in order to barely afford products and services which our grandparents did just fine without needing or wanting. Most industrialization is completely unnecessary. Imagine the lives we might begin to lead with the mass of our time and resources returned to us, the lives we could have for ourselves with no escapist fantasies preached from the cracked black mirrors to inform us of our identities or dreams. Maybe we could sort them on our own.
Contrary to this other article from Alex Wilkins concerning the advent of a smart-drug revolution, this is already a 24/7 society, and pharmaceuticals are already depleting whatever humanity remains. Employer profit is not the centerpiece to humanity. If drugs both legal or not are accepted as necessary to maintain this order, then perhaps this order needs to be dropped to the wayside. If there were no people there would be no country, so the people are the only ones owed loyalty. Not the government, not the business interest of the few, and not any symbology. Yet the greater masses would evidently prefer to self-destruct than to take up one iota of responsibility over their own lives. 99.999% of all usage of the descriptive “fake news” in recent years regarded nothing fake but unflattering. Reality is not subjective no matter how much we wish it to be.
It took decades for the USA to cripple the world to this extent. When more folks are willing to go broke traveling out for ComicCon than to storm DC, selfishness replacing empathy or justice is the status quo. Facebook, Twitter and all socials exist so we can segregate ourselves from any semblance of truth. Confederacy is the mainstream. Those cotton plantations of old were the FAANG Cos of their day, libertarian as fuck. The fact Trump was allowed to be President, much less exists anywhere outside of incarceration, shows it. Morality is the minority, while the majority of the country are bad people, for their perpetually insistent denial that salvation might in fact not be flattering. Idiots today can make the italicized claim that “Americans are now governed as a practical matter by a permanent cadre of professional bureaucrats and military/intelligence officials.” But that “now” goes back decades to Jeckyll island, to banking barons permitting themselves to write legislation, complimented by endless states of emergency “confer[ing] enough authority to rule the country without reference to normal constitutional process.” Aloofness toward history protects the framework responsible. Capitalism created Trump.
Human casualties aside, imagine what the world might provide if munitions were not the largest source of revenue on the planet. Untold trillions spent on nothing better than destruction and pillaging the smoldering ruins for shiny baubles to be claimed by captains of industry. Imagine if all that effort and time and energy were spent on bettering ourselves instead of conquest. Instead of shouting we are number one, actually making it so. The world is completely fucked, yet we always had the potential to undo it. But ego comes first. Self-interest. Maybe there’s more than enough albums, enough flavors of lip gloss and enough cartoons. Maybe the choice between which distractions from the problems we enable and empower is hardly a choice at all, and maybe it’s time for us to decide on some real options for a change. One-sided love is idolatry. Its own destruction. I cant be with someone or any grouping that expends more time and resources on their own entertainment than on helping others. Each and every problem of the world comes down to the self-interest of ego, proving the end of all unions from relationships to tupperware parties to nation-states. You won’t solve world hunger, but what you spend on a movie ticket could instead buy food to keep a desperate somebody alive for a few days longer. Rationalizing against that is egotism. Escapism from lesser problems is not warranted more than life. We may not secede from the universe no matter how much our egos implore it, for neither in life or death are we independent of it even if the marketing plainly stated otherwise.
Nothing is what the self-medicating doctor trying to save your life ordered. Nothing is on the menu. You make bad decisions and help was never on the way. Your only hope is not everything but nothing. Only the nothing was real.