I love Aesop, but so little of fiction today is emblematic for anything beyond gratification, that we’ve seen this growth in “meta” to remind audiences how there might always be more to any given story. At least the capacity is there if never the execution. The “have-nots” unnecessarily deplete themselves to enrich the con-artist “haves” with manufactured consent falsely marketing the experience as necessary to our own survival. Exhausted, we take the pennies leftover from the vulgar notion of cost of living to find redemption. Pop cultures hereby as derivative calculations, vicarious heavens for those passions endearing to us and purely symbolic hell for those obstructions IRL we are made to feel powerless before to finally get what’s coming. We do not honestly need any of it, not if freedom were real.
People who take the USA federal government with a grain of salt are left with nothing but that grain of salt. Uncle Sam is and always has been the villain. You cannot vote someone a conscience or a backbone or a heart on sleeve. Enablement is not resisting. It’s only ever been domestic Capitalism that’s the cause to all that ails you. Unregulated ego, insisting on profit before the well-being of others, the very livelihoods of others. Work your life away to feed those egos. Bunches of tits. Many folks drown in adjectives and labels about themselves, when I was just always too busy to afford such conveniences.
By my experiences, self-reliance is quite often erroneously taken as defensiveness, refusing access by others to credit or blame regarded as arrogance rather than disinterest in being used, abused or both, for multitasking is mandatory nowadays. As commonplace as manufactured consent is manufactured division, power-mongers whose frivolity rests on requiring the public to blame each other for the fuckery dished by said power-mongers upon us all. I suspect that concept of escapist fantasy migration is more widespread than partakers could ever acknowledge themselves, but I also think that there is something to be said about these artificial cultures pointedly serving as distractions from the here and now. Everything from the economy to the environment is amiss *because* we give more time to entertainment than our own well-being. We are too busy laughing and crying over fiction to notice the pickpockets.
But special shout-out to the college socialists daydreaming they can take back means of production and get their share of the billions generated by markets, when those billions come from inflation, meaning the masses will still be working too much to produce over-charged and price-gouged trash in order to generate said billions. These billions are accumulated by manufacturing demand for pre-ordained monopolists, an entire framework of extortion and exploitation which will not magically end if someone else gets to cash the same checks. The whole machine must be brought down and society reconsidered from the ground up the skirts of Lady Liberty and all she holds dear.
Wealth spent generations perfecting this Ponzi scheme where the only trickle-down felt by the unwashed are golden showers and mud baths, yet even among too many anti-Capitalists today are those who feel that simply reappropriating profits will magically correct the ship’s course. These astronomic figures siphoned from the economy, destabilizing and crippling the economy, come from price-gouging and over-charging, not merely from underpaying producers or evading reasonable taxes. The entire framework is exploitation and extortion. Capping maximum wages in the same stroke as making illegal any inflation would cut costs everywhere, while forcing a real trickle-down. The masses could then afford a cost of living barred from endless increases while needing to work less hours to make it happen. But everyone only sees dollar signs. Our bills should be fewer in number and smaller in sum, ourselves enjoying more free time, but we are destined to live beyond our means as though only chain gangs, lynch mobs and orgies might possibly lead us down to slumberland.
Sleeping a singular block really only came about to cope with the industrialization of our days, where obligations to the world real or imagined are obliged. The night-time is when everything of consequence to ourselves occurs. Ideally involving pitchforks and torches and not a bloodless revolution but one where all lives are spared to reap the non-monetary rewards.
Now that would be a story for the ages.