Johnny Rotten

Not too long ago, people grew their own food, herded their own animals, built their own houses, made their clothes, and basically created 99% of what they owned. Fast forward to today, and it is nearly the opposite, in the industrialized world. Yet, being able to buy instead of laboring to make hasn't, on a large scale, made us explore our creative sides, or work towards improving the standard of living--it's just addicted us to the luxury of consuming, especially in the entertainment sector. Movies, music, videogames, 500-channel cable TV lineups, etc.

Instead of us being able to measure our contrbution by taking stock of the land around us, it's gauged by bank accounts and material possessions--baubles and trinkets. Even as I am an avid reader, I collect books at a far faster rate than I could ever read them. It would take me, maybe, a year to go through my current collection, if I devoted 100% of my free time to nothing but reading. As it stands, it may take me five to ten years, if I never purchase another book, even though I am a very focused reader. As we live in an information age, it takes me long enough just to go through the daily news on the 'Net.

Anyway, we have been trained to buy by people trained to sell. They know our resistances, our likelihoods, our buttons, you name it. Studied extensively, focus grouped, refined to a cunning edge. "You deserve it! Indulge yourself. For a limited time only! Exclusive offer!"

It makes me sick, all the more so because I can feel the seething contempt of Ad Agency XYZ boiling underneath every ad campaign. For the same reason that a con artist has no respect for his mark: A Freudian transferrance of despising the mark's greed instead of despising their own. It's easy to say that the general public as a whole is kind of dumb and easily led, but that's a cop-out.

At this point, the "captains of industry" are today's elite, as the Christian Church was the European elite in medieval times. Yet the Christian Church held sway for more psychological reasons, not because they produced concrete goods and services. Their power was contingent upon a mode of thought, not something you needed to buy in order to survive. That is what makes our current technological religion far, far more powerful and fundamental. The reality of consumerism permeates our lives so much that it is a membrane through which we see the world. Almost all connection to land and toil has been severed, only living on the vestigal form of hobbies like model planes, stamp collecting, and...

Well, now think about this for a minute. How many of you actually even have hobbies? A creative thing you do in your free time that results in a concrete product. While there seems to be a statistically larger number of creators on the TFP, our hobby time, on the whole, has been largely swallowed up by TV, web surfing, and listening to music. And why hang out with someone physically, when you have cell phones, IM, email and text messaging? How social are we, really? How creative are we, really?

My nightmare image of civilization is a person who never leaves his home and buys everything on the Internet, works for a company that sells things on the Internet, and has been lulled into the strangled fantasy of believing this is not only the best way to do things, but the way it's pretty much always been done.

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"The idea that money doesn't buy you happiness is a lie put about by the rich, to stop the poor from killing them." -- Michael Caine