“It is possible to make people contented with their servitude. I think this can be done. I think it has been done in the past. I think it could be done even more effectively now because you can provide them with bread and circuses and you can provide them with endless amounts of distractions and propaganda.”
Stoking the urge to consume keeps us in jobs we don't like in order make money to buy things we don't need and wouldn't even want if it weren't for the all-pervasive mind control of advertising.
We have been so distracted for so long that we don't even recognize our servitude, let alone know to fight against it, or escape its convenient, luxurious velvet chains.
As Huxley also wrote, we have become victims of mind-manipulation and do not even know we are victims.
"To them", he pointed out, "the walls of their prison are invisible, and they believe themselves to be free."
Our only enduring freedom is the freedom to shop till we drop.
That is the real goal of consumerism.
Stop buying, start living. Escape is still possible.
And above all - don't comply with their evil plots and schemes to keep us in our servitude.
"The dialectic miracle, the transformation of quantity into quality, is explained here: it is the decision to call total servitude freedom. The real passion of the twentieth century is servitude.”
- Albert Camus
"We have been so distracted for so long that we don't even recognize our servitude, let alone know to fight against it, or escape its convenient, luxurious velvet chains."
ReplyDeleteThat is something I've felt since a young age and have always marveled at. When everyone around me seemed to be saying "That's just the way things are", I would feel incredulous and wonder, why don't they question or challenge that? Why do they just accept this servitude? As if they had no other choice. In many ways our society forces us to become enslaved to mind numbing jobs just to make ends meet so we can survive. This is convenient because when all of our time is spent slaving away working we barely have any time left over to pursue outside interests, let alone take care of ourselves, not to mention maintain relationships, let alone try and fight this corrupt system. And that's the way many of them want it, because then they have all of their worker-bees at the bottom of the hierarchy doing all the work while they funnel all of the profits up to the top.