10 February 2011

Whose Shopping Therapy?

A hyper-consumer society can only thrive with hyper consumers, rich and poor, not only ready to pull out the checkbook or credit card at the drop of a hat (or point of a GI gun, threat of eviction, cloud of starvation), but also willing to line up at the check-cashing place for a more expensive "loan."

A hyper-consumer society can only thrive if it promises that every wish can be fulfilled, every heart's desire met through that checkbook, credit card, or however much you can squeeze out of the check cashing rock.

A hyper-consumer society will persist only when so-renamed "consumers" [formerly known as "citizens"] can only see their desires met from the array of treasures, trinkets, gadgets, wovens, and concoctions offered in the display case - no more and no less. No imagination required. Imagination is discouraged.

A hyper-consumer society can only exist within a strategic hamlet, where the consumers are made to consume through purchases authorized by the powers-that-be, the state, and never outside or free from that state's authority.

A hyper-consumer society will only exist if said hyper consumers cannot distinguish needs from wants, and so see nothing "hyper" or "schizo", or "pathological" about their consuming patterns. After all, they might argue: what society does not consume? From the Pre-historic (strange, ill-fitting term), Classical (overstated), feudal, or modern: they all consume something, food and air and water.

A hyper-consumer society can only thrive if the consumers feel entitled to the treasures and trinkets in the display case.

A hyper-consumer society can only thrive if the consumers feel someone else is less entitled to those treasures - if they are apt to feel anything at all. Those less entitled will be given a lower step on the ladder and bestowed with various names: but they are ultimately and empirically Slaves.

A hyper-consumer society will always exist in close proximity - by rail, plane, boat, or canal zone - to a slave society, because hyper consumers depend on extracting their treasures from those slaves (and call the relationship "trade," "purchase," "enterprise zones," "treaty rights").

A hyper-consumer society is a society without a soul, not only because the extent of its desires and imagination are limited to those display cases but also because it persists in meeting those desires on the backs of [its] slaves. It must by definition keep the slaves down (e.g, put the n*gger in his place, guard the border, hunt down "illegals," etc), be content that while the slaves may be entitled to little, that is all they can handle because they are deemed "backwards." The hyper consumers are always entitled to more than enough. This pathological dichotomy will be rationalized in academic studies and political white papers.

A hyper-consumer society will persist in trying to fill its soul with treasures from the display case, which means never lifting its boot from the slaves' necks, because hyper consumer's imagination is as limited as the slave's liberty. And consumers are bred to consume: that is all they are taught to know.

A hyper-consumer society, having little developed insight, no real intuition, will be forever puzzled at its own crises, its poverties, its slums, its crime rates, because hyper consumers - who used to be citizens - are so limited in their imagination and intuitiveness they cannot fathom what impoverishes a man, woman, or child as robbing their treasures from them will certainly do, and why that man, woman, and child must be made a slave.

A hyper-consumer society exists on the precipice but must refuse to acknowledge that, like their neighbors, they may be the next easy victim.


[For Jasmine: the student who teaches the teacher]