Most people spend their entire childhoods and adult lives until they are really too old to work, doing shit they don’t want to do and would never do absent coercion.
This is the ur-fact about capitalism. You cannot leave. If you do not submit to slavery, you will wind up homeless and eventually dead, and suffer a lot along the way.
This is built into the system: The “whip of hunger” is used to make people work. The threat of homelessness.
Homelessness, despair, and so on are required; without them people would not bother working at bad jobs. Indeed, without them many people would not work any more than required to feed and house themselves.
Now, understand clearly, rip a hole in your skull, and put this in: There is more food than needed and way more homes than homeless people in all of the developed countries and more food than needed to feed everyone in the world. We could easily feed and house everyone in the world. It is almost a trivial problem. We simply have to do it.
Industrialization, plus modern agriculture, produces easily more than we need. Automation should mean that less and less hours need working. We should be living in a paradise of free-time and choice.
We do not because a small minority has captured power and enslaved the rest of us.
These people are monsters on every possible level, including in their depraved indifference to what will happen to their children and grandchildren under environmental collapse and climate change.
We have a surplus, but it is generated in the stupidest ways possible — with planned obsolesence, soil degradation, and pollution causing environmental collapse.
If we had built everything without planned obsolesence, we wouldn’t be where we are. If we had not degraded the soil and dumped so much pollution into the air we would not be where we are. We made a bunch of choices to do things the fast, “profitable” way that actually led to people being sicker (all that pollution and soil degradation means you are undernourished and full of unhealthy chemicals) and having to work longer.
We had the knowledge to have a manageable, sustainable cornucopia by just looking at the effects on people, animals, and plants, and the environment in general and correcting. We did not.
School, if you will put aside your prejudices for a couple minutes and look at it coldly, is a process whereby you are made to sit still, talk only when teacher allows, piss only when teacher allows, stand only when teacher allows, and do all sorts of things you don’t want in the way that pleases teacher or you get bad grades, and if you get enough bad grades, you will almost certainly never have a good job or any power in society.
You were trained to be a slave by school then you went to work and acted like a good slave. Some few proved themselves psychopathic enough to ascend to the elites (though the few open routes are rapidly closing down), though most elites come from the already-elite (check out who Bill Gates father was).
Since creating a utopia in which people don’t have to obey their masters is no fun for psychopaths or functional psychopaths and narcissists (our ruling class), keeping the majority of the population firmly in a form of slavery they could tell themselves was freedom, “I get to CHOOSE MY MASTER who tells me what to do! I am free!” is what our master-class has done.
We run around on treadmills, working for them to get what we need, and the various drugs (including entertainment) we use to ease ourselves and pretend it’s all worth it. The internet, which looked like it might increase freedom, has simply set up more hedonic treadmills, optimized for us to tell our masters everything about ourselves, so they can sell us our next drug, and continue their removal from us of all real assets. (Private equity is now buying up single family homes, the middle class’s last real asset.)
If you work at a normal job, you are a slave. If you have ascended to the ranks of high executive, CEO, or board member, you are Lord of Hell. There are some other seats, rather nice places: the independent best-selling author or musician, for example. The high paid consultant, the big Twitch streamer and so on. They are rare, and like becoming a pro-sports player, they exist for the majority of the population more as a way to blame themselves for not “making it” than as a real possibility.
This is our society: A society which had the technology to create a near utopia without destroying the world (yes, some people will argue this was always impossible; let us say that we never even tried) and which chooses instead to run a master/slave society which is so advanced it convinces most of the slaves they are free.
You WISH you had “Brave New World” because at least then you’d think you were happy.
It is odd, and sad, that this world will end because the masters, abetted by their slaves (who, remember, have not revolted in any meaningful way and have chosen the master-class through voting), have mismanaged the environment so badly.
When that happens, the powerful are betting they will become even more powerful, so that they can use their resources to be masters in an even greater hell.
Let me suggest, that as you or your children are scrabbling for survival in the world to come, you take the time to ensure that the masters don’t “win” by destroying the environment.
The hell they will create in a collapsing environment will make the present hell look wonderful by comparison, and they will never stop creating hells unless it is made clear to them that their perpetual hell creation will soon become unprofitable for them as well; even if it has to be with their lives.
(My writing helps pay my rent and buys me food. So please consider subscribing or donating if you like my writing.)
