In the past three weeks I’ve had loads of talks and lectures around our country (mainly in universities). The topic was “Your money or your life?” or why do we work for money if we could work, live and make money at the same time? The more I study the reasons the more I see it is an absolute Matrix. After about ten years of trying to dismantle it, I finally started to see the basic components of the system. I believe, one of the key parts was people’s or citizen’s conversion into “consumers”, into the creatures believing the happiness is for sale. Into the human beings who buy more than they need, actually much, much more. Into the people trying to “Keep up with the Joneses“ thinking that mainly possessions of material goods will make them respected members of the human society. Into the Sheeple whose “modus operandi” Fight Club‘s Tyler Durden described beautifully: “Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need.”
Century of the Self is a fascinating documentary that describes the birth of this phenomenon. You probably have seen it. In my view it is worth watching few more times as it explains the cause and effect of us becoming consumers. As Paul Mazer, a Wall Street banker working for Lehman Brothers in the 1930s, is cited in the movie as declaring “
We must shift America from a needs- to a desires-culture. People must be trained to desire, to want new things, even before the old have been entirely consumed.“
Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need.
In my view, this wide scale manipulation of the people’s needs is one of the key causes of the current crisis that our societies are going through. I think, it is actually not financial. I believe it is rather a moral crisis. I can not help myself, I do not see anything right about the way today’s mainstream business communicates with the rest of the world… with the consumer’s trying to make them feel inferior without their product or service, with the legislators trying to ease competition and regulation or with the society as a whole trying to polish its image which is often years away from the reality inside…
Hope, more and more businesses will adopt principles of freedom, among which integrity is of a paramount importance. I believe that understanding of the causes of today’s hiccups will make us better informed and help us make wiser decisions for the future. That is why I highly recommend documentaries as Century of the Self. Enjoy!
One Response to “Century of the Self”
Leave a comment
* = required (mail will not be published)
I think there’s other part of the picture: you either work with a full load (i.e. 40 hours a week or even more) or you don’t work at all, unless you’re lucky to be a freelancer or in some arts and so on.
“The Matrix” is designed to need uniform robots, so being an employee usually instantly puts you in procrustean bed of 5-days work week, fixed work hours and so on. It just isn’t tailored to treat people differently, to be flexible, or to give them more freedom.